Genus of Sex: Configurations of Sexuality and Gender in Twentieth-Century Iran

It is ironic that Foucault’s The History of Sexuality -- a central proposition of which is to argue against “the repressive hypothesis” and map the various sites of “incitement to discourse” about sexuality -- has served to incite a vast body of scholarship as “history of sexuality.” This productive work has in part overshadowed a different part of that text. In Part Five of that volume, Foucault concludes that one of the achievements of a notion of sex in itself has been “to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified.” It is this latter proposition that informs my historical investigation of emergence of something called sex in twentieth-century Iran. Moreover, an analysis of genealogy of sex in Iran will also have to look at the different genealogy of the concept of self. Co-emergent with sex as “a unique signifier and as a universal signified” in nineteenth century Europe is the concept of an interiorized self with psychic depth. It is this “deep self” that becomes the subject of the emerging field of psychology. This is not a trajectory that could be assumed to be universal; yet almost all studies of sex and sexuality work with deep self. How can one understand a historically different sense of self? How did the deep self of European psychology translate (textually and institutionally) into the sense of self of a different cultural and historical moment in Iran? What would a history of emergence of “sex” look like with a different notion of “self”?