The Historical Contingencies and the Politics of in Iran

Disavowal and regulation of sexual minorities will be explored by engaging with important historical sources and accounts that speak to the historical contingencies of the emergence of same-sex desire and the category of “the homosexual” in Iran. Incorporated into this account is the political and social history of Iran from the latter part of the twentieth century until the present. Drawn into the discussion of sexuality and same-sex desire, the historical contingencies will be helpful to understand better the accounts of same-sex-desiring/gay Iranian men under quite specific conditions of sexuality governance, regimes of representation, and self-formative/self-fashioning potentialities of Iran today. Attention is drawn to the historical nuances with regards to sexuality and sexual governance in Iran, in which there are both discontinuities and continuities between the past and the present, between the period of the Shah and the post-revolutionary Iran.