Gazing out from the cover of Iranian Masculinities sit two Iranian soldiers clad in typical 1930s military dress, marked by the ubiquitous kepi-style headpiece introduced by decree of Reza Shah in 1927. Although these men embodied a Western-inspired and explicitly modernist sartorial mode, what strikes the contemporary viewer is the affectionate staging of the photograph, as one languidly rests his arm upon the other's shoulder in a poignant display of male intimacy. The ambiguity of their masculine performance immediately draws the reader into the central theme of Sivan Balslev's debut monograph, namely, the acculturation of Western concepts and practices into a new form of “hegemonic masculinity” in the late-Qajar and early Pahlavi eras of modern Iranian history.
Despite the titular “masculinities” of this monograph, Balslev's analysis is primarily devoted to the articulation and performance of a singular, albeit multifaceted, form of masculinity particular to a new (sociological) class of Iranian elites, with each chapter offering a discrete window onto how these elites discursively linked notions of progress and modernity with Western-inspired sartorial practices and affects over the course of the late-19th and early 20th centuries. In tracing the rise of this self-conscious coterie of intellectuals, urban notables, and bureaucrats to political prominence, Balslev reveals how patriarchal and class hierarchies striated the new forms of manhood they sought to make hegemonic. In this choice of subject, Iranian Masculinities inverts a marked disciplinary tendency in gender and sexuality studies towards situating marginalized, subjected, or otherwise counterhegemonic identities as the primary loci of analysis. Indeed, from Afsaneh Najmabadi's foundational discussion of the beardless young boys (amrads) who functioned as objects of male love and desire in pre-Qajar Iranian society, to Wendy DeSouza's most recent monograph on the subsumed queer Iranian practices, the disciplinary focus on counternormative and “pre-modern” Iranian gender identities has included little space for “Iranian men qua men,” leading Balslev to argue that “men's pursuits and practices such as shaving and dressing, working out and posing in front of the camera can and should occupy a more central place than usually allotted them in historical studies” (p. 22).
Yet, despite what might have a problematic focus on men, elite men no less, Balslev is clearly attuned to a tradition of feminist and poststructuralist critique which aims to deconstruct the embedded patriarchal, classed, and racialized hierarchies latent in the author's subject material, a theoretical commitment that permeates her overall analysis. Chapter 1 begins with an introduction of the notion of javanmardi (literally, “youngmanliness”), adducing how this “pre-modern” category stood as the masculine type par excellence across a wide swathe of 19th century Iranian society. As an aspirational category capacious enough to encompass pious seminary students, valiant street toughs, and prosperous merchants alike, Balslev argues that being-javanmardi was not a fundamentally exclusionary form of manhood premised purely on the ownership of economic and cultural capital, with the term encompassing the physically, mentally, and economically powerful. Yet, as the late-19th century Russian and British empires encroached on Iran's “guarded domains,” Balslev suggests that this earlier, more capacious, and perhaps more egalitarian notion of javanmardi was narrowed as the Iranian press introduced patriotism (vatan parasti) as an integral component of proper manhood. Expanding on the foundational scholarship of Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi and Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Balslev here confirms the fundamentally gendered character of Iranian nationalist discourse, while also introducing a novel source base of periodicals, newspapers, memoirs, and archivally sourced photographic material that informs the remainder of the monograph.
With communication and transportation networks expanding in tandem with this late-19th-century imperial encounter between Iran and the West, traditional Iranian elites increasingly dispatched their sons to Europe (France and Switzerland, in particular) to receive a “modern” education. Chapter 2 explores how the pedagogical mores of these academic institutions helped shape the gender ideology of these scions of the Iranian elite, while the following chapter shows how, upon their return to Iran, these hybridized elites sought to define their own, highly rarefied vision of masculinity in the Iranian press and politics. While some of these new elites did participate in the Constitutional Revolution, Balslev, following from Janet Afary, suggests that the emancipatory specter raised by urban artisan and peasant movements during the revolution lead many elites away from the politically volatile trope of patriotism as a core marker of their manhood, opting instead to reify a restrictive subset of everyday practices adapted from their European experiences as new markers of model masculinity. Under such a gender regime, even such quotidian acts as displaying a pocket watch on a chain could now take on a heightened signification for being “associated with European punctuality…men who wore watches displayed not only their wealth but also their adherence to a modern perception of time” (p. 135).
Balslev's critical reading of nationalist elite sociocultural formation intersects with an ongoing historiographical reconsideration of Iranian political history in the early to mid-20th century. As Rudi Matthee suggested in his 2018 text with Elena Andreeva Russians in Iran (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 137–8), “the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and its aftermath was not a straightforward march toward freedom thwarted by the forces of reaction, but an intricate phenomenon in which an authentic call for royal accountability and popular representation resisting the forces of reaction was mixed with personal rivalries and opportunism representing an often sordid quest for personal gain—all of it entangled with the position and role of the two main outside powers, Russia and Britain.” Recent monographs from Afshin Matin-Asgari and Amir Afkhami have further deconstructed the cultural, biological, and economic assumptions of the Constitutional generation of political leaders and thinkers, revealing how, as the Iranian nation came to be thought of as a bounded entity, progressing forward through linear time, that which was not self-consciously modern would be consigned to a backward pre-national past, caricatured as despotic, decadent, and weak in the face of imperial aggression. Here Balslev's intervention confirms the centrality of gendered assumptions to this process, with traditional forms of masculinity such the homosocial and non-binary identities delegitimated out of newly drawn boundaries of Iranian national identity and pathologized through attendant concerns about the demographic health and sexual practices of the population.
Chapters 4 and 5 are a particular highlight of the monograph, revealing the culture wars which took place in the Iranian public sphere and print media over the appropriateness of these new norms and practices of masculinity during the 1920s. These chapters not only delve into creation of new terms of derision for seemingly overly-Westernized men, most notably the monikers of farangimaab to describe a fondness for European practice and fokoli (literally, cravat-wearing), but also the cooptation of such new gender lexicons in the consolidation of elite masculine hegemony. Chapter 6 turns explicitly to the topic of the 1927 Dress Law, showing how hegemonic masculinity became instantiated as public policy. Here Balslev introduces some of her most interesting photographic material to remind the reader of how class, religious, ethnic, and geographic difference were integral to male gender presentation prior to the Dress Law, with pre-1927 Iranian society exhibiting a radically heterogenous assemblage of sartorial modes ranging from the brightly checkered robes of Kurdish tribesmen to the vivid green turbans of sayyids to the full mustaches grown by wrestlers of the zurkhaneh (house of strength). As Balslev recounts, the Dress Law was explicitly designed to eliminate these forms of difference, while simultaneously bolstering the masculine credentials of an already privileged elite, thereby imposing their vision of manhood as the only acceptable norm. In this regard, Balslev places notions of gender at the center of the Pahlavi state-building project as a whole, showing how such disparate policies as conscription and legal codification were themselves conditioned through the promulgation of hegemonic masculinity. Balslev concludes the monograph with a discussion of how “the interweaving of nationalism, health, and aesthetics in the discussion on the dress reform…made hegemonic masculinity corporeal” (p. 229), and how this corporeal masculinity was institutionalized, with Chapter 7 exploring how the scouting and school sport initiatives of the late-1920s and 1930s inculcated new body images on a mass scale in tandem with sartorial reform.
In much the same way as Wilson Chacko Jacob has shown how the Egyptian effendiyya class sought to remake their own vernacular notions of bourgeois masculinity into national culture, so Iranian Masculinities reveals the efforts of Iran's economically and politically powerful “thousand families” to fashion themselves as model masculine subjects. That being said, and although Balslev insists on the specificity of these elites, there is a tendency in her analysis for the press and, in later chapters, for state policy to stand in as a proxy for the actions and opinions of specific members of the class themselves. Furthermore, while Balslev's analysis of the particularities of elite gender ideology is astute, at times the monograph glosses over the changing sociological composition of this elite over time. How, one wonders, did the cadre of Cossacks introduced into the upper echelons of Iranian society with the rise of Reza Khan—men with such visceral nicknames as Ahmad the Butcher and Mohammad the Knife—seek to challenge or comport with the masculine identity of European-educated litterateurs and social reformers?
Finally, although Iranian Masculinities offers a clear and well-stated set of observations on the changing character of male identity and masculine-coded practices during the period, some of Balslev's stylistic choices proved a tad formulaic for this reviewer's taste. While bookending each chapter with a separate introduction and conclusion makes the work suitable for assigning individual selections to undergraduate students, the effect takes away from the narrative thrust of the monograph when taken as a whole. With these minor comments duly noted, Iranian Masculinities still stands as a valuable contribution to the historical scholarship on gender and sexuality in the modern Middle East, as well as to the specific literature on Iranian social and cultural history in the 20th century.
