Publications by Author: Najmabadi%2C%20Afsaneh

2014
Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran

Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted, and partially subsidized, sex reassignment surgery. In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran. Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials—which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being—grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.

2006
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2006. “Gender and Secularism of Modernity: How Can a Muslim Woman Be French?” Feminist Studies, Inc. Feminist Studies, Inc. Publisher's Version Abstract

The current debates in and about the veil in Europe carry with them not only the terms of the emergence of political Islam in the past several decades, but also this historical memory and that of the earlier cultural encounters and colonial wars between Europe and the domains now named the Middle East and North Africa. While I do not mean to collapse these projects into a singular entity, the historical legacy of fixing the meaning of a Muslim woman's veil as the sign of her gender oppression has remained with us to this very day.

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