Wendy DeSouza's Unveiling Men is a welcome addition to the relatively understudied field of masculinity studies and the history of masculinity in Iran and the Middle East. The book's five chapters present five forays into questions on masculinity, sexuality, queer theory, and orientalism, both within and outside Iran, and from the 19th to the mid-20th century. The first three chapters focus on developments of notions of masculinity and masculine sexuality in Iranian society. The first chapter analyzes photographs of Nasir al-Din Shah and of Reza Shah to illustrate the changing image of the king in relation to women and as a military figure. The second chapter looks at Reza Shah's male dress reform, highlighting its racial and gender elements. The third chapter looks at the discourse regrading homo/sexuality during the interwar period, mostly at Hasan Taqizadah's writing in the exile newspaper Kavah. The second part of the book moves away from Iranian masculinity to European masculinity, and the role that medieval Sufi homoerotic poetry played in how orientalist and some Iranian writers imagined both oriental sexuality and their own sexuality.

Whereas the five essays composing the book are not organically linked, all of them (except the first chapter discussed below) are concerned with identifying and bringing to the fore subordinate masculinities, or “suppressed masculinities” (p. 8). Relying on Raewyn Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, DeSouza insightfully exposes the power relations embedded in the creation of a modern heterosexual Iranian (and European) man. These power relations exist between ruler and ruled, between state and citizen, between the West and the Orient. The first chapter, perhaps staging the backdrop for the rest of the book, utilizes visual sources in order to illuminate the modernization of patriarchy and of hegemonic masculinity through court and official photography of two of Iran's kings: Nasir al-Din Shah and Reza Shah. Official photographs of Nasir al-Din Shah feasting and hunting (as well as photographs of the women of his harem that were probably not meant for public consumption) are a symbol of the monarch's control over life and death. DeSouza shows how this motive underwent modernization during Reza Shah's period, when such control was demonstrated in photographs of the ruler in military campaigns and visiting industrial projects. This chapter is a good example of Connell's claim that hegemonic masculinity—in this case, the masculinity of the ruler—changes in order to justify and perpetuate patriarchy. Interestingly, reading photographs critically also gives DeSouza the opportunity to suggest surprising power dynamics within the Nasiri harem, ones in which women take a more active and central role, and are more than merely sexualized objects meant for the gaze and enjoyment of the shah.

The book's second chapter, the best in my opinion, and the one giving the book its title, offers a new angle to Reza Shah's male (and to some extent, female) dress reform. So far, this reform has earned much less scholarly attention than the 1936 Unveiling Act, and scholars who did write about it, such as Houchang Chehabi and Patricia Baker, did not analyze it from a gendered perspective. DeSouza not only studies the reform as a means to create a new model of hegemonic masculinity—one that serves the purposes and power of Reza Shah and the circle of elite men in government—but also as a means to exclude certain men from both masculinity and the Iranian nation via this reform, highlighting the racial anti-Arab and anti-tribal bias of the reform. In another important move DeSouza shows how the forced change of male dress to the Western suit was experienced by religious Iranians as a form of male unveiling, with all the humiliation, sexual undertones, and resistance involved. The new clothes required men to expose their bodies to the gaze of government representatives in a manner that felt indecent and emasculating. The power of the new state, the same power that would unveil women (and, decades later, would forcibly re-veil them) made itself felt in the most intimate realm of the citizen's body and attire.

DeSouza's goal of queering cultural debates on masculinity and sexuality shows how the Iranian and orientalist discourses on homosexuality were not clearly homophobic or tolerant of non-hetero sexualities, but were always part of larger debates: on progress, on demography, on productivity, on spirituality, and so on. Indeed, the main argument of her book is that “In Iran and overseas, academics, writers, and scholars equated development and ‘progress’ with the reform of men's sexual behavior” (p. 5). This approach allows her to somewhat exonerate an intellectual like Hasan Taqizadah from accusations of homophobia. DeSouza shows how sexuality and homosexuality were marginal to Taqizadah's writing, and were usually included among a long list of Qajar “vices” that delayed or even prevented Iran's progress. It was not love between men per se that drew his criticism, but various aspects of unproductivity—from lack of proper work ethics, to alcohol and opium addiction, to polygamy and pederasty. Reproduction was at the center of a discourse of population decline, in Iran as well as in Europe, and various aspects of what Taqizadah and other Iranian intellectuals considered as corrupt Qajar sexual practices were castigated as part of this decline.

This approach also exposes how notions of sexuality, desire, and mysticism or the image of the sensual yet spiritual Orient were not a stable and monolithic trope, but constantly changing. These changes could originate from the life stories of the orientalists studying them (such as in the case of Louis Massignon) or from cultural trends within Europe which dictated different approaches to the translation of Sufi homoerotic poetry. These trends generated a “monastic turn” which moved away from the sensual aspects of this poetry, and either eliminated or camouflaged their erotic meaning as referring to mystical love of God.

This book is valuable for people interested in masculinity studies in the Middle East, and the “Homoerotics of Orientalism” (the title of Joseph Boone's 2014 book, which might have been a useful source to engage with in the relevant chapters). It is much more a book about “Unveiling Men” by using queer theory—its title, than about “Modern Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Iran”—its subtitle. Whereas the book does not purport to provide a full narrative of the development of modern Iranian suppressed masculinities, it does offer interesting and important entry points into this and other aspects of masculinity studies, both in Iran and in Europe.