Sivan Balslev. <i>Iranian Masculinities: Gender and Sexuality in Late Qajar and Early Pahlavi Iran</i>.

A highly welcome addition to the gradually flourishing area of Middle Eastern—particularly Iranian—masculinities studies, Sivan Balslev’s Iranian Masculinities: Gender and Sexuality in Late Qajar and Early Pahlavi Iran offers a readable story of the emergence and evolution of a hegemonic model of Iranian masculinity between the 1870s and 1930s. Drawing on leading masculinities theorist Raewyn Connell’s work, Balslev studies a “regional” mode of “hegemonic masculinity”—itself defined as configurations of masculine practices that, besides their already dominant relation vis-à-vis femininity, gain cultural ascendancy during a particular time and place over other nonhegemonic masculinities, which Connell deems as “marginalized” and “subordinated” modes of masculinity. Building on pertinent discussions in numerous secondary sources and working with varied primary sources, including periodicals, literary texts, memoirs and autobiographies, as well as photography, Balslev provides seven interconnected and chronological arguments, cushioned by an informative and contextualizing introduction and a conclusion. Chapter 1 overviews two figures of masculine authority prevalent during the late Qajar era—that is, the javanmard (“chivalrous man”) and the luti (“the neighborhood ruffian who defended the weak, the neighborhood and the city” [19])—in association with the homosocial male space of the zurkhaneh (“house of strength”; a traditional gym for males), both of whom embodied the era’s hegemonic masculinity. These figures serve as a foil against which a new hegemonic masculinity would emerge shortly in Iran. The fading popularity of these enactments of masculinity, as well as javanmardi (“chivalry”) becoming tied to national patriotism by some Iranian Constitutionalists, would gradually cause the declining popularity of zurkhaneh on political and moral grounds. Chapter 2 argues that during the late nineteenth century Western-educated male elites tied their own emphasis on the importance of Western education to honor and masculinity, thus adding new prerequisites to their desired model of Iranian masculinity as an ideal while also excluding women and nonelite men as either unmanly or nonhuman. Chapter 3 shows that a consequence of the gendered dimension of Iranian Constitutional Revolution was the appropriation by male elites of patriotism as another requirement for ideal masculinity—again enabling those elites to exclude women and any perceivably nonconforming men. Moving forward to the early Pahlavi era, in chapter 4 Balslev argues that facing the increasing stigmatization by conservatives and the religious of the farangima’ab (“westernized”) figure (132) during the late nineteenth century, the turn-of-the-century reformist intellectuals strategically saved face by dividing westernization into proper and “excessive westernization” (139); they then ascribed the latter to the fokoli (“westernized dandy”) figure (149), whom they denounced as containing a dangerous and perverted sexuality, as reluctant to marry, or to marry early, or then to marry with an Iranian woman. Scapegoating the fokoli’s anomalous attitude toward marriage, Iranian Western-educated elites, as Balslev discusses in chapter 5, then kept actively screening Iranian men’s sexuality and sexual desire during the early decades of the twentieth century, which culminated in promoting a “healthy” male sexuality (171), monogamous heterosexuality, and companionate marriage (with Iranian women), all framed within a “social duty” rhetoric (168). In chapter 6, after overviewing male dress codes in the Qajar era, Balslev addresses the 1927 Dress Law for male dress reforms under Reza Shah, showing how the ensuing enforcement of body aesthetics and hygiene provided further layers to the previously developing Iranian hegemonic masculinity. The last chapter examines the official promotion of sport, scouting, and military service, under Reza Shah’s modernizing agenda, this time aimed at creating “a new image of the male body defined by its youth and athleticism” and as disciplined and loyal to the shah (246, 279). The zurkhaneh, previously castigated based on hygiene and sexual morality, was also rehabilitated by the state and reintroduced as “the abode of Iranian patriotism and morality” (281). The garment and bodily change policies described in chapters 6 and 7, Balslev argues, further increased the hegemony of Western-educated elite men—that is, the heralders of the new hegemonic masculinity in Iran.

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