#najmabadi

[taushif]

That we worry about the question of agency in one direction but never consider the impact of “the East” on “the West” as an issue of denial of agency for Europe is a colonial/anticolonial legacy that continues to inform our current thinking.

Afsaneh Najmabadi

[globalizinggendersexuality]

I did not know what the Majlis was, but it is the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majles-e Shoraye Eslami in Persian), or Parliament.

Najmabadi talks about the Majlis as the "one major political institution they [trans activists] were not interested in engaging" because they were more interested in "entitlements"/practical need-meeting than the grand category of "rights," which they see as more subject to the dangers of the political process (213).

(do note, however, that this info/history is on the website of the "United States Institute of Peace" ...whatever that means.)

-LBT

[globalizinggendersexuality]

To better understand Najmabadi's claim that trans activists in Iran pragmatically saw the politicization of their cause and interacting with the Majlis for the acquisition of rights (as pursued in the women's rights movement) as detrimental to their needs-based cause, I read this summary on the women's rights movement in modern Iran. I am now able to understand that the regular "political earthquakes" in Iran that Najmabadi earlier references have hindered the progress of this kind of conventional, rights-based movement. For example, after sixteen arduous years of achieving limited progress for women's rights on multiple fronts during the Rafsanjani and Khatami presidencies, Ahmadinejad made police crackdowns on dress code violations more frequent and severe. As such, I am able to understand why gender deviants, who suffer severe cultural and arguably legal discrimination and receive much less domestic support in their cause than the conventional women's rights movement garners, abstain from engaging with the Majlis and rights-based activism. The severity of needs of many trans people met with the volatility of the political situation in Iran necessitates a more practical approach. 

Link: http://iranprimer.usip.org/resource/womens-movement

- DCH

[globalizinggendersexuality]

This is a brief description of the book "Second Skins" by Jay Prosser. Najmabadi references Prosser's work on page 233 in describing how the genre of autobiography (including trans autobiographies) is conformist and unilinear due to chronological narrative structure.

--AB

[globalizinggendersexuality]

Fatwa: what does it mean? Beyond negative media portrayals

I had held negative connotations of this word, which I barely knew, and only in the context of media decrying some death sentence issued by a Muslim leader—most famously, the one by Osama bin Laden that was portrayed as the reason for the 9/11 attacks. I learned, though, that fatwa literally means opinion—a fatwa is merely a suggested course of action offered by a spiritual leader. Muslims can seek these opinions from scholars as they approach any number of issues around how to practice their faith. An interesting fatwa is one issued in the early 2000s by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, forbidding under Islam the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons; and declaring that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons. What a fascinating and admirable anti-armament gesture, and how little this edict is conveyed in the Western press!

—AGS

[globalizinggendersexuality]

While I don’t imagine that President Ahmadinejad’s claim that there were no homosexuals in Iran was a nuanced reference to Massad’s or Najmabadi’s analysis of sexuality in Islamic countries, I do think that sensitivity to the imperial nature of the insistence upon the universal, stable and binary fact of hetero and homo sexualities by some of the international human rights community is necessary in order to formulate a thoughtful response to President Ahmadinejad’s statement about his population’s sexuality.

— Katherine Franke, “Ahmadinejad Comes to Columbia: The Perils of Standing Up For the Gays,” page 23

--AB

[globalizinggendersexuality]

I found that I needed a crash course on Foucault and The History of Sexuality for Najmabadi's article. The above link gave some good background on Foucault's life and context for his work, but I turned to classic Wikipedia for more about The History of Sexuality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality

-- REH