Revolutionary Bodies: Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran

Gender and sexuality in modern Iran is frequently examined through the prism of nationalist symbols and religious discourse from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book, Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi takes a different approach, by interrogating how normative ideas of women’s bodies in state, religious, and public health discourses have resulted in the female body being deemed as immodest and taboo.

Through a diverse blend of sources -a popular cultural women’s journal, a red-light district, cases studies of temporary marriages, iconic public statues, and an HIV-AIDS advocacy organization in Tehran - this work argues that conceptions of gender and sexuality have been mediated in public discourse and experienced and modified by women themselves over the past thirty years of the Islamic Republic.

Expanding upon existing philosophical theory, technological research and scholarship on gender and sexuality in Iran, this book focuses much needed attention on under-studied, marginalized communities, such as widows living with HIV. This work interrogates how bodily technologies are constructed discursively and socially in Iran and the values and perspectives which are incorporated in them.