Bio: Ziba Mir-Hosseini

Ziba Mir-Hosseini is an anthropologist who has done extensive fieldwork in rural and urban Iran as well as in urban Morocco. She works as freelance researcher and independent consultant on gender, family relations, Islam, law and development issues. She is a Research Associate at the London Middle Eastern Institute, SOAS, University of London; Hauser Global Law Visiting Professor at the School of Law, New York University (2002, 2004, 2006 ....), Fellow of Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2004-05). Her publications include Marriage on Trial (1993) and Islam and Gender (1999); she has co-directed two award-winning feature-length documentaries: Divorce Iranian Style (1998); and Runaway (2001).

Abstract

Negotiating the Forbidden: Women and Sexual Love in Iranian Cinema

Women and sexual love are time-honoured--but problematic--themes in Iranian cinema. Soon after the 1979 revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran, these themes were forced into the straitjacket of Islamist ideology and Islamic law (feqh), which allowed little room for current social realities. The authorities imposed hejab (dress code) and sexual segregation, and the public presence of women and the expression of romantic love became highly restricted. For almost a decade, Iranian filmgoers would look in vain to see woman and love depicted on the screen. Gradually, however, both came out of the shadows; and by the late-1990s, they were once again leading - if highly controversial - themes in the Iranian cinema.

In this paper I explore these developments through a discussion of three films, which in different ways were landmarks in the passage out of the shadows and became the focus of heated debates for their transgression of the rules. They are: Makhmalbaf¹s A Time to Love (Nowbat-e OAsheqi, 1991), and Behrouz Afkhami¹s Hemlock (Showkaran, 1999).

The argument that I want to develop has three elements. First, the problem of the cinematic representation of women and romantic love in Iran long predates the birth of the Islamic Republic. It is part of a larger problematic, which has two elements. One is a deep-rooted ambivalence in Iranian culture and society towards love and women. The second is an ongoing struggle between the forces of modernity and traditionalism, in which women and their bodies have become a battleground. While the first element, the ambivalence, is ancient and more poetic in form and expression, the second (women¹s bodies as battleground) is contemporary and more political. This contrast is evident in the two famous twentieth-century mandates on how women should appear in public. In 1936 Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi monarch, bans the veil, and punishes women who appear in public wearing hejab - i.e. chador or scarf. In 1982, the Islamic Republic does the opposite. Finally, what the Islamic Republic did through its imposition of religious rules on cinema was to accentuate and politicize the cultural ambivalence towards love and women. This in time opened the way for renegotiating some old cultural and religious taboos.