Queering Fashion in <i>Hajji Baba</i>: James Morier, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, and the Crisis of Imperial Masculinity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) shaped orientalist stereotypes until the early twentieth century. Scholars have examined the novel’s racism separately from gender and class anxieties in the often-neglected sequel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828). Reading these two novels jointly reveals a British imperial masculinity in crisis during a precarious period in Anglo-Persian relations: the embassy of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan Shirazi Ilchi from Qajar Iran to late Georgian Britain in 1809–10 and 1819–20. This essay argues that Abul Hassan’s celebrity status in the tabloid news media inspired Londoners to adopt Persian fashions queerly, their gender deviancy informing Morier’s fiction about a foppish cross-dressed upstart from Ispahan. I argue that Abul Hassan’s mediatized body drove Morier to satirize fashionable Englishmen as a foreign race, allowing him to claim British gentility. Less concerned with Persians than with their effeminate admirers in England, his satire suggests that the “Orient” was constituted by intersectional gender, class, and racial identities in flux.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".