Abstract
The chapter draws on interviews taken with gay-identifying Iranian males. A particular Foucauldian analysis is used when engaging with interview data in order to address questions of gay embodiment and embodied experience, as well as to explore the different ways gay-identifying Iranian men navigate their lives. The aim is to draw attention to the intersection of resistance, strategies, masking/unmasking of desires, and identity construction of being gay, while living under particular socio-legal conditions that exist today in Iran. These resistive actions and different strategies can be understood as a part of practices of the self. Empirical examples are provided of how gay Iranian men constitute themselves, for example, by “knowing about oneself”—becoming gay—and how they are constituted by dominant discourses of gender and sexuality.
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Notes
- 1.
Khosravi refers to Mostafa Rahimi, an Iranian expert on Shahnameh, who has argued that within Iranian culture, there is a “son-killing complex” (see Khosravi 2008, p. 133).
- 2.
Versatile or vers is a person who enjoys both sexual roles of topping and bottoming.
- 3.
See discussion on this in Chap. 3.
- 4.
In Turkey as in Iran, those individuals who apply for exemption from the military service because they identity as gay are often discharged on the basis of “psychological illness.” This can influence their possibilities of state employment in the future. Even in some cases, private employers have sought information about the military service of their future male employees (see here Human Right Watch 2008).
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Kjaran, J.I. (2019). Ethical Relationality and Accounts of Gay Iranian Men. In: Gay Life Stories. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12831-9_5
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