Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards
Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity
Afsaneh Najmabadi
“The anger at European readings of Iranian social and sexual mores began to reconfigure structures of desire by introducing a demarcation to distinguish homosociality from homosexuality. The denial of any overlap between the now separate domains of homosociality and homosexuality paradoxically provides a shelter, a masqueraded home, for homosexuality. We can continue to hold each other’s hand in public because we have declared it to be a sign of homosociality that is void of sexuality.”