Full Description
Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen, and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spaces—public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden—thus mapping, graphing, and even transgressing those spaces, especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender, sexuality, and desire, becoming strategies of empowerment, of domination, of expression, and of being seen. Hence, the photograph became a vehicle to traverse multiple locations that various gendered physical bodies could not, and it was also the social and political relations that had preceded the photograph that determined those ideological spaces of (im)mobility. In identifying these notions in photographs, one may glean information about how modern Iran metamorphosed throughout its own long durée or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.
Contents
Introduction: Locations of Desire
A Language of Its Own: Depictions of Women in Iranian Art Before and Shortly After the Arrival of Photography
Corporeal Politics: Constructions of Gender and Power in the Royal Nasiri Photograph Albums and the Photography of the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11)
Collecting Women
The Erotic Spaces of Qajar Photography
For the Male Gaze: Depictions of Masculinity and Sexuality
Enslaved Bodies of Desire: Photographs of Black African Slaves
Conclusion: The Inevitable Witness
