1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910155036503321

Autore

Scheiwiller Staci Gem.

Titolo

Liminalities of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Iranian photography : desirous bodies / / Staci Gem Scheiwiller

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Routledge, , 2017

ISBN

1-315-51213-0

1-315-51212-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (240 pages)

Collana

Routledge History of Photography

Disciplina

770.955

Soggetti

Photography - Iran - History - 19th century

Photography, Erotic - History - 19th century

Sex customs - Iran - History - 19th century

Electronic books.

Iran History Qajar dynasty, 1794-1925

Iran Social life and customs 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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 in Qajar photography -- Conclusion: The inevitable witness.

Sommario/riassunto

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.