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Abstract
In the wake of a string of sensationalist documentaries about transsexuality in Iran, Iranian theatre and film artists began crafting groundbreaking trans performances to educate audiences and depict characters living non-heteronormative lives without the translating influence of queer theory or identity politics. Investigating transsexual bodies as assembled by jurists in Iranian Shiʿa jurisprudence and by artists on stage and screen reveals the ways in which the transsexual body is constructed in Islamic legal discourse and represented in narrative and bodily form in the public imaginary in Iran. Representations of transsexuality in theatre and film highlight the role of the arts as a vehicle for social change, communal recognition, and self-cognition. In particular, performances of female-to-male gender transitions in theatre and film have expanded the boundaries of how gender presentation is translated onto Iranian stages, into Tehran coffeehouses, and onto global screens. These trans performances usher Iranian spectators into new forms of viewership and artistic consumption in their attempt to creatively represent transsexual bodies and narratives to increase tolerance towards transsexuals; further, they have ignited a conversation among artists and activists about the assemblage of transsexual bodies in artistic productions and the most effective narrative and emotional forms of catharsis to inspire change.
Notes
1 Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 203.
2 Trans activism in Iran is continuing to make great strides that are rarely reported in western media. For instance, in 2018, it was announced that students at Tehran University would be forming a club for transsexual students.
3 Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 207.
4 Ibid., 6.
5 However, in a globalized world, it is inevitable that transsexual discourses around the world come into contact and influence one another. Thus, Iranian activists have started using more “rights” discourse in the past several years. As Molkārā states in the short documentary Legacy of the Imam, which documents a session of the Iran Transsexual Support Society she founded: “rights are to be taken, they won’t be handed to you … you need to be fighting for your rights. You are recognized as a legal part of society. You have an illness and you are not deviants. You have to go into society and prove yourself.” Thus, Molkārā configured transsexual protection and recognition as an ongoing process carried forth by individuals mindfully pushing trans recognition within society. Further, in the dialogue that follows in Legacy of the Imam, a transman (FtM) discusses appealing to multiple governmental agencies and the Supreme Leader as part of his trans activism and mentions “rights” as well:
So what is your next step?
We are going to the Human Rights Organization, then the Internal Ministry, the Ministry of Health, and the office of the Supreme Leader and wherever else they tell us to go. Even if they tell us to go to the end of the world, we will go.
What is your main goal?
To show that we exist.
Hojjat al-Islam Mohammad-Mahdi Kariminiā, a leading clerical authority on transsexuality in Qom, believes “the right of transsexuals to change their gender is a human right” and feels it is his mission to make the public more accepting of transsexuals and decrease stigma against them.
6 Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 214.
7 Leaders who have been consulted include Khatami, Ahmadinejad, Khomeini and Khamenei.
8 Trans people are eligible for “special groups” insurance coverage (according to the law of Universal Health Services in 1995) for basic medical insurance coverage.
9 For Avicenna’s influential understanding of the self, see Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 295) and for the history of Sufi conceptualizations of the self, see ibid., 293.
10 See Skovgaard-Petersen, “Defining Islam for the Egyptian State.” Sally Mursi, the Egyptian transsexual medical student at Al Azhar University in Cairo whose sex change was the basis for the main fatwa in Egypt and the Sunni world on transsexuality, wrote an autobiography entitled Iʿtirāfāt Sayyid: al-qiṣṣah al-muthīrah li-ṭālib al-ṭibb alladhī taḥawwala ilá imra'ah (1991) in Alexandria, Egypt. For another transsexual memoir from the Sunni world, see the autobiography Mudhākkirāt Randā al-Trāns (2010) by an Algerian trans woman named Randa and co-author Hazem Saghieh (political editor of the London-based Arab newspaper al-Hayat) which was published in Beirut by publisher Dar al-Saqi. The memoir was released in Italian as well under the name Dillo alla luna (Tell the Moon), translated by Alessandro Buontempo and published by Edizioni Piemme in 2011. In addition, a 2015 documentary, Meanwhile in Beirut, which has a Lebanese transwoman at its center, was released by Swiss director Felipe Monroy.
11 For instance, Grand Ayatollah Yusef Sāneʿi was asked: “If a person is physically male and does not have any feminine [reproductive] organs, but is emotionally and psychologically like a woman, may he change his gender by operation?” He replied: “It is not inherently forbidden to do that … This is not manipulation of the work of God; rather, this is manipulation of the creature (not the creator). Thus, it is allowed.” As a rebuke to those Sunni jurists who argue that SRS is an act performed under the influence of Satan (based on Surat al-Nisāʾ: 119), Kariminiā argues that this verse only refers to a human being changing into another species and not changing one’s sex; he has compared the changing of one’s sex to other changes such as changing wheat into flour and bread and cutting our hair and nails. In his opinion, SRS preserves the basic humanity of the person as all that is changed is the “characteristics.”
12 Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 179.
13 While the religious and state acceptance of transsexuality in Iran today is based upon a fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini, the issue of transsexuality circulated in Iranian public discourse and media decades before he pronounced on the matter. Public discourse on intersexuality in Iran emerged as early as 1930 (Ettelāʿāt, October 27, 1930) and heightened in the 1940s and 1950s influenced in part by American popular psychology authors like David Rubin and George Hearth. Medicalized discourse on non-normative gender behavior appeared in the 1960s, with the earliest SRS taking place in 1973 (Kayhān, February 17, 1973).
14 Khomeini, Tahrir al-wasilah, vol. 2, 753‒755.
15 Tait, “A Fatwa for Freedom.”
16 Najmabadi, Professing Selves: 166.
17 When Molkārā traveled to Paris in 1978 to meet Khomeini in person, she recounts, “I was taken into a corridor. I could hear Khomeini raising his voice. He was blaming those around him, asking how they could mistreat someone who had come for shelter. He was saying, ‘This person is God’s servant.’” Tait, “A Fatwa for Freedom.”
18 In 1983, at Ayatollah Khomeini’s house in Jamārān, with Ayatollahs Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ardebili in attendance, Khomeini issued Molkārā a fatwa stating that changing sex with a doctor’s approval is not prohibited [belā-māneʿ] (Najmabadi, Professing Selves: 165). Then the “women from the Imam’s household cut her a chador” (ibid., 165), and a precedent was set for trans people to “legally live trans lives before SRS” (ibid., 166).
19 Tahrir al-wasilah (Exegesis of the Means of Salvation or Commentaries on the Liberation of the Intercession) is a book by Ayatollah Khomeini. His opinion on transsexuality appears in a subsection titled “The Changing of Sex” within the section on “The Examination of Contemporary Questions” (al-masaʾil al-mustahdithah).
20 Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 166.
21 Fatwa, posted 22 April, 2010, from Iran, in: Makarem Shirazi http://www.islamopediaonline.org/fatwa/ayatollah-makarem-shirazi-specifies-new-sexual-organs-must-work-sex-change-operation-be-permis.
22 The question posed on the website was: “Some homosexuals have a completely feminine or masculine body, but they are emotionally inclined to the same sex. Many of them wish to make an ostensible sex change that is not real, and they threaten suicide otherwise. May a doctor conduct the surgery in order to prevent his or her suicide?”
23 Montazeri, Islamopedia.
24 See Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards and Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran.
25 Arastou, Email interview with author.
26 “Transgender Iranians take to the stage to raise awareness.”
27 Ibid.
28 “Saman Arastou: Theater only medium for transgender.”
29 Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 74.
30 Arastou, Email interview with author.
31 Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 297.
32 Ibid., 295. Siāsi considered humans’ personality (“shakhsiyat-i zāheri-ye ādami”) a “theatrical personality.”
33 Ibid., 297.
34 Ibid., 299.
35 Davoud Mir-Bagheri’s The Snowman (1995) approached the issue through a plot involving cross-dressing.
36 Shakerifar, “Visual Representations,” 333.
37 Barford, Vanessa. “Iran’s ‘Diagnosed’ Transsexuals.” BBC, February 25, 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7259 (accessed December 21, 2018).
38 Fahti, “As Repression Eases”; McDowall and Khan, “The Ayatollah and the Transsexual”; Harrison, “Iran’s Sex Change Operations”; Stack, “Changing their Sexes in Iran”; Tait, “A Fatwa for Freedom.”
39 Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 276.
40 Ibid., 234.
41 Arastou, Email interview with author.
42 For instance, she previously staged the play, Purposely, Lovingly, Murderously, which showcased several famous murder cases, including that of Khadijeh Shahlā Jāhed, who was found guilty and executed for her alleged involvement in the murder of her boyfriend’s wife.
43 “Play Brings Trans People into Public Eye in Iran.”
44 Other actors in the play were Anahita Eqbālnejād, Malika Parsa, and ʿĀtefeh Razavi.
45 In 1983, he created a theatre group called “Avaye Divanegan,” and in 1988 he became a member of the board of directors of Shahrud’s Association of Performing Arts.
46 Arastou, Email interview with author.
47 Ibid.
48 “Transgender Iranians take to the stage to raise awareness.”
49 Arastou, Saman. “Be Who You Are Not.” http://www.avayedivanegan.com/?p=13 (accessed December 21, 2018).
50 Arastou has also pursued social justice issues in his teaching. For example, from 1991 to 1994, he taught in poor villages: teaching illiterate children and adults how to read, establishing a mobile library, and running acting workshops.
52 Ibid.
53 Arastou, Email interview with author.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 For clips of transsexual performances in Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=lQQ0a7iHRnU; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-jPm-sP5HM; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WIBM7ldH-0.
57 Arastou, Interview with Iran Theater.
58 Other performers in the play included Afsaneh Mirbagheri, Nadia Bavand, Sima Shokri, Mahi Azimi, and Amirmo’ayad Bavand.
59 Arastou, Email interview with author.
60 For instance, the play underwent changes from its later production at the Fajr International Theater Festival from its earlier incarnation at the Fanous Theater House; it became more interactive and collaborative with the audience, with actors extending their hands to the audience in dramatized pleas for help and intervention.
61 As Arastou explained to me in an interview (November 6th, 2018): “Auto has two meanings in Farsi, Pen and Auto. The Farsi name of the performances is a little bit different. In Farsi [the] name is: ‘A pen which can’t write,’ but it was difficult to translate it in English. Actually it can be abstract but I meant a person who doesn’t use his thought, a person who has no cognition of itself. It can do nothing for itself, so it can do nothing for society. We believe individualism can help us in this kind of situation.” Note that the use of “it” here is a translation of the non-gendered third person singular in Persian.
62 Arastou, Saman. “You Can Be Auto.” http://www.avayedivanegan.com/?p=228 (accessed December 21, 2018).
63 Arastou, Email interview with author.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Gelman, “Be The One Who You’re Not.”
68 " آبی مایل به صورتی " روایتی از تغییر جنسیت , December 18, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/persian/arts-42398767 (accessed December 21, 2018).
69 پرفورمنس برای آگاهی بخشی درباره ترنسکشوال ها در ایران, September 16, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-jPm-sP5HM (accessed June 19, 2018).
70 In another scene, two transgender actors, one FtM and one MtF, sit across from one another and reveal short recollections of their gender transformation. The MtF performer says she changed her sex nineteen years ago. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=33&v=lQQ0a7iHRnU.
71 Seyf, Interview with BBC World Service’s The Ticket .
72 Dehghan, “Iranian film shines spotlight on taboo subject of transsexuals.”
73 Taerpour, Interview.
74 Similarly, a 2012 Iranian film called The Veiled Sorrow in the Depth of the Calm of the Whale which is about a transsexual young woman (Camellia) who lives with her turtle and is secretly in love with Soosan, one of her best friends, also configures northern Europe as a place of escape, refuge, and freedom. Soosan dreams of emigrating to Scandinavia to pursue her academic studies.
75 This film has won numerous awards and nominations in over sixty-four different LGBTQ and international film festivals around the world. The film won the Special Jury’s Crystal Simorgh Award at Iran’s 29th Fajr International Film Festival and the Outstanding First Feature Award at San Francisco’s 36th Frameline Film Festival.
76 As he recounted at the discussion on Facing Mirrors, “Whenever I spoke with one of these trans people, they would talk about the state of affairs and say ‘when I go to the pilgrimage of Imam Reza (AS), I do not know whether to go to the men’s side or the women’s side.’ With this condition, a person suffers from an identity disorder. That is, one person’s body may be a boy, but his soul is a girl.”
77 In recounting a BBC reporter who came to Qom to interview him, he remembers telling them that the first jurist to rule on SRS was the late Imam Khomeini (RA). The reporter did not believe him and asked for documents to prove it.
78 Arastou, Email interview with author.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Raziji, Interview with the author.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Arastou, Email interview with author.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid.
90 The documentary profiles Amir, a twenty-one-year-old who feels like a woman trapped in a man's body who undergoes SRS and changes his name to Rima.
91 Arastou, Email interview with author.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid.