Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern Minority

Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved