SEXUAL SELF-FASHIONING

Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality
GENERAL EDITORS:
Soraya Tremayne, Founding Director, Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group
and Research Associate, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of
Oxford.
Marcia C. Inhorn, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and
International Affairs, Yale University.
Philip Kreager, Director, Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group, and Research
Associate, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Institute of Human
Sciences, University of Oxford
Understanding the complex and multifaceted issue of human reproduction has
been, and remains, of great interest both to academics and practitioners. This series
includes studies by specialists in the field of social, cultural, medical, and biological
anthropology, medical demography, psychology, and development studies. Current
debates and issues of global relevance on the changing dynamics of fertility, human
reproduction and sexuality are addressed.
Recent volumes:
Volume 51
Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian
Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and
Belonging
Rahil Roodsaz

Volume 46
Abortion in Post-Revolutionary
Tunisia: Politics, Medicine and
Morality
Irene Maffi

Volume 50
Inconceivable Iran: To Reproduce
or Not to Reproduce?
Soraya Tremayne

Volume 45
Navigating Miscarriage: Social,
Medical, and Conceptual
Perspectives
Edited by Susie Kilshaw and Katie Borg

Volume 49
Good Enough Mothers: Practicing
Nurture and Motherhood in
Chiapas, Mexico
JM López

Volume 44
Privileges of Birth: Constellations of
Care, Myth and Race in South Africa
Jennifer JM Rogerson

Volume 48
How Is a Man Supposed to Be a
Man? Male Childlessness – a Life
Course Disrupted
Robin A. Hadley

Volume 43
Access to Assisted Reproductive
Technologies: The Case of France
and Belgium
Edited by Jennifer Merchant

Volume 47
Waithood: Gender, Education, and
Global Delays in Marriage
and Childbearing
Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn and
Nancy J. Smith-Hefner

Volume 42
Making Bodies Kosher: The Politics
of Reproduction among Haredi Jews
in England
Ben Kasstan

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website:
http://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/fertility-reproduction-and-sexuality

Sexual Self-Fashioning
IRANIAN DUTCH NARRATIVES
OF SEXUALITY AND BELONGING

Rahil Roodsaz

berghahn
NEW YORK • OXFORD
www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2023 Rahil Roodsaz
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Roodsaz, Rahil, author.
Title: Sexual self-fashioning : Iranian Dutch narratives of sexuality and
belonging / Rahil Roodsaz.
Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Fertility,
reproduction and sexuality ; volume 51 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Classification: LCC HQ18.N45 R66 2022 (print) | LCC HQ18.N45 (ebook)
| DDC 306.709492—dc23/eng/20220526
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019187
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019188
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-80073-683-2 hardback
ISBN 978-1-80073-684-9 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800736832

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction. Sexuality and Identity Construction among
the Iranian Dutch

1

Chapter 1. Sexually Crafting the Nation: Sexuality as
the Vehicle to Collective Self-Fashioning, Nineteenth
Century–Present

26

Chapter 2. A Conditional Modern Self: Sexual
Negotiations of “Modernity” via an Endogenous Morality

63

Chapter 3. Passing on the Torch: Authenticating the Self
via Religious and Traditional Notions of Sexuality

94

Chapter 4. Beyond Sexual Boundaries: Transgressive
Selves and Sexualities

132

Conclusion. Sexuality as a Sociocultural Argument
among the Iranian Dutch

164

Glossary
References
Index

175
178
191

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

he willingness and openness of the research participants have
made it possible for me to write this book. I am deeply grateful
to them for trusting me with their invaluable and personal stories.
This book is based on an ethnographic research project conducted
between 2009 and 2014 while working at the Institute for Gender
Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen. I am very thankful to
the committee of the Dutch NWO Mosaic program for their positive
evaluation of my research proposal and to Radboud University’s
executive board for their generosity in providing the financial means
for this research. However, none of this would have been possible
without the financial support of the Universitair Asiel Fonds (UAF),
the Dutch Foundation for Refugee Students, enabling many people
like me to pursue a university education during, often lengthy,
asylum procedures.
My deepest gratitude goes to Willy Jansen and Stefan Dudink
for their guidance, encouragement, and dedication from the very
first steps of developing my ideas for the research project until its
completion. My colleges at the Institute for Gender Studies made
the research project a wonderful work experience for me both personally and professionally. I became very fond of Thursday coffee
breaks with Ria Janssen, Claudia Krops, Jeannette van Mierlo, Ria
van Ooijen, Carla van Rooy, and others. I am also grateful to Geertje
Mak for a critical discussion of the initial theoretical framework of
my project and to Anouka van Eerdewijk, Sanne Derks, and Louis
van der Hengel for kindly sharing their research and writing experiences with me at the very beginning of my academic career.
For several years during and after this project I learned tremendously from our discussions at the IGS seminars and the anthropology research seminars at the Radboud University as well as the
NOSTER text reading seminars at Utrecht University. I would like

Acknowledgments

vii

to thank Abigail Albuquerque, Deniz Batum, Mariecke van den
Berg, Kathrine van den Bogert, Sophie Bolt, Saskia Bultman, Nella
van den Brandt, Gianmaria Colpani, Marco Derks, Maaike Derksen,
Coen van Galen, Anoeshka Gehring, Adriano José Habed, Meike
Hessels, Jos Hoevnaars, Miguel Houben, Sasinee Khuankaew,
Adriaan van Klinken, Anne-Marie Korte, Nina ter Laan, Marijke
Naezer, Rasa Navicke, Loes Opdam, Janneke Peelen, Anny Peters, An
van Raemdonck, Alexandra Rijke, Judith Samson, Lieke Schrijvers,
Anneke Schulenberg, Katrine Smiet, Marijke Sniekers, Iris Sportal,
and Michiel Swinkels.
I am deeply indebted to Janet Afary for her hospitality during my
stay in Los Angeles in November and December 2012 and for her
valuable comments on the draft version of Chapter 1. I am also very
thankful to Halleh Ghorashi for her generous advice and encouragements when I was exploring opportunities for an academic position
many years ago. I particularly appreciate the input from the three
unknown reviewers whose close readings and critical comments
contributed significantly to the end result. I also want to thank Tom
Bonnington, Associate Editor of Berghahn Books, for his kind guidance and support during the entire publication process.
Finally, I thank Alexander, my family, and my friends for enriching my life with their presence and showing me the meaning of
unconditional love and support.

Introduction

SEXUALITY AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
AMONG THE IRANIAN DUTCH

I

n the summer of 2006, a group of Iranian Dutch organized a
demonstration against the policies of the Iranian regime in the
city center of The Hague. During this gathering, a conversation took
place between an older friend of mine and a middle-aged man who
was a remote acquaintance. He looked distinctly pale and sad and
suddenly started telling my friend about an unbearable painful situation he had been experiencing. Worried and a bit confused, my
friend asked him what caused it, to which he answered: “I recently
lost both my mother and my daughter.” Intensely moved by this announcement, my friend asked him how it happened. He replied that
his mother had died of old age, whereas his daughter was “not really”
dead. His seventeen-year-old daughter had slept with a young man,
he continued, which in his view meant that he had lost her. To him,
she was symbolically dead. He was now considering putting her on
the street. Gradually, other Iranian Dutch joined the conversation,
which quickly turned into a group discussion about how this man
was supposed to handle the situation.
Almost unanimously, the people who took part in the conversation advised this man to “get over it,” to accept this “natural” aspect of life, and to try to build a healthy, close relationship with his
daughter. Several people kept referring to what they perceived as
the general acceptance of premarital sexuality in Dutch society and
the necessity for Iranians to adapt themselves to this liberal (sexual)
culture. Some of them seemed even angry at him for being unable
or unwilling to liberate himself from “traditional” ideas about sex.

2

Sexual Self-Fashioning

A young woman stated that after having freed herself from conservative ideas about sexuality, she now understood having sex as
something as simple as ab-khordan (drinking water), suggesting that
there was no need to complicate a natural desire shared by all. At
that point, a group of approximately ten men and women, mostly
middle-aged, were giving advice to this man about domestic problems, articulating what ideals they believed should be followed by
Iranians in relation to sexuality in the Dutch context.
Various thoughts come to mind with regard to this incident. For
instance, why would this man share this personal story at such a
public place? Did he on some level expect his compatriots fellow
countrymen to talk him out of the idea to expel his daughter, whom
he obviously still cared about? Why did this personal conversation
turn into a group discussion about traditional versus liberal understandings of sexuality? What motivated those people to eagerly and
immediately reject this man’s way of dealing with his daughter’s
sexuality, even though they seemed to recognize what he was going through? How does all this relate to their new residence in the
Netherlands? Could this political protest against the Iranian regime
in a public place in The Hague simultaneously be an act of dissociating oneself from conservative notions of sexuality? And if so,
then at whom was this act of dissociation directed and what was to
be gained through this dissociation? What role did gender and age
play when a male parent is enormously concerned with his female
child’s sexuality?
What happened that day, about seven years ago, was one of the
significant events that made me more sensitive to Iranian Dutch
ideals as well as discontents in relation to sexuality in their selfpresentations. This, moreover, happened in a distinct broader Dutch
sociopolitical context where the political Dutch ruling elite was
accused of not taking “Islam’s danger” to Dutch society seriously.
Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, public distrust erupted in the
Netherlands, which was further intensified by the foundation of Pim
Fortuyn’s political party Leefbaar Nederland (Liveable Netherlands)
in 2002 (Prins 2002). Ably using the Dutch media, Fortuyn spread
his anti-Islam and anti-immigration views and managed to gather
an unexpectedly large number of followers. According to the polls,
he was well on his way to becoming the leader of the largest political
party in the country right before he was shot dead by a radical environmentalist. Many would remember him for “saying what others
didn’t dare to say,” a formula that gradually seeped into the Dutch
public discussions of immigration and Islam. The need to break ta-

3

Introduction

boos instead of choosing a relativistic approach to cultural difference, being straightforward instead of fearing backlash, and being
realistic instead of naïve characterized the sociopolitical atmosphere
in which the abovementioned incident took place and in which the
seeds of the research project underlying this book were planted.
In this book, the Iranian Dutch perceptions of sexuality as connected to, what I will call, processes of self-fashioning will be looked
at. I am interested in the ways articulations of sexuality enable constructions of the self. Regarding the aforementioned anecdote, my
concern, therefore, is with the reactions of people to what the man
shared with us rather than providing an analysis of or a solution
for the kind of “problem” he was dealing with. What is intriguing
about the reactions to this man’s story are the negotiations involved
in idealizing and claiming a “liberal” self through the acceptance of
premarital female sexuality. According to Henry Rubin, “When we
ask what is the matter with someone, we are often in search of a
diagnosis and a cure. If, alternatively, we ask what matters to someone, we are asking after their taste of the world” (2003: 10). This
book’s approach is of the latter nature, looking at what matters to
the Iranian Dutch in how they conceptualize sexuality.
In the following, I first present a discussion of the Dutch discursive multicultural context at the beginning of the twenty-first
century in which this study is embedded. Next, a short overview
of studies on sexuality, gender, and identity issues among Iranian
immigrants living in European and North American countries will
be provided. This will be followed by the introduction of the main
research questions. A brief discussion of the three sexual fields of
contestations in which I will explore the positioning of the Iranian
Dutch is the focus of the subsequent section. Furthermore, the
research group, the methodological approach, a reflection on my
own position as a researcher, and the outline of the book will be
presented.

Embedding the Research
In the period before and during my research project, several Dutch
media productions focusing on anti-Islam views received a lot of attention. An example is the short movie Submission Part One (2004),
written by the former politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali and directed by the
assassinated filmmaker Theo van Gogh, which was presented as
a controversial critique on violence against women in Islam. This

4

Sexual Self-Fashioning

movie led to an explosion of heated public debates within and outside the Netherlands. In the film, Quranic verses in Arabic are calligraphed on the body of the female English-speaking narrator who
is covered only by a transparent veil. Lamenting to Allah, the narrator talks about domestic (sexual) violence and forced marriage in
a mixture of prayer, confession, and testimony.1 The repeated focus
of the camera on her naked body, particularly her breasts, attributes
a symbolic role to the sexualized female body as the contested site
where the battle between “backward Islam” and “modern/civilized
Western values” is fought. The entanglement of Muslim women’s
sexuality in debates on multiculturalism and integration is characteristic of a comprehensive discourse of the “other” in European and
North American countries (Scott 2007).
In the Dutch context, citizens with a Moroccan and Turkish origin have regularly been identified as a group that experiences difficulties in dealing with certain issues of sexuality and gender due to
their Islamic background (Crul and Doomernik 2003). “Dutch culture” is implicitly or explicitly assumed to consist of a high level of
tolerance towards sexual diversity and individual choices in sexual
behavior and relations. This is further opposed to “Islamic concepts”
such as honor and piety which are assumed to be restrictive of sexual freedom, particularly for women. It is then through sexuality
that a difference between “Dutch” and “Islamic” cultures is imagined and constructed. This prominent role assigned to sexuality and
gender in public debates on integration and citizenship,2 whereby a
form of holistic cultural dissimilarity between “Muslims” and “Westerners” is produced, is indicative of the discursive context in which
Submission Part One should be understood.3
In the same period, anti-Islam views expressed through sexuality, furthermore, emerged in more formal and institutionalized
contexts. In a Dutch policy document from 2002, Emancipatie en
familiezaken (Emancipation and Family Issues),4 “honor killings,”
“genital mutilation,” “as well as practices that might be less striking
such as limiting one’s physical and social space to move” appears as
a hindrance for the integration of Muslim women and girls in the
Netherlands, for these “traditional practices contradict Dutch fundamental rights.” Some years later, in another Dutch policy document
on integration and citizenship (2010),5 Islam is mentioned as the
faith of a considerable number of immigrants, which “evokes anxieties” among forty-one percent of the Dutch population because
of “other traditions, views and the association with violence and
radicalism elsewhere in the world as well as in the Netherlands.” It

Introduction

5

is then stated that the government recognizes these anxieties, and,
operating within the boundaries of the freedom of religion, it works
to protect he democratic Dutch constitution. The Dutch constitution is, among others, defined as opposed to “excrescences” such as
“honor-related violence,” “polygyny,” and “forced marriage” as phenomena observed especially among young women who enter the
Netherlands on grounds of “family formation” or “family reunification”. The ethnic or religious background of this group, however, is
not mentioned explicitly, implying an implicit consensus on whom
this document is targeting.
Tracing and analyzing the Dutch integration debate between the
1970s and 2000s, the philosopher Baukje Prins indicates the dominance of the discourse of “new realism” (2008, 2002). According
to her, in this discourse, starting from the 1980s, culture and more
specifically gender became entangled with issues of immigration
and integration. Until the 1990s, value pluralism was celebrated as
a Dutch characteristic, while cultural relativism was simultaneously
criticized and rejected by important Dutch public figures. As part of
this discourse of “new realism” the multicultural approach of the
Left progressive Dutch politicians and intellectuals was presented as
the reason why immigrants failed to truly integrate into Dutch society. Later on, in the 2000s, the discourse of “new realism” began
to entail a call to: listen to ordinary people for they represent what
is “really happening” in society; dare to face the facts and speaking
“frankly”; criticize the “political correctness” of Left progressive politicians; and ignite a revival of Dutch patriotism. As a result of this
atmosphere, issues related to immigrant Muslim women and sexuality—e.g., cult of virginity, homophobia, and forced marriage—came
to the center of public attention. Presumably, these problematic
“culturally inherent” matters were finally dealt with. Prins regards
this development as both a blessing and a curse, for the previously
ignored position of immigrant women was paid attention to, yet,
by playing the culture card, these women were depicted as “either
victims or accomplices of their oppressive cultures” (2008: 365–68).
Sexuality was and remains a crucial element in culturalization
of “us-versus-them” constructions within the Dutch integration debate. More recently, the debate has slightly changed its focus and
now extends to refugees or asylum seekers from the Middle East
and Africa, notably Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, and Turkey. In particular, young men from these countries have come to occupy the role of the gendered and racialized Other, who are a threat
to European white women (De Hart 2017).

6

Sexual Self-Fashioning

Providing a historical and analytical picture of homosexuality as a
political tool in the Dutch multicultural context, the historian Stefan
Dudink illustrates the symbolic function of sexuality as a marker of
cultural, religious, and national boundary (2010). In the same vein
as the “new realism” theory (Prins 2008, 2002), Dudink describes
how in the aftermath of the Dutch “consensual politics,” which was
criticized and held responsible for the lack of integration of immigrants, homosexuality is appropriated as a benchmark of Dutch cultural achievement and a point of cultural and religious distinction
from Muslim immigrants since the beginning of the twenty-first
century. Due to the compulsive focus on negotiation and making
compromises, the argument goes, the Dutch “consensual democracy” had resulted in blurring cultural differences. In this regard, the
tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality was brought forward as
a moral value around which a distinctive Dutch nationalism could
be imagined against the assumed increasing Islamic influences in
Dutch society. The Dutch consensual political climate was to be replaced by one that—in accordance with the concept of “new realism”—promoted frankness and transparency. Like a homosexual
person who is encouraged to “come out” and to be open about his/
her sexual orientation, Dutch politicians were supposed to be honest and clear in taking a position regarding collective cultural and
religious diversities. In discussions on the legitimacy of multicultural society, Dudink concludes, the tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality came to represent a morally non-negotiable cultural
hallmark of “us” (2010: 31–33). How the Iranian Dutch relate themselves to this specific Dutch cultural hallmark in their quests for belonging is one of the main questions of this book.
The link between the celebration and protections of gay rights
goes beyond the Dutch context. With the concept of “homonationalism,” the women’s and gender studies scholar Jasbir Puar (2007,
2013) argues that gay rights have become a barometer by which
the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is measured in
the US as well as transnational contexts. Using this frame, Puar
sets to historicize how a nation’s status as “gay friendly” has become desirable and used as a tool for imperialist projects, fundamentally questioning the assumed opposition between the queer
and the nation-state. Within this global context, it is not surprising
that refugees, and queer refugees in particular, with a non-Western
background are compelled to reproduce the same imperialist discourse when seeking asylum (Sharif 2015). The Iranian diaspora is
no exception (Shakhsari 2012), which I will explain further when

Introduction

7

discussing the significance of the topic of homosexuality for this
book.
Remarkably, the approximately forty-four thousand Iranian Dutch,
who would also qualify as a “minority group with an Islamic background” such as Turkish Dutch and the Moroccan Dutch communities, remain absent from Dutch discussions on integration. At least
they are generally not perceived as a “problematic” group. In fact,
as a minority group they have been evaluated as “well-integrated”
by the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS 2012: 11), based on
their relatively high level of education and employment participation (Luijk 2017). Although in-depth sociocultural studies on the
Iranian Dutch that examine this “well-integrated” status are lacking, in their media appearances some of them claim a position that
could easily be identified as fitting the dominant Dutch integration
discourse. Especially in the period around which this research project was conducted public debates about Islam and integration intensified; a number of famous Iranian Dutch vocal in the media held
positions that fiercely critiqued Islam and its relation to women’s
roles, rights, and sexual freedom. Examples include: Afshin Ellian,
a professor of law, who said he believes it to be his “duty to defend
freedom and criticize Islam”6; Sooreh Hera (pseudonym), an artist
who garnered publicity with her photo project Adam and Ewald, in
which barely clothed homosexual Middle-Eastern–looking men and
others are wearing masks of the prophet Mohammad and the first
Shi’i imam Ali in erotic settings such as a bedroom7; and, Ehsan
Jami, a publicist and former politician, who cofounded the Dutch
“Central Committee for Ex-Muslims” with the aim “to break the taboo of apostasy in Islam” and “to defend freedom.”8 Next to these,
however, non-exclusionary, diversity-oriented voices on Muslims
and integration were and are present among the members of this
minority group, such as reflected in the work of the anthropologist
Halleh Ghorashi, who calls for cultural hybridity as opposed to an
essentialist approach to culture.9
Criticizing Islam and praising “the West” as the beacon for freedom has furthermore been noticed in various (scholarly) initiatives
by Iranians at the international level. For instance, Joan W. Scott
and Saba Mahmood speak of a trend, which they describe as “orientalist narratives,” in the works of a number of authors with an
Iranian background in France (Scott 2005; Mahmood 2006, 2009).
These contemporary orientalist narrators, according to Laetitia Nanquette, can be viewed as excessive critics of Islam and at the same
time as uncritical proclaimers of the West through which a polarized

8

Sexual Self-Fashioning

vision of the world becomes constructed (2009: 269–70). An example of such a “native narrator” is the Iranian French anthropologist
Chahdortt Djavann, famous for her pamphlet “Down with Veils”
(2003) and her book How Can One be French? (2006). In the discussions on veils and secularism in France, she takes a critical position
towards Islam, representing it as a fundamentally oppressive, prejudiced religion with regard to gender relations.
More recently, however, younger generation Iranians living within
and outside the Netherlands have started supporting and joining
anti-racist and anti-Islamophobic movements, seeking strategic
solidarity with Muslim minority groups and communities of color
(Maghbouleh 2017; Roodsaz 2020). The simultaneous existence
of multiple pro-Western as well as the emerging anti-racist voices
and sentiments is one of the important discursive contexts within
which the Iranian Dutch accounts of sexuality and the self in this
book should be understood. The negotiations involved in processes
of self-fashioning via sexuality, I postulate, include reflections upon,
(strategic) accommodations to, and (partial) resistance against what
the research participants perceive as “Islam,” “the West,” “tradition,”
“modernity,” and “liberalism.” This discursive context thus, rather
than a static external entity, is regarded as malleable, becoming constantly produced and reconstructed by participants, and available
for creative or confirmatory intentional or unintentional utilization.

Sexuality and Gender among Iranian Immigrants
in Western Societies
Several studies have taken issues of gender and family including reflections on sexuality among Iranian immigrants in Western countries as their main topic (Ahmadi 2003a, 2003b; Ahmadi
Lewin 2001; Alinia 2004; Bauer 1994, 1985b, 2000; Darvishpour
1999; Farahani 2007, 2012, 2017; Khosravi 2009; Mahdi 1999,
2001; Moghissi 1999, 2005, 2007; Nassehi-Behnam 2010; Shahidian 1999; Shakhsari 2012). Some of these studies specifically focus
on the Iranian diaspora’s views on (often heterosexual) sexuality and gender relations, which points to gradual yet fundamental changes occurring in these communities.10 Hammed Shahidian
(1999), whose work concerns the Iranian immigrants in Canada,
for instance, reports on “a fundamental change in reference from
community to the individual” among his respondents as well as an
increasing rejection of “Iranian patriarchal masculinity” accompa-

Introduction

9

nied with a more equal division of paid and unpaid work between
husbands and wives.
Another scholar, Nader Ahmadi, who studies the Iranian diaspora
in Sweden, has come to comparable findings and analyses (2003a,
2003b). According to him, “the transition between two cultures”
has significantly changed this group’s ideas and understandings of
sexuality. Being confronted with an “egalitarian Swedish sexual culture,” these migrants from a “traditional Islamic society” have now
become more individualized and less patriarchal in how they deal
with sexual decision making. However, this transition, Ahmadi further explains, contains various difficulties. For instance, although a
tendency towards an acceptance of premarital sex can be observed
in this group, young women who have had various sexual relationship risk being called “impure,” while boys who have engaged in the
same kind of behavior are “irresponsible” (2003a: 694). The Iranian
Swedish views on sexuality, as suggested in this study, have changed
from traditional authoritarian and patriarchal to more liberal, individualized and egalitarian alternatives, although not always without
difficulties.
In other research, Fataneh Farahani (2007) explores the negotiations, dilemmas, and coping tactics among Iranian Swedish women,
focusing on the topics of virginity, first sexual experiences, marriage,
veiling, and changing attitudes and values in a diasporic context.
She analyzes how conflicting cultural norms inform these women’s
accounts of sexuality, and how they engage in power dynamics by
challenging, accommodating, and shifting between available discursive axes. This enables Farahani to illustrate the multiplicity and
contingency in these women’s narrations of their heterosexuality.
She, furthermore, states that these women communicated a sense
of change in their relationship to sexuality during their stay in Sweden, including their attitudes, values, and beliefs regarding gender
roles and their right to their bodies and sexualities. However, Farahani takes distance from linear modernist and essentialist approaches
that dichotomize “traditional” Iranian culture vis-á-vis modern
Swedish/Western culture. For instance, she criticizes simplistic associations between the high rate of divorce among Iranian immigrants
and their migration from traditional to modern societies in the West,
and she reminds us of similar transformations within Iranian society
despite the limitations imposed by the Islamic republic.
The literature on gender and sexuality within the Iranian diaspora illustrates active engagement among these communities with
cultural change through re-evaluations of previous sexual and gen-

10

Sexual Self-Fashioning

dered norms and ideals and negotiations of alternative models. This
book, however, takes a different perspective. Rather than whether
and to what extent change is happening in the Iranian Dutch attitudes towards gender and sexuality, it investigates what stories
of change within this community signify in terms of subjectivity.
More specifically, whereas the analyses in the studies discussed in
this section concern Iranians’ perceptions of sexuality as such, in my
research these perceptions are subsequently elucidated in terms of
their enabling function in processes of self-fashioning. Accounts of
sexuality presented in this book are seen as constitutive, rather than
reflective of the self, rejecting the notion of an authentic or a pure
self behind accounts of sexuality. Ethnographically, this means that
accounts of sexuality are seen as fluid (contextual and changing),
enabling processes of identity formation. This approach, I hope,
helps us move beyond essentialist understandings of the self and
culture in discussions on immigrants and sexuality.

Research Questions
In diasporic contexts, identities are constantly produced and reproduced anew, Stuart Hall states (1990: 235). The goal of this research
is to investigate how sexuality is conceptualized by the Iranian
Dutch research participants and how these conceptualizations enable the fashioning of a particular self. Sexuality here is regarded as
a fluid field of “erotic sociabilities and sexual sensibilities,” to borrow from the American-based Iranian historian Afsaneh Najmabadi
(2006: 17). The self is understood as a continuous subjective process
of sociocultural positioning. Analyzing the Iranian Dutch positions
towards issues of sexuality, I will explore what discursive assumptions underlie those positions, what negotiations with sociocultural
norms are involved in taking those positions, and what notions of
the self are communicated through those positionings. To narrow
in on the otherwise too broad field of sexuality, I have chosen three
fields of contestation concerning the identity-migration-sexuality
nexus, namely virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation, which I will discuss in the next section. The main question that
this study aims to answer is: how do the Iranian Dutch deploy discourses on virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation in
processes of self-fashioning?
The narrated experiences of the Iranian Dutch on the three topics of sexuality will be analyzed in order to understand how these

11

Introduction

narratives enable the constructions of the self. This main question is
divided into three sub-questions. To emphasize that sexuality, rather
than a static entity, is a continuously changing field of cultural negotiations, the first sub-question is: what are the main points of
cultural contestation in the participants’ stories about virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation? The context of migration in which people tend to intensify their (re)evaluations of who
they are, is taken as the basis for the second sub-question: what
subjective notions of change and development are reflected in how the
participants talk about virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation? Finally, the third sub-question aims at providing insight
into the central points of discursive intersection between sexuality
and subjectivity: what are the main sociocultural intersections between
perceptions of virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation on the one hand and articulations of the self on the other hand?

Virginity, Homosexuality,
and Nonmarital Cohabitation
The first of the three fields of sexuality to be discussed in this book
is virginity. Both Shahidian (1999) and Ahmadi (2003a) report on
the changing perceptions of virginity by Iranians living in Canada
and Sweden. While the importance of women’s purity and men’s or
family’s honor are emphasized in relation to female virginity (Shahidian 1999: 208; Ahmadi 2003a: 694), overall, the authors observe
a growing acceptance of premarital sexual engagements. Male virginity is not mentioned in these studies, which points at the significance of gender as an organizing principle of virginity’s sociocultural
meaning. Recalling bad memories, the parents often regret their
lack of sexual experience and openness upon their own marriage
and understand the need to change their attitude towards their children’s sexuality. However, these parents remain ambiguous about
how open or restrictive they should behave in this regard. In her
study on diasporic sexualities among Iranian Swedish women, Farahani underlines the high sociocultural value of the “pure” female
body symbolized by virginity among Iranians (2007). The importance of virginity is illustrated though its performativity and women
acting as sexually ignorant regardless of actual sexual experience,
which simultaneously provides opportunities for some women to
“bargain with patriarchy” (Farahani 2007). Similarly, this book does
not depart from a fixed understanding of virginity. Instead, I am in-

12

Sexual Self-Fashioning

terested in how the research participants define virginity themselves
in order to delve into its importance in relation to issues of gender
and identity in everyday life. My goal is to investigate important cultural meanings given to virginity in the Iranian Dutch context, the
sociocultural negotiations and considerations involved in formulating those meanings, and the practices of subjectivity which become
possible along these discursive acts.
Homosexuality, the second sexual field of contestation in this research, has seldom been the topic of sociocultural studies on the perceptions of sexuality among Iranian Western diaspora. An exception
is the work of Sima Shakhsari (2012) on the role of homosexuality
in transnational cyberspace activities among Iranians. Shakhsari observes a considerable increase in the representations of queers in the
Iranian diasporic circles in cyberspace, whereby “the rights of homosexuals” are defended by some Iranian human rights organizations, dissidents, and Iranian intellectuals outside of Iran. According
to Shakhsari, whereas Iranian queers have previously been denied
a legitimate space in Iranian diasporic imaginations of the nation
tolerating and celebrating homosexuality, they have now become
central in a “race toward a free and democratic Iran” in Iranian diasporic oppositional discourses (2012: 17). On the one hand, the
post-9/11 “war on terror” logic has contributed to this intensified
attention for the Iranian queers and their oppressed position in “the
grand prison of Iran,” as Shakhsari notices. On the other hand, she
argues, a relatively recent shift from exilic sentiments, opposing the
home (Iran) with the host (the West), to more transnational mobility-oriented diasporic understandings of Iranianness have seemingly
led to the inclusion of homosexuality in the imagined democratic
future of Iran. However, this inclusion, she further postulates, is
normative in the sense that it applies only to what the advocates
perceive as “natural” or “authentic” homosexuality. People who are
not “essentially” homosexual and yet are engaged in homosexual
activities are excluded from this celebrated category of homosexuality (ibid.: 15–29). Moreover, gay rights are sometimes instrumentalized, as for instance done by Iranian exilic leftist groups who use it
as a political weapon against the Iranian regime, even though they
used to dismiss gender and sexuality as serious political issues in the
early post-revolutionary era. As Shakhsari’s work illustrates, in Iranian Western cyberspace, homosexuality has increasingly become a
powerful symbolic field in which notions about change and progress
are articulated.

Introduction

13

The third sexual field of contestation to be discussed in this book
is nonmarital cohabitation. Although research on this specific phenomenon in the context of the Iranian Western diaspora seems
scarce, related ideas about appropriate relationships and ideal childrearing in these groups have been discussed in several studies
(Shahidian 1999; Darvishpour 1999). Shahidian, for instance, states
that in cultural assumptions of middle- and upper-class Iranian immigrants in Western countries, there can only be “one true love”
and that is in the context of marriage (1999: 216). Other experiences are, according to him, defined as “misguided feelings” and
“hollow infatuations.” Love and sexuality are to be level-headed issues, intricately linked with marital life. Another scholar, Mehrdad
Darvishpour, whose research concerns Iranian immigrants in Sweden, reports that due to this group’s cultural access to various forms
of household formation in the Swedish context, building and maintaining a family in a traditional way has increasingly become an
option instead of an obvious lifestyle (Darvishpour 1999: 31). This
book aims to analyze the dialogues and discussions among the Iranian Dutch regarding relational commitment, ideal circumstances
for childrearing, and understandings of love and romance as productive of subjectivity.
The three topics of virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation are simultaneously implicated in Dutch nation-building
narratives. Virginity, for instance, is associated with gender- and
homosexuality-related violence among Muslim communities (Van
Eck 2001) in constructions of a backward Muslim Other and a Dutch
civilized Us. The far more striking topic in Dutch national discussions of us-versus-them is homosexuality. Particularly in the 2000s,
gay rights were mobilized to present the Dutch culture as liberal and
gay friendly as opposed to the backward, traditional, and intolerant Islamic culture of Muslim immigrants (Mepschen 2009). After
the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Moroccan
Dutch Islamist in 2004, the entanglement between a gay rights discourse and anti-Islam politics became explicit (Mepschen, Duyvendak, and Tonkens 2010). Nonmarital cohabitation, on the contrary,
is the least explicitly discussed topic about Muslims in the Netherlands. However, when it comes to relationships, love, and Muslims,
forced marriage and mock marriage are two of the recurring points
of discussion in law and policies around migration marriage (Moors,
De Koning, and Vroon-Najem 2018). In short, the stories of the Iranian Dutch about sexuality cannot be separated from these Dutch

14

Sexual Self-Fashioning

discourses on gender, sexuality, and the relation to immigrants. Issues of belonging are, expectedly, played out in a field of power relations that is partly characterized by these discourses and notions of
inclusion and exclusion in broader Dutch society.

The Iranian Dutch
The Iranian Dutch are part of a large worldwide Iranian diaspora
with several waves of forced and voluntary migration. Although
precise and reliable statistic are lacking, the number of Iranian migrants has been estimated between three and six million (Cohen
and Yefet 2021). They have left their country for various reasons,
including early post-revolutionary religious and political persecution, the human and economic consequences of the Iran-Iraq War,
deteriorating political and economic conditions in the 1990s, the
sanctions imposed on Iran by Western countries in the last decades,
the contested presidential elections in 2009, and, most recently, the
Aban movement in 2019 (Karim 2013; Khosravi 2018). Most of the
well over thirty thousand Iranian Dutch stem from the middle class,
urban, Farsi-speaking Iranians, with a high school degree at minimum (Hessels 2002: 17; Koser 1997: 595).
The Iranian Dutch are known as a remarkably fragmented group.
According to the CBS, compared to other Dutch minority groups,
they are the most spread out over the country (2012).11 Furthermore, ideological differences and a general sense of political distrust
have been indicated as the reasons for the poor participation of the
Iranian Dutch in the few existing cultural and political Iranian organizations in the Netherlands (Hessels 2002: 24; Van den Tillaart et al.
2000: 88). The majority of the Iranian Dutch, especially those who
came to the Netherlands in 1980s, are political refugees with different ideological affiliations (Ghorashi 2003: 141). This, to a certain
extent, explains the lack of group formation or a sense of strong cohesion among this group. Another tendency observed in this group
is that the higher educated members seem to prioritize mutual understanding and intellectual interests above ethnical or cultural similarities (Hessels 2002: 31–32). Ghorashi (2003), moreover, refers to
a relatively homogenous, thick notion of Dutchness as part of a Calvinistic and strongly regulated Dutch lifestyle, which thereby leads
to a lack of diversity and multiplicity in the Netherlands. This, in
her view, leaves little room for multiple and hyphenated identities
among immigrants such as the Iranian Dutch (ibid.: 232–33, 242).

15

Introduction

Both internal division among the Iranian Dutch and certain sociocultural characteristics of Dutch society are thus involved in the
construction of a highly fragmented collective identity among the
Iranian Dutch. The absence of a strong sense of collectivity suggests
a relatively low level of social control and pressure, which might influence the way sexuality is employed in processes of self-fashioning
in this group.

Methodological Approach
Using a qualitative approach, I was able to explore attitudes, interpretations, meanings, and understandings of issues related to both
sexuality and subjectivity from an emic perspective (Mason 1996:
4). The holistic and flexible character of qualitative methods allowed
me, furthermore, to include unexpected developments and findings
during the research process (Schwandt 1997: 130). While I was interested in Iranian Dutch subjective experiences and individual narratives in relation to gender and sexuality, I simultaneously tried to
look for the ways in which these micro-level phenomena intersected
with broader collective concerns of migration (Barbour 2008: 25).
Four methods were used: semi-structured in-depth interviewing
(thirty participants), focus group discussion (five groups comprised
of twenty-two participants), participant observation (numerous,
eight selected for analysis), online text analysis (hundreds, sixty-five
selected for analysis), and additionally text analysis of primary and
secondary historical sources. Almost all of the conversations were
in Farsi except in a few cases where the research participants, often
those who came to the Netherlands at a very young age, preferred
to speak in Dutch. In the empirical chapters I will pay specific attention to the importance of language in capturing (inter)cultural
sensibilities.
As one of the methods of data gathering, thirty Iranian Dutch
women and men (fifteen women and fifteen men) were interviewed in-depth for this research between 2010 and 2014. Initially,
I used my own network and asked my friends and relatives to put
me in contact with potential participants. Subsequently, through
snowball sampling I was introduced to new people. At various moments during data-gathering and analyses, I specifically sought to
include those participants who seemed underrepresented, notably
people who identified as religious. A possible explanation for this is
the general unpopularity of religion and religiosity among the Ira-

16

Sexual Self-Fashioning

nian Dutch. A huge number has entered the Netherlands as political
refugees and they criticize the Islamic regime’s deeds, which they
tend to attribute to its claims of Islamism. This has led to skepticism
towards state religion and sometimes even a condemnation of religiosity in a broader sense. Emphasizing one’s Islamic identity in the
Iranian Dutch community, therefore, could be interpreted as having
connections with the political authorities in Iran. Another possible
explanation is that research on sexuality has a secular or even anti-Islam connotation in the context of Dutch discourses of gender,
sexuality, and immigrants. It is imaginable that this secular connotation made the Iranian Dutch practicing Muslims hesitant to participate. Putting more effort into recruitment and emphasizing the
importance of their voices as a minority within a minority, resulted
in including the stories of a small group who identified as religious.
The interviewees were between twenty-five and fifty-four years
old. They live in different regions of the Netherlands, some of them
in larger cities, such as Amsterdam, Utrecht, and The Hague (seven
women and seven men), others in medium size cities including
Delft, Nijmegen, and Tilburg (four women and five men), and four
women and three man came from a small town. They all were
born, and almost everyone was raised, in Iran and had come to the
Netherlands as adults. Seven women and one man identified themselves as religious, four participants (one woman and three men)
presented themselves as moderately religious and eighteen (eight
women and ten men) regarded themselves as nonreligious or atheists. The duration of the interviews varied between approximately
one and five hours.
With the aim to explore group norms, social expectations, and
ideals (Bloor and Wood 2006: 88) as well as negotiations between
different collective meanings (Lewis-Beck, Bryman, and Futing Liao
2004: 391), five focus groups were held. Next to the thirty in-depth
interviews, twenty-two Iranian Dutch participated in five focus
group discussions (eight men and fifteen women). The interactions
between the participants and the group dynamics were the most
important dimensions of this method with a limited role for me as
the researcher during the conversations. In this way, I try to encourage more spontaneous and animated exchanges. This resulted
in expressing unanticipated yet highly relevant collective concerns.
Simultaneously, group discussions were revealing for shared norms
that appeared uncontested.
Attempting to gain a more intimate understanding of ongoing
discussions and dialogues (Het Hart et al., 2001), I also used the

Introduction

17

method of participant observation. Participant observation increases
the opportunities for having “small talk” in the field, based on which
the information obtained by other techniques can be corrected
(Driessen and Jansen, 2013: 250) and expanded. Small talk was
helpful in revealing underlying tensions, hierarchies, and conflicts
within the community. Moreover, as I met a large number of Iranian
Dutch by using this method, I explored and checked for accounts
that were potentially left out in other methods of data gathering.
I went to various meetings during the research project and chose
eight settings for analysis: a birthday party; a long-weekend trip; an
Iranian New Year’s celebration two gatherings at Mezrab, a cultural
center in Amsterdam, a public outdoor party; a book club meeting;
and a wedding. Mezrab became an important space in this project
as a group of young research participants were more or less closely
connected to this cultural center. The cultural activities in Mezrab,
varying from storytelling to music gatherings, drawing lessons, public discussions, and film evenings, as such, reflected a shared interest
of this network of research participants. A more detailed reflection
on Mezrab will be presented in Chapter 4.
The rapid growth of the number of publications on sexuality issues in Iranian mass media outside Iran has been remarkable. During
my project, I was astonished by the increasing attention paid to sexuality in popular news websites, online opinion pieces, and in the
form of confessional stories, especially on women’s sexuality and
homosexuality. I decided to follow all relevant discussions on sexuality issued by Radio Zamaneh (particularly the degar-bash page)
and BBC Persian (particularly the nobat-e shoma page) in 2010 and
2011. Given that Iranians both inside and outside the Netherlands
were able participate in these online discussions, the data collection
was limited to those who presented themselves as Dutch residents.
Nevertheless, the contribution of the Iranian Dutch participants to
these discussions should be seen as connected to transnational developments and thus exceeding the Dutch context.
Furthermore, occasionally, I traced and gathered online discussions on sexuality and identity among my Iranian Dutch “Facebook
friends.” This group of people consisted of (young) adults, with different ethnic, educational, and occupational backgrounds. When
Facebook discussions were used for analysis, I obtained permission
from the individuals to include their posts in the research project
and have protected their identities. In this sense, I sometimes made
use of my own network quite directly, which may have led to biased accounts. Within the limits of privacy protection, I have tried

18

Sexual Self-Fashioning

to present each participant as accurately as possible to provide the
reader with the necessary information to be able to position the participant in a larger sociocultural context. Altogether, a total number
of sixty-five online discussions were chosen for analysis.
Finally, for Chapter 1, which deals with an intersection of sexuality and modernity in projects of collective self-fashioning in recent
Iranian history, various primary and secondary sources were analyzed. To get access to important, relevant texts, I traveled to Los
Angeles and regularly visited the central library of the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA) during a two-months stay in 2012.
Likely owing to the considerable Iranian community in Los Angeles, UCLA’s central library consists of a large collection of books and
other texts on Iranian culture and history, in Persian, English, and a
few other languages. I started my search by studying a few currently
well-known historical overviews of sexuality in different Iranian
historical periods12 to gain a sense of important primary and secondary works in this field and made a list accordingly. This process was
repeated a few times by tracing the references in the newly found
sources, resulting in a tree diagram of relevant texts.
Given my interest in the relation between sexuality and subjectivity, in the analyses of the data, I systematically traced the way
notions of sexuality were “framed” by the Iranian Dutch. A system
of coding was employed, through which words and expressions that
the participants used were categorized in order to position their beliefs, ideas, and notions of sexuality. Simultaneously, this technique
of coding was used for a cross-sectional thematic analysis, while particular attention was paid to conceptions of cultural belonging and
boundaries. In later stages an in-depth sociocultural analysis of individual cases was carried out before presenting the data in this book.
Based on this, a pattern was found in the way discourses of sexuality
enabled claims of subjectivity by the research participants. Specifically, three major accounts are identified with respect to the way
sexuality was deployed as the means to self-fashioning. These will
be discussed in the ethnography in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.
To protect the privacy of all research participants in accordance
with the assessment criteria of the ethical committee of the Radboud
University Nijmegen consent was sought verbally and the narratives
are pseudonymized and anonymized by mentioning only strictly
relevant characteristics. Given the relatively small size of the Iranian
Dutch community and the sensitivity of the discussions, less relevant personal characteristics are deliberately changed to make the
identity of the person as untraceable as possible. Only two research
participants made use of the possibility to read the transcripts of the

19

Introduction

interviews before I used them for analysis. Others were mostly interested in the outcomes, which I discussed at small and informal
occasions and a few larger organized meetings. The audience was
often interested in discussing what to do in order to liberalize and
modernize the Iranian Dutch sexual culture and therefore slightly
disappointed by my merely observational-analytical academic approach. Even though I felt embarrassed about falling short of their
expectations, this response made me even more aware of the larger
significance of sexuality among this group and the critical disjunction between academic endeavors and real-life concerns and interests of the people we write about.
Before continuing with a discussion of sexual storytelling and
rhetoric to further explain this study’s approach to narrated experiences of sexuality, a reflection on the reference to “the Iranian
Dutch” seems appropriate. All of the participants in this research as
well as their parents were born in Iran, where almost all of them
also grew up. At the same time, they all regarded the Netherlands
as their current home, even though the majority of them identified as Iranian. “The Iranian Dutch” sounded unfamiliar to some
of them, as they perceived themselves mostly as “Iranians living in
the Netherlands.” The Dutchness implied by “the Iranian Dutch”
raised uncomfortable feelings among some of the participants, even
though they generally felt satisfied about their life in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, being aware of the ongoing political and societal sensitivity regarding issues of citizenship, especially in relation
to immigrants with an Islamic background in Western societies, I
chose to use the reference “the Iranian Dutch” to recognize their
Dutch citizenship in a political context where immigrants, especially
those with an Islamic background, are repeatedly Othered. As a researcher, I believe, such imperfect choices are inevitable, attesting to
how one constantly navigates between different audiences and concerns (Narayan 2003; Farahani 2010). Furthermore, although this
community still forms a relatively “new” group of migrants in the
Netherlands, as time passes the category of the Iranian Dutch will
expectedly transform through intermarriage and the offspring of
Iranians and non-Iranians, making ethnicity-based categorizations
even more complicated.

Sexual Storytelling and Rhetoric
Storytelling in general and sexual storytelling in particular carry
the connotation of being mere fantasies, made up narratives, and

20

Sexual Self-Fashioning

not quite reflective of the world of truth. The sociologist Kenneth
Plummer has urged instead regarding sexual stories as socially constructed, in the sense that they are meaningful in a certain social
context, are read and interpreted in a particular social setting, tend
to transform historically, and are part of a sociopolitical argument
(1995: 167–68). Rather than being concerned with storytelling as a
matter of truth, he suggests, we should pay attention to their social
consequences. He, in other words, proposes to examine the power
of storytelling in everyday lives. He argues that we tell stories “in order to constitute ourselves” so storytelling is “a major clue to understanding identity” (ibid.: 172). By telling sexual stories in particular,
people assemble a sense of self and lay down routes to a coherent
past, mark off boundaries and contrast in the present, and provide
both a channel and a shelter for the future. Talking about sexuality,
as assumed by Plummer, enables the fashioning of the self in relation to a coherent past, helps to draw identity boundaries in the
present and reflects anticipations of the future. In this book, what
the Iranian Dutch participants will express about issues of sexuality
are taken as clues to how they fashion a self in relation to a coherent
past and an ideal future, while drawing various cultural boundaries
between “us” and “them.”
In particular, this book intends to analyze the participants’ rhetorical moves to construct an intelligible self in relation to more
general social considerations connected to dominant discourses of
sexuality—such as the notions of citizenship and “integration” associated with a liberal attitude towards sexuality in the Dutch context
(see Introduction). Rhetoric, I assume, is an important aspect of sexual storytelling. In this regard, the work of James Farrer is inspiring for its employment of the concept of rhetoric in relation to the
broader sexuality-related cultural and social setting (2002, 2013).
Analyzing the sexual culture in Shanghai since China’s shift to a
more market-based economy in his book Opening Up, Farrer traces
the basic elements in “talking” about sex and sexuality (2002). This
approach enables him to see how the Chinese imagine and understand themselves in the wake of increased globalization through the
lens of sexuality and, as he argues, it is exactly such imagination and
understanding that give meaning to globalization in the context of
Shanghai. In another work, he illustrates how personal narratives
of Shanghainese women dating foreign men serve to portray them
as cosmopolitan, concluding that “such sexual stories are simultaneously personal but collective products with both aesthetic and political dimensions” (2013: 12). A character of a cosmopolitan woman

21

Introduction

becomes established, he argues, via stories about personal sexual
experiences. Studying what people say about sex and sexuality is
here connected to how this talking functions as a tool for practices
of subjectivity. There are two aspects of Farrer’s approach that I find
particularly helpful for this book. First, in his study the sexual stories told by research participants are not analyzed in terms of their
factual accuracy or regarded as separate entities that indicate something about the people telling them, that is, to what extent they are
really cosmopolitan. Rather the rhetorical aspects of those stories
are focused on, which goes beyond a discussion of fixed identity
categories and at the same time regards discourse as a political field
where “saying” becomes “doing.” The acts of speaking constitute
the subject and vice versa. This approach elevates discourse to the
level of practice. Secondly, the connection between sexuality and
subjectivity is analyzed in relation to the broader sociocultural context. This context informs the political dimension of personal sexual
stories. Following Farrer, I will treat personal accounts as enabling
the reconstruction of this broader context, instead of attributing an
objective character to “the context.” Neither the personal narratives,
nor the broader context are fixed. However, imbalances in power
relations underlying the dominant discourses which determine how
“the context” is perceived should not be neglected. Analyses of the
Iranian Dutch interviewees’ ideas about sexuality thus provide access to how they perceive, organize, and negotiate their social life
and constitute a sense of self.

A Reflection on My Role as a Researcher
My own role as researcher matters in several other ways. The qualitative approach and methods for collecting data in this project
makes me the main research instrument (Salamone 1979: 51) and
the interaction between the researcher and the research participants
the method (Cassell 1980: 36). The reality is not simply “out there”
to be grasped but is constantly created by both parties. Fieldwork,
then, becomes an intersubjective process itself (Sultana 2007), and
in my case, emerging from a dynamic and hybrid insider-outside
positionality (Carling, Bivand Erdal, and Ezzati 2014).
Having been born and raised in Iran until the age of fifteen, I had
the privileges of an “insider” in different ways. The shared cultural
and historical background and shared native language creates a bond
and a sense of mutual trust (Clifford 1986: 9). Approaching people

22

Sexual Self-Fashioning

felt “natural,” while my personal network provided relatively easy
access to the research group. When approaching potential participants, the majority seemed quite enthusiastic about participation.
Some of them expressed their respect and admiration for my “educational success” as a fellow Iranian in the Netherlands and were
eager to contribute. Others felt the need for research on sexuality, as
they regarded this issue to be “the real problem” which the Iranian
culture is facing and applauded me for putting my finger on this
“salient point.”
At the same time, though, the position of an “insider” and the
assumed familiarity with the participants could block information
which would catch the attention of an “outsider” as being significant
(Rubel and Rosman 1994: 339). In other words, due to a potential
cultural bias, discovering the obvious could be a problem, since only
the “outsider” would possess the necessary (emotional) distance to
do so (Styles 1979: 148). More importantly, other axes of difference
such as class, education, age, and religiosity can still create distance
and misunderstandings between the researcher and the research
participants. I reckon that I may have been less approachable for
committed Muslim Iranian Dutch as my research topic already puts
me in the secular/anti-religious “camp” or that my academic background may have been experienced as intimidating to those who
do not consider themselves articulate enough to discuss sexuality
with me.
As a researcher working in academia one can never be fully an
insider, for at various moments, I made decisions regarding how
to present stories and which parts to highlight or exclude, which
implies asymmetrical power relations as well as responsibility for
transparency and substantiating those decisions. Although avoiding
biases and presenting truthful accounts are not achievable goals in
an absolute manner, at numerous meetings I discussed the interviews and my analyses with my supervisors and other colleagues
to challenge and re-evaluate my interpretations. At the same time,
my work as presented here should be understood as a dialogical account between the participants and myself, rather than an attempt
to expose the “real truth” or construct a single true story about
sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. Through a dialogic approach,
James Farrer argues, “parallel narratives and multiple truth claims
co-exist and productively interact” (2013: 13). Even though I have
aimed at accuracy and transparency, for instance through extensive
use of quotes and multiple retrospections of original conversations
during the writing process, what is being presented in this book is

23

Introduction

necessarily produced in an interaction between a scholar’s and the
participants’ representations. As such I see my account as socially
constructed, partial (Geertz 1983; Clifford and Marcus 1986), and
situated (Abu-Lughod 1991; Clifford 1986; Haraway 2003; Rosaldo
1989).
Sexuality is often understood to be a sensitive theme for the researcher and the participants to talk about, as it concerns private
spheres and issues that usually are not discussed publicly (Lee and
Renzetti 1990: 513). Having this in mind and to allow for a sense
of mutual comfort to grow (Van Eerdewijk 2007: 56), I chose to
start the conversations with the research topics which I considered
least sensitive, such as the general well-being of the participants
as immigrants in the Netherlands. However, as mentioned previously, a significant number of the participants were eager to talk
about sexuality. This suggests that they might have perceived the
conversations as a site where they could perform as “liberal,” “modern,” or “open-minded” individuals who are able to openly discuss
sexuality-related issues. Instead of regarding this more or less strategic approach by the participants as “impure” and thus problematic,
I actually turned those strategies into an advantage by making it the
topic of research. This means that despite the participants’ possible
presupposition that my research is—and therefore as a researcher I
am—to be located in modernity, their accounts can still be treated
as relevant articulations in which collective concerns and anxieties
are reflected.

Overview of the Book
Having briefly introduced the research project underlying this book,
in Chapter 1, I will reflect on the role of sexuality and modernity in
processes of collective self-fashioning in the specific historical context of Iran. Focusing on three different episodes from Iranian recent history (starting from the end of nineteenth century up to the
present), I will discuss male homoerotic activities, ideal womanhood
and family, and “artificial” virginity as converging points of various
ideas about a national or cultural Iranian “us.” The goal here is to
present a historical contextualization of the present-day discursive
entanglement between modernity and sexuality among the Iranian
Dutch.
The embodied and discursive entanglement between modernity and sexuality in the Iranian Dutch context will be presented

24

Sexual Self-Fashioning

in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, using ethnographic data. The majority of
the Iranian Dutch research participants took “modernity” as an
ideal upon which the sexual culture should be built (Chapter 2),
a smaller group rejects this idea of modernity and instead appropriates a distinguishing religious morality (Chapter 3), and yet another small group tries to overcome restrictive, including modern
norms altogether (Chapter 4). I will argue that through these positionings the research participants are enabled to claim respectively:
a conditional modern self, an authenticated self, and a transgressive self.
These practices of self-fashioning, however, should not be understood as a typology assuming immutable or fixed group characteristics of the Iranian Dutch. They, rather, indicate multiplicity and
heterogeneity in the strategies of the participants in how they deploy sexuality in processes of self-fashioning. Furthermore, the
internal complexities and divergence in each constructed self will
attest to the ambiguous, multilayered, and continuous nature of
self-fashioning. Each of these three empirical chapters is organized
along the contested sexual fields of virginity, homosexuality, and
nonmarital cohabitation.
In the Conclusion, I will reflect on the embodied and discursive
entanglement between sexuality and subjectivity. More specifically,
the intersection between gender and religion on the one hand and
sexuality on the other hand will be discussed. Also, a retrospect on
modernity as a central concept in the participants’ accounts as well
as some of the limitations of the study will be provided.

Notes
1. For an inclusive discussion of Submission Part One, see “Please, Go Wake
Up!: Submission, Hirsi Ali, and the ‘War on Terror’ in the Netherlands”
(De Leeuw and Van Wichelen 2005).
2. Although, using the concept of “integration” in Dutch national discussions on the position of minorities started already in the 1980s (Prins
1997: 115), the intensity of this topic has increased substantially after
the attacks on the World Trade centre in New York on 11 September
2001.
3. For more exhaustive discussions on the role of sexuality and gender in
Dutch integration policies, see Mepschen 2009; Roggeband and Verloo
2007; and De Koning, Bartels, and Storms 2011. It should be mentioned that the othering of Muslims via notions of gender and sexuality
is not limited to the Dutch situation and includes a broader Western
context (Jansen 1993b; Fassin 2010; Scott 2012).

Introduction

25

4. https://www.parlementairemonitor.nl/9353000/1/j9tvgajcor7dxyk_
j9vvij5epmj1ey0/vi3akta35fu7, Accessed 15 April 2021.
5. https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/kst-32824-1.html, Accessed
15 April 2021.
6. From the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, “Afshin Ellian: Het is mijn
(nood)lot de Islam op de operatietafel van de rede te leggen” [Afshin
Ellian: It Is My Fate to Lay Islam on the Operation Table of Reason], 2
November 2012.
7. Soorehhera.com, accessed 15 April 2021.
8. From Dutch news program NOVA, aired 2 May 2007.
9. See for example, Ghorashi and Brinkgreve 2010; Ghorashi 2001, 2004
and Ghorashi and Vieten 2013.
10. An exception is the work of the sociologist Haideh Moghissi (1999),
in which she identifies a strengthening of Iranian patriarchal norms
and gender inequality among Iranian Canadian immigrants. Marginalization and exclusion as experienced in the host society, Moghissi
states, has resulted in the tendency to hold onto Iranian traditional
family values among Iranian Canadian men. However, the fact that this
study is mainly based on observations among “Persian-speaking abused
women in Toronto” might explain such exceptional conclusions.
11. From “Jaarrapport integratie 2012,” Annual Report Integration 2012:
Jaarrapport Integratie 2012, cbs.nl, accessed 15 April 2021.
12. The works of Janet Afary (2009a, 1996), Willem Floor (2008), and Afsaneh Najmabadi (2005) were especially helpful in this regard.

Chapter 1

SEXUALLY CRAFTING THE NATION
SEXUALITY AS THE VEHICLE TO COLLECTIVE
SELF-FASHIONING, NINETEENTH CENTURY–PRESENT

The nation is a process of becoming.
—Otto Bauer, “The Nation”

T

he practices of sexual self-fashioning among the Iranian Dutch
are understood as historically and socioculturally embedded. In
this chapter, a reading of this embeddedness with respect to the recent Iranian history will be presented. The entanglement of notions
of sexuality with the fashioning of an ideal collective self in the Iranian context will be discussed, while focusing on episodes from a
historically rather turbulent period, i.e., the end of the nineteenth
century up to the present. The constitutive role of sexuality in a
number of popular ideas and ideals about nationhood in political,
intellectual, and popular discourses will be examined.
In his well-known work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson poses a definition of the nation as socially and culturally constructed, as a politically imagined community, and as both inherently
limited and sovereign (2006: 6). He argues that beyond each nation
lies another nation as “no nation imagines itself coterminous with
mankind” (ibid.: 7). In light of defining “us” in contrast to “them”
and creating inward unity and outward differentiation, ideologies of
the nation contain a symbolic apparatus. As part of this symbolic apparatus, sexuality sometimes becomes deployed to create the collective imagery of nationhood (Kim 2005). The contours of the nation,
both in unifying and differentiating terms, then become articulated

Sexually Crafting the Nation

27

via sexuality, which means that certain sexualities are associated
with “us,” whereas other sexualities come to represent the “other.”
These constructions of nationhood through sexuality, however, are
far from unambiguous and often accompany subtle as well as fierce
negotiations. As such, nationalisms require constant “craftsmanship.” This chapter is concerned with attempts at fashioning a collective Iranian self through sexuality in approximately the last two
centuries. The aim is to sketch a historical context from which the
current Iranian Dutch discourses of sexuality partly spring forth.
The entanglement between sexuality and nationhood in recent
Iranian history has already been studied extensively (e.g., Najmabadi
2005). Here, I will concentrate on male homoerotic practices, ideal
womanhood and family formation, and reconstructions of female
virginity (hereafter referred to as “artificial virginity”) in three different historical episodes of Iran. These topics are chosen due to
their direct connection with the main sexual fields of contestation
in this research: virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation. The change of order in the discussion of these three topics has
simply to do with the historical chronology and the sensitivity of
each topic in that given historical period. Although homosexuality
or, rather, “gay” as a modern sexual identity category has been appropriated by Iranian men only very recently (Najmabadi 2013: 6),
socially recognized homoerotic practices have a much longer history
in Iran. Under the current regime sex outside marriage is prohibited,
but this does not restrain Iranian people from engaging in premarital sexual activities. However, in these cases sometimes sociocultural
pressures lead to practices of “artificial virginity.” Nonmarital cohabitation as currently practiced in Western societies has never been a
widespread phenomenon in Iran and therefore a prominent related
discourse is lacking. Discussing the ideal womanhood and family
formation, alternatively, covers notions of an ideal household, appropriate parenting, and commitment and relationship responsibilities. By exploring the conceptions of male homoerotic practices,
the role attributed to women in the family and the phenomenon of
artificial virginity in negotiations regarding collective identities, this
chapter aims to provide a historical background on sexuality’s associations with constructions of “us” among Iranians. Depending on
the sociopolitical concerns, this “us” is sometimes directly connected
to nationalistic aspirations, whereas in other settings it might entail
a more cultural connotation.
The goal of this chapter is not to portray a history that simply
determines the Iranian Dutch current conceptualizations of sexu-

28

Sexual Self-Fashioning

ality, a history that the participants in this book would consciously
and explicitly relate themselves. Rather, discussing these examples
serves to recognize and explicate the historicity of sexuality as a crucial identity marker in the specific recent Iranian (Dutch) context.
Nor is this historical reading supposed to lead to clear, objective accounts of sexuality’s role in Iranians’ collective identity projects. The
sources on which I rely in this chapter are themselves historically
constructed. Both the primary and secondary sources need to be positioned inside particular sociocultural, political, and historical contexts. They are produced either inside or outside the geographical
boundaries of Iran by authors who have implicit or explicit political ties or/and varying disciplinary backgrounds. I refer to the work
of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnologists as well
as important contemporary societal figures such as politicians, poets, and travelers. Furthermore, some sources are rather descriptive,
whereas other sources more or less function as political pamphlets.
My assumption is that all these accounts, nevertheless, contribute to
the constructions of and reflect a sense of nationhood, but in different ways and to different degrees.
First I will present a conceptual approach which guides this chapter’s central argument. Next, a very brief historical overview of the
period in question will be given. After that I will discuss the three
main topics of male homoerotic practices, the ideal womanhood and
family formation, and artificial virginity as deployed in the constructions of “us” and “them” at respectively three different Iranian historical moments: around the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11),
the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the present time.

Conceptual Approach
In Gender and the Politics of History, the historian Joan Wallach Scott
argues that social and cultural knowledge about sexual difference is
produced in the course of history (1988: 6) and that history’s representations help construct gender in the present (ibid.: 2). This
approach has also been applied to the Iranian context of modern
history (Najmabadi 2005). I assume in this chapter that the same
can be claimed about the production of sexuality in history and will
use this assumption in the specific case of sexuality in the recent
history of Iran. More specifically, I intend to explore the historical
production of sexuality through its deployment in projects of “modernization,” starting from the end of the nineteenth century which

Sexually Crafting the Nation

29

is approximately when notions of national identity and progress
in relation to sexuality were introduced in Iran (Najmabadi 2005;
Tavakoli-Targhi 2001). It is in this period that at crucial moments
boundaries of the nation are defined through differences in sexual cultures, or as the political and cultural sociologist Joane Nagel
would state, attempts of sexual policing and constructions of nationalism take place (2000: 107). Rather than presenting an exhaustive
record of deployments of sexuality in the Iranian history of nation-building, my goal here is to indicate the importance of sexuality
in articulating and imagining “modernity” or “counter-modernity” in
the past two centuries of the Iranian history. I suggest that this historical baggage functions as a crucial referential framework for the
research participants in the current Iranian Dutch context in how
they conceptualize sexuality and how their subjectivity is formed.
Following Scott, I assume that representations of sexuality in the
past help create its present constructions.
Regarding history as a site where identities are constructed based
on power relations is a central premise in Orientalism, the controversial and influential book by literary theoretician Edward Said
published in 1978. “Orientalism,” in his view, is a discursive and
institutional process of “othering” the Orient in order to define Europe or the West (1978: 1–2). “Ideas, cultures and histories,” Said
explains, “cannot seriously be understood or studied without their
force, or more precisely their configurations of powers, also being
studied” (ibid.: 7). Inspired by Foucault in this emphasis on the
role of power and knowledge in history, Said takes up the task of
unraveling how Orientalism has emerged from a selective and unchallenged sovereign Western consciousness aimed at creating a superior “Western us” as opposed to the “backward Orient.” The main
concern of this chapter is to investigate the discursive productions of
a collective self in recent Iranian history via notions of appropriate
sexuality which the Iranians somehow perceive as related to “the
West.” This chapter, it should be emphasized, rejects a monolithic
understanding of “the West,” assuming that “the West” is as much a
historical construct—and thus, incoherent, fragile, and contested—
as “the Orient” is.
As argued by the cultural anthropologist Willy Jansen in a historical perspective on the biased portrayal of Middle Eastern women,
Orientalist images operated in a complex way (1996). Next to creating and confirming negative stereotypes of Middle Eastern women
as “dumb and dull,” they, for instance, also provided the means for
many women to become highly educated (ibid.: 258). Keeping this

30

Sexual Self-Fashioning

multilayered functioning of orientalist representations in mind, I will
in this chapter pay attention to what Iranians imagined “the West” to
be and, more importantly, to what end they produced those images.
As explained by the professor of women’s and gender studies Minoo
Moallem, although Iran was never a colony, “its encounter with the
Western world necessitated its engagement with civilizational imperialist discourses” (2005: 45). This engagement with regard to issues
of sexuality and collective identity formation is the concern of this
chapter, while recognizing the agency of, and hierarchal power relations between, the parties involved. Furthermore, at the level of the
state, the possibilities for negotiation and conversation within the
colonial context should not be denied. Analyzing the Iranian state’s
stance towards homosexuality in the past two centuries, the political scientists Katarzyna Korycki and Abouzar Nasirzadeh argue for
locating the regulation of homosexual desire in politics rather than
in religion and culture (2016). They illustrate how the Iranian state
borrowed anti-homosexual sentiments from the West in the nineteenth century, only to claim later in the late twentieth century that
homosexuality itself was a Western import. The first stage of this
remarkable transition will be further discussed in the fourth section
of this chapter. The important, more general insight from their research, as the authors themselves conclude, is that in the encounters
between the Western and non-Western worlds, the West should be
seen as a referent in a mutually constitutive conversation (ibid.: 61).
This mutuality and strategic deployment of sexuality in processes of
Iranian nation-building is also the assumption of this book.
Writing about modernity and tradition is a tricky affair, as one
runs the risk of reproducing a simplistic dichotomy, leaving the main
categories of “modern” and “non-modern” uncontested. In fact,
most of the historical and socio-anthropological analyses used as secondary sources in this chapter need to be understood as positioned
in the same modernity discourse which they intend to reflect upon.
To a certain extent, this scholarship is both constituted by and helps
constitute its object of analyses—the modernity discourse. What the
philosopher Judith Butler understands as “a fine point to poststructuralism” is the insight that “power pervades the very conceptual
apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic” (1994: 156). There is no subject prior to discourse,
yet the mutually constitutive relationship between the two provides
the possibility to “question the traditional deployment [of categories], to denaturalize and to make them into sites of political debate”
(ibid.: 169). The task then would be to analyze the context in which

Sexually Crafting the Nation

31

categories have become intelligible, in the hope of paving the way for
creating new, less restrictive deployments of those categories. Keeping this in mind, I will concentrate on how “modernity” is perceived,
by whom this concept is used, and for what reason.
The main theoretical inspiration in this chapter comes from the
American historian Frederick Cooper’s critical review of the ways
“modernity” has been addressed in various fields of academic literature (2005). In his book Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, a section called “Modernity” distinguishes four main
approaches to this concept in scholarly inquiry: (1) modernity applauded as central to European history and culture and an aspiration for the rest of the world; (2) modernity as a European imperial
construct imposed on others; (3) modernity as an exclusively European accomplishment that needs to be defended against “others”;
and (4) modernity as plural, such as reflected in notions of “multiple
modernities” or “alternative modernities” (2005: 113–14). According to Cooper, the shared problematic aspect about these conceptualizations is that they all ascribe coherence to modernity, neglecting
“the questioning, contestation, and critique that were and are part
of the history” and obscuring “the ongoing, unresolved conflicts at
the heart of European culture and politics” (ibid.). Even the fourth
approach, which might seem less exclusionary than the other options, the very notion of “alternative modernities” assumes an “original or real modernity.” The Islamic or Chinese modernity would
then be an extraction from Western or European modernity. Neither
does the fourth perspective deconstruct the assumption of an evolutionary movement from tradition to modernity. Furthermore, if we
were to understand modernity as a global condition of “the now”
that includes everything and everyone, then the concept would lose
its analytical potential altogether (ibid.: 114–42).
Instead of thinking in terms of a metanarrative, Cooper proposes,
we should regard modernity as a “claim-making device” and look
for what has been said in its name, by whom, in what context and
why. Through this “unpacking” of modernity (ibid.: 132) and a focus
on more precise understanding of how people frame a better future,
we might be able to break out of the inevitability of modernity as
an abstract reference point. Providing an alternative to modernity as
the frame of reference would go far beyond the scope of this chapter, but Cooper’s emphasis on modernity’s role as a claim-making
device, will serve as the theoretical guide. What Cooper, Butler and
Scott have in common is their understanding of how the analytical
categories of modernity, sexuality, and gender never merely reflect

32

Sexual Self-Fashioning

but are constituted by and help constitute “the reality” they supposedly capture. These are examples of the kind of categories which are
employed as devices to claim power. I will argue in this chapter that
in the context of Iranian history, from the end of the nineteenth
century until the present, sexuality and gender have been deployed
as devices to claim or reject “modernity” in order to imagine a certain ideal national or cultural identity.

A Brief Historical Overview
Before discussing the three topics of male homoerotic practices, the
ideal womanhood and family formation, and artificial virginity, I
will briefly present an overview of the Iranian historical period in
question. This overview includes, but does not solely focus on, issues related to gender and sexuality. A detailed description of historical events is not the goal here. The main concern is to provide
general information about these politically turbulent episodes because of their relevance to discussions on sexuality and processes of
collective identification in the Iranian society. It is in this specific historical setting that sexuality and gender are mobilized in the struggle
for or against “modernity” in the field of nation-building. Two major
revolutions, namely the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) and
the Islamic Revolution (1979) took place in this period, which will
be the main points of orientation in the structure of this section.
Iran in the nineteenth century was ruled by the originally Turkish family of Qajar. The extent of their leadership was limited, as
tightly knitted clans, villages, guilds, urban wards, and ethnic communities profoundly divided the country (Shamim 2000: 385–86;
Abrahamian 1982: 26). Between eighty and eighty-five percent of
the Iranian population lived in rural areas, where the basic needs
regarding food and clothing were fulfilled within households and
the village community (De Groot 2007: 14). Due to this material
self-sufficiency and difficulties with transportation, Iranians’ sense
of identity was highly based on familial and community relations.
The urban centers were populated by landlords; office holders; representatives of royal government; commercial, entrepreneurial,
and financial leaders; and influential professionals such as religious
authorities. This last group, called ulema, provided services such as
prayer, marriage and funeral rituals, and settled legal and commercial cases over property and inheritance, which brought them close
to the daily concerns of people (De Groot 2007: 14–22).

Sexually Crafting the Nation

33

Various historical scholars agree that contact with “the West,”
which at that time mainly consisted of the Russians and the British,
influenced Iranian society in two crucial ways. They emphasize, on
the one hand, the commercial dimension of this interaction, whereby
foreigners benefited from Iranian raw materials such as cotton, silk,
wool, and opium (Dabashi 2007: 71–72; De Groot 2007: 20). On the
other hand, they present this contact with the West as the source of
political and cultural inspiration (Afary 1996: 36; De Groot 2007:
31). For instance, in the 1880s Iranian “intellectuals”1 started to introduce “Western” concepts of parleman and demokrat into Persian
vocabulary and the religious connotation of mellat (nation) and mardom (people) was replaced by a secular connotation (Ajoodani 2003:
189; Tavakoli-Targhi 2001: 142; Kashani-Sabet 2000: 92; Abrahamian 1982: 50–51). To these intellectuals the secularization of Iran
became one of the major concerns in the late nineteenth century,
the consequences of which are reflected in the growth of “modern”
schools and the drop in the number of those that did not follow the
trend in secular education and continued to organize religious ceremonies (Ettehadieh 1983: 203). The intellectuals’ newly popular slogan of “long live the nation of Iran,” which transcended the regional
and ethnic diversity, also contested the dominance of an Islamic Shia
identity (Afary 1996: 54). Rather than the Shia, “the nation of Iran”
would now connect Iranians to each other. Next to these secular sentiments, scholars identify a religious anti-monarchy discourse among
influential clerics, who positioned themselves against injustice and
corruption of the Shah (Abadian 1995: 32).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the inability and unwillingness of the Qajar dynasty to reform and the lack of protection
of Iranian interests against Russian and British imperial powers was
contested by a coalition of urban elites who shared a “modernizing” and “nationalistic” interest (De Groot 2007: 32). This coalition
consisted of intellectuals, aristocrats, civil servants, army officers,
merchants, and the ulema (Abrahamian 1982: 61). A simultaneous
condemnation of royal despotism and foreign imperialism characterized this movement, which led to the Constitutional Revolution
(1906–11) and the establishment of a parliament. A firm belief in
the rule of law and justice culminating in the demand for an edalatkhaneh (house of justice) was shared by “reform-minded” Iranian
elites (Floor 1983: 123). This period has come to mark what has
been generally conceptualized as a significant transition of Iran from
a traditional society into a modernized and centralized state (Martin
1989: 1).

34

Sexual Self-Fashioning

Emphasizing the multidimensional and multi-ideological character of the Constitutional Revolution as an important facet of this
historical conjuncture, the American-based Iranian historian Janet
Afary (1996) uses the example of the women’s movement. Although not broadly represented and supported in the society, this
movement is considered by Afary as an important historical event
during which “the roots of modern Iranian feminism were firmly
planted” (ibid.: 178). In that process, women’s anjomans (councils),
a form of grassroots democratic movement, were created by the
elite and urban middle class Tehrani women. New girls’ schools,
adult education classes, and health clinics were opened and the
male-dominated leadership of the Constitutional movement was
criticized by some of these women. Correspondingly, a few intellectuals discussed controversial topics such as arranged marriage,
polygamy, divorce, veiling, and women’s suffrage, and, moreover,
some women actively participated in armed resistance against the
Shah. Although several progressive male intellectuals presented
themselves as defenders of women’s rights, Afary observes that they
nevertheless expected women to remain faithful to their traditional
roles as mothers and housewives (ibid.: 186). According to Monica Ringer, the new interest in women’s education among Iranian
intellectuals concerned “national progress” through improvement
in a woman’s role in the household (2004: 51). In particular, an
ideology of hygiene in the household started to take shape as part
of the creation of a “modern Iran” (Kashani-Sabet 2006: 3). A selective conception of women’s emancipation was thus understood
as an indication of the nation’s modernity. In reaction, conservative
clerics regarded these forms of women’s emancipation to cause a
dismantling of the gender order and the demise of the Muslim Shi’i
culture (Afary 1996: 208).
By 1911, dissention among the coalition parties and external
opposition from the British and Russian legations resulted in political chaos and insecurity, which later developed into lawlessness
and self-assertion among regional elites (De Groot 2007: 33). The
Constitutional Revolution was consequently brought to an end, but
the parliament and the constitution were retained. In 1925, the last
Shah of Qajar was deposed by the “brave and fearless” Reza Khan.2
He was an officer of the Persian Cossack brigade, a powerful military
unit of the Qajar dynasty. Between 1921 and 1925, as a war minister
and later as a prime minister under Ahmad Shah Qajar, Reza Khan
succeeded in building a strong army that was loyal solely to him. Although he initially wished to become a president like Atatürk in Tur-

Sexually Crafting the Nation

35

key, he eventually deposed Ahmad Shah in 1925 and became Reza
Shah Pahlavi. A phase of intense “modernization” based on Western
models was pursued during his reign (1925–41) in the fields of the
military, civil administration, public health, the judiciary, education,
and the economy (Banani 1961: 4). However, “political modernization” in terms of intellectual and ideological critical discussions
about state matters was not included in the reforms (Gheissari and
Nasr 2006: 43). In this sense a mix of reform and repression characterized Reza Shah’s rule (De Groot 2007: 33). With Reza Shah,
Iran entered an era of intense nationalism based on Western ideals
(Banani 1961: 45).
According to professor in Iranian studies Afshin Marashi, it was
under the regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi that the Iranian state for
the first time consciously and explicitly used “nationalism” as its
ideology (2008: 7). Although a process labeled as “nationalization”
initiated by the Iranian elite had already started during the Constitutional Revolution, various historians agree that Reza Shah’s policies resulted in the actual creation of the nation as a viable social
abstraction (ibid.: 11). To this end, the state promoted a shared national memory, culture, and identity connected to ancient Iranian
history (Keddie 1981: 94). Interestingly, despite borrowing from
“the West,” ancient Iran was celebrated as a glorious and industrious age and the Arab-Islamic influence was pointed out as the cause
of tarraghi-ye ma’koos (reverse progress) (Tavakoli-Targhi 2001: 96).
The new Iranian national identity was based on “Persian civilization,” open to “Western modernity,” and positioned against the
“backward Islam and Arabs.” While in the same period, in Massad’s
words, Arab intelligentsia made the Ottomans as the abject other in
order to construct a pure Arab nationalism (2007: 47), and Iranian
elites called for dissociation from Islam, a religion that was allegedly
forced upon Iranians by “decadent Arabs.” To Iranians, this othering of Arab Muslims functioned as the vehicle to realize national
progress. The racialized dimension of this dissociation from Islam
and Arabs has been investigated by the UK-based Iranian historian
Reza Zia-Ebrahimi (2011, 2016). However, it is important to note
that this secularized and racialized version of Iranian nationalism,
as claimed by the state and the elite, was not a generally shared aspiration. There existed also an Islamic notion of community, which
was popular among the urban and rural masses (Marashi 2008: 14).
This “two cultures phenomenon”—Islamic versus pre-Islamic Iranian communalism—Marashi stresses, “became the central drama
of Iran’s modern history” (ibid.).

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Sexual Self-Fashioning

The racialized and secularized discourses of Iranian national identity appear to be relevant in today’s processes of identity construction in diasporic contexts. As I discuss elsewhere (Roodsaz 2020),
many among the Iranian Dutch use this dissociation as a strategy
to claim citizenship in the Netherlands, emphasizing cultural differences between themselves and Turkish Dutch and Moroccan Dutch,
particularly in relation to issues of gender and sexuality. More recently, the younger generation Iranian Dutch especially, has started
to address and criticize the appropriation of racialized discourses
among Iranian migrants living in the West. A comprehensive analysis of the complexities of the production of race is also provided by
the Canadian-based Iranian sociologist Neda Maghbouleh (2017),
who investigates the mismatch between the Iranian American legal
status as “white” and sometimes internal “whitewashing” on the
one hand and everyday experiences of racism and exclusion in the
post-9/11 US on the other. The historically rooted racialized understandings of the self thus continue to inform how Iranian immigrants position and relate themselves as a group both internally and
externally.
The Iranian quest for nationalization through modernity in the
nineteenth century, as the historian Nikki Keddie observes, widened the gap between the small middle and upper classes on the
one hand, and the vast majority of the poor on the other hand
(1981: 111). The measures taken to improve the life of the latter
group were minimal and the brutal enforcement of the so-called
modernization project led to a strong sense of discontent and alienation within the society. For instance, veiling was outlawed in 1936
and women were supposed to adopt the European dress code and
mannerisms, which was not appreciated by those who were either
unable to afford the new style or were hesitant to follow the trend
for reasons related to their religious convictions (Afkhami 2009:
239–49; Keddie 1981: 98,108–9). In this sense, women’s bodies
were symbolically employed by the state to mark a transition towards what was considered national pishraft (progress). However,
the new reforms concerning gender issues were rather ambiguous.
Whereas the education of women became a priority, the privileged
male position concerning marriage, divorce, and guardianship remained intact (Keddie 1981: 97–98). Furthermore, the number of
working women increased among the middle and upper classes in
that period, but their political rights were limited at best (ibid.: 108).
As we will see in the next chapter, the instrumentalization of gender
in projects of modernity and its ambiguous potential for emancipa-

Sexually Crafting the Nation

37

tion continue to characterize contemporary Iranian Dutch quests for
identity construction, albeit in a migration context where different
concerns and consideration are at stake.
In 1941, Reza Shah abdicated in favor of his son Mohammad
Reza, who ruled until 1979. Like his father, Mohammad Reza Shah
used a nationalistic rhetoric associated with modernizing policies
(De Groot 2007: 164). According to the historian Ali Ansari, Mohammad Reza Shah desired to be the monarch of “an egalitarian
and democratic society,” which was difficult to combine with establishing political and social order (2001: 12). His programs, consequently, consisted of contradictory elements, as he wished to be
perceived as both a democrat and the sole authority in the country.
The regime’s efforts to realize the latter resulted in a politically repressive climate and thus a limited space for intellectuals to engage
in political matters (Zabih 1979: 75). Moreover, due to inflation,
scarcities, and economic inefficiency the dissatisfaction with government grew, which led to various protests (Keddie 1981: 114–
26). Part of the economic problems, by which especially the middle
and lower classes were affected, were perceived as a consequence of
Western interference. This dislike of the foreign, especially American, influence was shared among the clergy who had taken it as
their mission to reassert the Islamic law.
It was at that time that the notion of gharbzadegi (Westoxication)
emerged in the Iranian society (Keddie 1981: 203, 229), referring
to both economic dependence and cultural imperialism. From the
perspective of different oppositional groups, the Iranian culture was
polluted by Western influences and the Shah was held responsible
for not protecting Iran from this pollution. Eventually, a coalition
was formed against the regime consisting of Shia hierarchy, bazar
merchants, and secular intellectuals.
Different readings are put forth by historians as to why the Islamist movement took a dominant position in the decade before
the Islamic Revolution of 1979. These include resentment of foreign
domination, authoritarian rule, inequality, and violation of traditional norms and values (Abrahamian 2018; Milani 2018; Nabavi
2003; Arjomand 1988). Regardless of this difference, many indicate gender and sexuality as two crucial themes of the politics of
the Islamic Revolution (Talattof 2011; Afary 2009b; Moallem 2005;
Shahidian 2002a; Tavakoli-Targhi 2001). Particularly, “the woman
question” is seen as central to both the Iranian modernist discourse
and Islamic counter-discourse during and after the revolution (Najmabadi 1991: 48). With respect to the post-revolution period, the

38

Sexual Self-Fashioning

Iranian society has been repeatedly described as containing a mixture of modern and traditional attitudes at the cultural and political
level. For instance, focusing on the theme of women’s employment,
the economic historians Roksana Bahramitash and Hadi Salehi Esfahani argue that modernization and development has been achieved
“despite and through Islamization” in post-revolutionary Iran (2011:
24). One of the examples discussed in their work regards the literacy campaign, which dated back to the Pahlavi regime and was later
highly encouraged and pursued by Khomeini. Provided by women
in religious and “safe” places such as mosques in rural areas under
the IRI, the literacy program attracted a great number of female participants, who otherwise would not have taken such a step. Moreover, the authors refer to socioeconomic aspects which determined
the extent of women’s public participation rather than ideological
considerations related to Islam. For example, the war between Iran
and Iraq (1980–88), the concurrent economic recession, and USled sanctions resulted in a need for women’s active involvement in
Iran’s economy. However, this increased public visibility of women
went hand in hand with policies of segregation and restrictive rules.
Women were, furthermore, mostly active in the specific sectors of
health care, education, and services exclusively aimed at female
clients such as women’s security and customs at airports, female
student dormitories, and women’s sport centers (Bahramitash and
Esfahani 2011: 73–76).
Immediately after the Islamic Revolution, the authorities encouraged having a large family to create a strong Islamic community (Esfandiari 1997: 48). However, the extremely high rate of population
growth from 34.5 million in 1976 to 49.4 million in 1986 forced the
Islamic government of Iran to rethink their policies on family planning (Mehryar and Ahmad-Nia 2004: 5–6). Suddenly, all over the
country, especially poor women were provided with birth control
devices and “the small family” was promoted on many billboards in
Iranian large cities. Family planning was, in other words, adjusted
according to the specific needs for creating a stronger Islamic Iran
(Esfandiari 1997: 48).
Moreover, policies introduced by influential Iranian authorities
have been rather ambiguous at times. For instance, the Iranian president, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, presented a highly provocative notion of temporary marriage in 1990. Celebrating the “Islamic
wisdom” in recognizing the sexual instinct among human beings,
he proposed that war widows as well as young men and women
who for educational or financial reasons cannot marry sooner than

Sexually Crafting the Nation

39

in their twenties would be perfect candidates for sigheh. This form
of Shi’i temporary marriage, also known as mut’a, allows men and
women to decide about the length of their marital contract, which
can vary from one hour to ninety-nine years (Haeri 1989). The
woman often receives an amount of money, which has led to a popular condemning understanding of sigheh as “institutionalized prostitution.” In Rafsanjani’s view, however, there would be no shame
in women initiating such relationships for reasons of sexual gratification. It seems that he tried to integrate sigheh into the contemporary “proper” and legal sexual culture in Iran, which otherwise
allowed sex only in the context of long-term heterosexual marriage.
The example of sigheh shows how even controversial forms of sexuality were pragmatically mobilized to serve national demographic
interests. Simultaneously, some women use this arrangement to
their own advantage by seeking financial security and sexual pleasure or resisting permanent marriage (Haeri 1989).
After the presidency of the pragmatist Hashemi Rafsanjani, in the
elections of 1997 an overwhelming number of women and young
people voted for Mohammad Khatami, who belonged to the reformist movement (Afary 2009b: 328). He promoted a more liberal
stance on issues of gender relations and press freedom. The presidency, the parliament, and the provincial and city councils were
dominated by reformists between 2000 and 2004 (ibid.: 329). Many
women were appointed for important political posts, the legal age
of marriage for girls was raised from nine to fifteen, and the severity
of hijab for children and high school students was reduced. Other
proposed radical institutional reforms, such as equalizing women’s
inheritance rights, however, were rejected by the Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Khamenei, who is currently the highest Iranian authority.
Despite his limited success in carrying out his program in the face
of resistance from powerful hardliners, Khatami was re-elected in
2001. The two presidential elections in 2005 and 2009 were won by
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conservative candidate, who reversed a
great deal of the reforms of his predecessor Khatami. Feminist activists, however, adapted their strategies to the new situation and
remained active. A renowned example of their struggle under Ahmadinejad’s presidency is the “One Million Signatures Campaign,”
utilizing an approach of reforming Islamic law in Iran in order to
drive back discriminatory rules against women (Sameh 2010: 448).
A complicated relationship of power between feminists and the government continued to characterize the presidency of Hasan Rouhani
since 2021 (Rezaei-Toroghi 2020).

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Sexual Self-Fashioning

This brief overview attests to a period from the Iranian history
in which socially and politically far-reaching measures have been
taken to create a better nation, in which notions of “modernity” and
“tradition,” “Westernization” and “Islamism” have played a central
role. As already discussed in this section, gender and sexuality are
two significant domains where the characteristics of an ideal nation are negotiated and contested. In the next three sections of the
chapter, the role of gender and sexuality in the construction of a collective “us” in the Iranian context will be further explicated. Respectively, I will discuss the deployment of male homoerotic practices
in “modernization” and “civilization” projects around the Constitutional Revolution, the ideal womanhood and family formation in
Islamization projects of Iranian society shortly before and after the
Islamic Revolution of 1979, and the scholarly understandings and
analyses of the phenomenon of artificial female virginity in present-day Iran. In all these discussions, examples rather than a thorough historical account will be presented with the aim to illustrate
the importance of sexuality and gender in constructing an ideal national and cultural “us” in Iran as the backdrop against which contemporary notions of sexuality of the Iranian Dutch can partly be
understood.

The Nineteenth Century’s “Persian Vice”:
Male Homoeroticism
The Dutch historian Willem Floor describes the Qajar period before
the Constitutional Revolution as a time when male homosexual activities and public homoerotic expressions were widespread (2008:
279) and a “relaxed attitude about homosexuality” existed in different layers of Iranian society (ibid.: 335). Jacob Eduard Polak was an
Austrian physician who taught medicine in Iran from 1851 to 1860
and paid extensive attention to issues of sexuality, especially those
that he found remarkable. In one of his reports, he talks about how
some of the Iranian physicians would prescribe anal sex with men
to male patients, including the Shah, and that phenomenon was not
frowned upon (1861: 629). According to him sexual relationships
among women, generally known as sighe-ye khahar-khandegi (sister
vows), also existed (ibid.), but detailed information on female homosexuality in that period is lacking (Floor 2008: 349). Moreover,
one of the most well-known Qajar kings, Naser al-Din Shah, whose
sexual inclination in the eyes of his contemporaries leaned strongly

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41

towards women (Afary 2009b: 170), “owned” a number of closely
guarded dancing boys “because it was expected of him” (Polak 1861:
628). The suggestion of being (also) engaged in homoerotic activities
with boys was apparently associated with a healthy (masculine) sexual life, a quality of utmost importance for the king. Other historical
documents mention a considerable number of well-known courtiers
who were noticed for their preference to have sexual relations with
young men rather than women (Eyn al-Saltaneh 1995: 793, 916,
1026). In Jafar Shahri’s sociohistorical account, also in the lower
classes sex between “men with beards” and “beardless boys” was
common (1990: 184). In these representations of male homosexual
practices, most descriptions concerned intergenerational sexuality.
Homosexuality as practiced in nineteenth-century Iran was, according to Afary, very much status-defined (2009b: 106). Because
of the age difference, the older man was supposed to take the “active” role as otherwise his acts would be considered a form of perversion. Moreover, the older man usually belonged to a higher
class who would hire a boy called gholam-bacheh (page boy) as a
servant or slave for sexual pleasures (ibid.: 104). To emphasize the
status-defined nature of homosexuality in that time, Floor refers to
the example of the poet Akhtar who lost his tongue as a punishment
after having a sexual relationship with a youth from Qajar’s inner
circle (2008: 341). Another principle along which homosexuality,
and sexuality more generally, was organized, regarded the distinction between public and private (Korycki and Nasirzadeh 2016: 4).
Socially acceptable homosexuality belonged to the private sphere,
while for religious reasons it was prohibited at the public level. As
long as men married and procreated, they were free to seek erotic
pleasure in private spheres as they pleased.
Regarding the present-day pedophilic connotation of homoerotic
relations between men of different generations, Najmabadi (2005:
60) reminds us of the specific context of this Iranian phenomenon,
in which “boys” was mainly a reference to teenagers, rather than
children. These sexual relationships were supposed to be consensual, which was impossible to realize in case of very young children (Floor 2008: 314). Force, great age difference, or any kind of
excessive erotic behavior and inclination was socially stigmatized
(Korycki and Nasirzadeh 2016: 5). However, Afary has a more skeptical view on this matter and indicates that, at least among the elite,
there were less clear boundaries between consensual adult sex and
pedophilic and pederastic abuse (2009b: 95, 105, 107). At the same
time, given that status-defined homosexuality was perceived as ac-

42

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ceptable, it is possible that the more equal homosexual relationships
were “framed” as unequal in order to avoid societal objections. In
other words, status-defined homosexuality might at times have
functioned as a cover for culturally unacceptable forms of more
egalitarian romantic homosexual relations.
In the period around the Constitutional Revolution, however,
male homoerotic activities became a contested issue among Iranians, which is for example apparent in how some highly educated
elite women reflected on this phenomenon. Such a critical review of
homosexuality can be seen in the writings of an influential female
figure of the Constitutional Revolution and the founder of the first
school for girls in Iran, Bibi Khanom Astarabadi. In her famous book
Ma’ayeb al-Rejal (Vices of Men),3 published already a decade before the
revolution, she describes homosexual activities among married men
as offending to their wives (Javadi, Marashi, and Sherkarloo 1992).
Using a satirical tone, she criticizes what she describes as a form of
sexual promiscuity. In a fictive story, she talks about a man who has
a beautiful wife to whom he does not pay much (sexual) attention
and prefers to sleep with boys. One night he sends his servant to find
a boy for sexual pleasure. However, the boy who the servant had in
mind for his master was gone on a journey, which led to dressing up
the boy’s sister as an amrad (adolescent boy) hoping that the master would not notice the difference. “During the ups and downs of
sexual intercourse,” watched by the servant through the keyhole,
“the master started to search for the boy’s penis. After much effort
he realized that she was a woman.” The master got angry and demanded an explanation, to which the servant replied: “Whatever
the boy has, she also has.” However, the master expressed his wish
to be able to play with the penis as part of the game, which brought
the servant to a solution: “The anus is the anus and the penis is the
penis. Enter her from behind and play with my penis.” Amused by
this reply, the master started laughing so hard that he fell and hurt
himself in his private parts. He then cried and fainted. The story
ends with Astarabadi’s following statement: “This is the fate of most
pederasts, womanizers, gamblers, and alchemists, because they treat
their women and their wives in this way. O people of intelligence
take heed!” (Javadi et al. 1992: 126–27).
To Astarabadi, who is concerned with women’s issues, male homoeroticism as practiced at that time was an act of immorality, “a
male vice” attesting to the poor treatment of women. In this historical context where men had young male concubines and women had
little to no rights in marriage, wives had to compete with male lov-

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43

ers for the same man. By standing in the way of improving women’s
situation, homosexuality was perceived as impeding the realization
of a better Iran. As mentioned previously, the women’s movement
was part of national reforms initiated in the context of the Constitutional Revolution. By rejecting and mocking male homosexuality
and connecting it to women’s issues, women were as such intertwined with and integrated into a broader intellectual and political
quest for modernization. However, Astarabadi’s position in relation
to the movement towards modernity is ambiguous and debatable.
While she spoke negatively about her personal situation and losing
security after her husband took a second temporary wife, she praised
Naser al-Din Shah’s ability to treat all of his many wives equally.
As polygamy was criticized for being backward and traditional, and
monogamy was presented as the modern alternative, Vices of Men
cannot simply be qualified as a feminist call for modernity (Amin
2002: 35; Najmabadi 1993: 493). Nevertheless, more generally, the
Iranian women’s movement that began to take shape around this
period supported “the modernizing zeal of the male intellectuals,”
(Korycki and Nasirzadeh 2016: 55) such as represented in the call
for the unveiling of women and ending the segregation and increasing women’s movement. They also demanded a marriage based on
love rather than procreation, partly to be realized through putting
homoerotic relations of men to a stop, as called upon by Astarabadi.
Degrading accounts of male homoerotic activities were simultaneously present in various European reports on Iran. Although
not a focus of this chapter, these Western representations of Iranian
culture were important in how Iranians reflected on themselves.
For example, in his translation of The Arabian Nights, in a section
called pederasty, the American missionary Sir Richard Francis Burton, refers to Iran as a place where “houses of male prostitution are
common . . . and the boys are prepared with extreme care by diet,
baths, depilation, unguents and a host of artists in cosmetics. Le Vice
is looked upon at most as a peccadillo and its mention crops up in
every jest-book” (1885). Moreover, when invited to boy-dancing
parties, which was meant as a gesture of hospitality by Iranians,
Europeans expressed their disgust regarding the boys’ erotic movements they witnessed (Tancoigne 1820: 67; Keppel 1827: 47–48;
Ourseley 1918-23: 23). The French traveler J. M. Tancoigne states:
Preserved by their education and habits from the pains and vicissitudes of love; incapable, on the other hand, by their religious prejudices, of appreciating [heterosexual] delights and enjoyments, they

44

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have degraded that sentiment to the excess of reserving it at times
for their minions, and of turning it into a crime against nature. Many
of their poems turn entirely on this inconceivable degeneracy; and
their moral depravity is such that far from making a mystery of this
new species of amorous intrigue, they appear, on the contrary, to take
pride in it; speak publically of their minions, as if they were speaking
of their mistresses. (1820: 174)

Ignorance, pederasty, immorality, and unnatural behavior were perceived as characteristic of male homoeroticism in Iran as observed
by Tancoigne. Simultaneously, these kinds of Orientalist reports can
be interpreted as a form of voyeurism, as according to Said “the
Orient was a place where one could look for sexual experiences unobtainable in Europe” (1978: 190). The uncivilized “other,” who is
even ignorant of his own (religious) backwardness, is close to being
hideous, which is also a site for sexual fantasy. However, rather than
the Orientalist framing of the Iranian culture and their judgments
of Iranian sexuality, I will focus on how Iranians perceived themselves in relation to these reports, which was in Najmabadi’s view an
intense preoccupation among Iranian intellectuals throughout the
nineteenth century (2005: 37).
One way of dealing with this Western disapproval of homoeroticism in Iran was to deny its commonality. For example, Mirza Fattah Garmrudi, an Iranian author from the mid-Qajar period who
traveled to Europe in 1838, complained about Europeans’ “outrageous, exaggerated and unfair” accounts of sexual practices in
Iran, since “inappropriate behavior occurred only incidentally in
this country” (1969: 962). In retaliation he accused the English of
having amrad-khaneha (prostitution houses for homosexuals) and
gahbah-khaneha (houses of prostitution), and because of which they
had no right to write abominably about Iranians’ sexuality (ibid.).
The anxiety concerning Westerners’ evaluations of homosexuality
in Iran, furthermore, led to a conceptual distinction between homosexuality and homosociality by some of the Iranian intellectuals (Najmabadi 2005: 38), arguing that Westerners misinterpreted Iranian
homosociality as homosexuality (Afary, 2009b: 113). Seeing men
walking together and spending much time in each other’s company,
Westerners wrongly concluded that Iran was a paradise for homosexuals. An additional response to “coming under the Europeans’
gaze” was the feminization of the concept of beauty (Najmabadi
2005: 39). Whereas both young men and women could represent
beauty in early Qajar paintings, women started to almost completely
take over the position of the object of desire in later visual represen-

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45

tations. “The male beloved,” moreover, disappeared from romantic
poetry in the same period (ibid.: 38). Remarkably, the same happened in the case of Arab poetry (Massad 2007: 35), which attests
to the profound role of hegemonic Orientalist sexual imageries in
self-perceptions and self-presentations of Iranians and Arabs.
The condemnation of male homosexual practices as a form of
cultural sickness can also be seen in the later literary works of Iraj
Mirza (1874–1926), a highly famous Iranian poet and satirist as
well as a central figure in the Constitutional Revolution. His work,
among that of others, has been noted for making a connection between “the invisibility of women” and the popularity of homosexual
practices in Iran. According to some of his contemporary Westerners’ Orientalist analyses, he assumed that gender segregation had
led to unnatural sexual behavior, presenting Iranian homosexuality
as a substitute for heterosexual desire, a consequence of repressed
heterosexuality. In one of his poems, “Aref Nameh,” Iraj Mirza
blames women’s hijab, which he equates to women’s invisibility as
the cause of pederasty in Iran (2003: 78). It was in the same period
that societal visibility of women became increasingly acceptable and
a heterosexualization of the public sphere took place (Najmabadi
2005: 41, 54). A link was thus assumed between homosexual activities as a primitive affair on the one hand, and the quest for women’s
societal visibility as a modern gesture on the other hand.
A comparable rhetoric can be seen in other intellectuals’ contributions at the time. Already decades before Iraj Mirza, Fath Ali Akhundzadeh (1812–1872), known as a “modernist sociocultural critic of
Iranian society” (Najmabadi 2005: 55), wrote while living and working in Tiflis about the lack of men’s desire for women “a sickness” or
“an intentional act of moving outside the laws of creation” (Akhundzadeh1985: 131). Deprived from the most pleasurable worldly
blessing, namely intercourse with women, men would turn to sodomy (ibid.: 178–79). Another important writer, intellectual, and secular nationalist, Mirza Agha Khan Kermani (1854–1896/1897), also
spoke out against homosexuality as obscene and shameful:
Men are naturally inclined toward socializing and enjoying the companionship of women. This is so strongly evident that it needs no
explication and proof. If a people is forbidden from this great blessing
and deprived of this great deliverance, then inevitably the problem of
sexual acts with boys and young male slaves is created because boys
without facial hair resemble women and this is one of the errors of
nature. It is for this reason that in the Iranian nation this grave condition has reached saturation. (Reprint in 2006: 173)

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Again we see a conceptualization of pederastic, status-defined homoerotic practices that is derived from heterosexuality as “normal.” The
repression of this normalcy would then cause “errors.” Another famous constitutionalist, Hasan Taghizadeh (1878–1970), also joined
the anti-homosexuality offensive, who, according to Afary, had become “an utterly uncritical modernist” (2009b: 162). Part of this
catching up with the West and modernization, in his view, entailed
the abandonment of homoerotic practices as a sign of backwardness. One of the major perceived problems of the Iranian society
was the widespread “unnatural love among all classes of the nation,” eradication of which was one of the conditions for tahavol-e
farhangi (cultural transformation) and achieving tajaddod (modernity) (Taghizadeh 1970–78). Moreover, he pleaded for the removal
of homoerotic verses from Iranian poetry and for making women
the only object of men’s love (Najmabadi 2005: 163). This task of
heterosexualizing Iranian literature was later carried on by another
important thinker, Ahmad Kasravi (1890–1946) (Regan 1985: 69),
who under the influence of the Constitutional Revolution had become a harsh critic of the clerical establishment (Afary 2009b: 163).
Criticism of Iranian homoerotic practices, furthermore, became a
trend in Molla Nasreddin, which was a Tiflis-based highly popular
weekly newspaper in Azeri Turkish, published from 1906 to 1931
both inside and outside Iran.4 Molla Nasreddin was known in particular for its controversial discourse on gender and sexuality and a
progressive reinterpretation of Islamic texts, including the Quran,
in light of new sociocultural reforms (Afary 2009b: 135). Mocking
male homosexual practices in the Iranian society between men and
very young boys was one the topics of its satires, emphasizing the
“shameful pedophilic” character of same-sex practices in Iran. For
instance, the phenomena of boy-dancing and “brotherhood vows”
became the target of Molla Nasreddin’s criticism.
If the pederast Iranian man was taken as the symbol of backwardness by Iranian intellectuals, the ideal, celebrated antithesis
was represented by the “educated and cultured European woman.”
According to the Canadian-based Iranian historian Tavakoli-Targhi,
in Iranian travelers’ “Europhilic” reports during the Qajar dynasty
a generally accepted causal relationship was assumed between the
freedom enjoyed by women and the “progress of the nation” in European countries (2001: 65). Having attended ballrooms, theaters,
concerts, and masquerade parties, these travelers presented an idealized picture of Europe as “the heaven on earth” filled by “fairy
mannered, beautifully dressed and rose-cheeked women” (ibid.:

Sexually Crafting the Nation

47

55–60). In refashioning Iran, the modernists perceived the male
pederast as a sign of the degeneracy of the status quo, whereas the
European woman came to resemble civilization and the ideal nation
as a goal to work towards. At the same time, though, the European
woman was subjected to a counter-modernist Europhobic discourse
by being portrayed as “demonic” and as a symbol of a political threat
to Europe (ibid.: 70). In either case, these sexualized figures of Iranian male pederast and the European woman were deployed for
establishing either difference or identification.
In this section I have illustrated that before the Constitutional
Revolution male status-defined homoerotic activities were perceived as an integrated part of acceptable sexuality in different layers
of the society, then the quest for “civilization” and/through “modernization” of Iran brought about a negative attitude towards these
forms of sexuality among a group of prominent Iranian intellectuals.
The eradication of homosexual behavior and sentiments, therefore,
became a condition for “modernity” at that time and the Iranian
culture had to be disposed of this “vice.” This self-critique has been
indicated as a reaction to highly judgmental Orientalist representations of Iranian homosexual practices in various Westerners’ travel
reports. These reports are said to have functioned as a mirror in
which Iranian intellectuals were confronted with a backward, uncivilized self that needed to be reconstructed. Although not all intellectuals accepted those accusations, (male) homosexual eroticism
was unanimously looked down on. In other words, homosexuality
in Iran as represented by those Westerners was either rejected or ignored in order to create a new modern collective self.
As also suggested in the previous section, it is around this time
that Iran as a nation became imaginable, a development which
was facilitated, among others, by heterosocialization of the society.
Women had to become more visible, which meant less gender segregation in the public sphere to regulate that visibility. Through this
controlled interaction between the sexes, it was assumed, men’s
tendency to engage in homosexual activities would weaken. Homosociality would supposedly only breed sexual aberration. To what
extent this ideal Iran was realized and whether homosexuality was
actually eradicated from the Iranian sexual culture exceeds the focus
of this chapter. What seems to have happened at least is that at this
historical stage male homoeroticism became a part of the despicable
sexual repertoire in the service of civilization and modernization
projects. The rejection of homosexuality, as such, served as a key aspect in the politics of reform towards conceptualizing Iran as a mod-

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ern nation. In a mutually constitutive interaction between national
imagination and sexual imagination, homosexual practices formed a
central point. In a similar vein, as I will discuss in the next chapters,
in a contemporary Dutch context, the constructions of the “backward Muslim” who fails to accept homosexuality inform processes
of self-fashioning among the Iranian Dutch. However, first, the next
part of the chapter will deal with a notion of ideal womanhood and
family formation in imagining yet another new Iran during another
turbulent historical period, namely the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Purifying the Society:
Idealized Womanhood and Family
Iran went through considerable demographic changes under the
Pahlavi dynasty, which affected society in various ways. The rapid
urbanization in particular rearranged the family composition and
relations in many households. The American anthropologist Janet
Bauer conducted research among “industrial migrants,” who came
from rural to urban areas in order to work in the industrial sector in
southern Tehran in the years before the Islamic Revolution (1985a).
She observed fundamental changes in family structure and, as a result, in the relations between men and women. Urbanization, she
poses, for instance led to a sharper distinction between two sociocultural spheres, namely the domestic and the public. Dismissed from
agricultural duties, men started to work for long hours outside the
house, while women stayed at home and took care of the household. Women were discouraged to enter the public sphere as a place
full of strangers. Men, on the other hand, had more opportunities
for interaction, frequenting tea houses, cinemas, and sports events.
Despite this gendered segregationist “ideology of the space,” issues
such as women’s mobility, societal participation, and education were
increasingly normalized. At the same time, urbanization provided
parents, in most cases fathers, with absolute authority, which previously was divided among different members of the extended family.
However, as children stayed at home for a longer period due to their
education, challenging their parents’ decisions became more common. The choice of the spouse was one of the sources of intergenerational conflict, age differences between spouses became smaller,
and women took a less compliant attitude towards their husbands
(Bauer 1985a; Kousha 2002: 113–44). The pre-revolutionary mainstream Iranian family in poor areas, as portrayed by Bauer, was in

Sexually Crafting the Nation

49

transition, dealing with issues of authority and gradually moving towards more egalitarian, companionate relations between men and
women (Bauer 1985a: 158–67).
According to the American-based Iranian sociologist Hammed
Shahidian, “Iranian patriarchy” shifted from the private to the public realm during the Pahlavi regimes (2002b: 22). The increased educational and employment opportunities for women provided them
with a new social space and relative economic independence. However, the dominant role of men in the household was not challenged
in a fundamental way and women’s participation in the public domain made them at times more vulnerable to violence and sexual
abuse outside their homes (ibid.: 62). Although the modernization
policies of the Pahlavi regimes changed certain social aspects of
women’s lives, “the Iranian minds” did not transform in accordance
(Va’ez Shahrestani 2011: 458). The vulnerability of women became
increasingly associated with the reckless modernization urges of the
Pahlavi authorities. Shahidian argues that the majority of political
groups that started to form an opposition against the Pahlavi regime,
had a vested interest in reshaping gender and family relations, since
they all agreed on two issues that needed to be changed: “women’s
exploitation in the context of capitalist system” and “foreign manipulation of sexuality through cultural imperialism” (2002b: 156).
In this sense, the Islamists, the women’s movement, and the Left
found a shared discourse in their quest for a better society. However, according to Shahidian, the Islamic movement had the most
detailed and specific agenda on gender and family issues. A considerable number of secular anti-Shah intellectuals with different
political affinities were convinced that the Pahlavi regimes’ gender
policy had made women into prostitutes (Tohidi 1996: 119). The
new Iran as imagined by various oppositional groups would consist
of a less “Westernized” and a more “authentic” sexual culture and
gender norms.
During the reign of the second Pahlavi Shah, an increasing political consciousness and critical attitude towards state matters started
to become a trend among young Iranians, especially those from the
middle and upper classes. This group had the opportunity to participate in leisure and political activities outside the house, such as
having dinner at restaurants and walking and driving around the
city (Rudolph Touba 1985: 133; De Groot 2007: 55). An increased
awareness about their position in the society led to a significant
participation in the revolutionary demonstrations in the seventies.
However, the socioeconomic instabilities that Iran was facing during

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Sexual Self-Fashioning

the Islamic Revolution, once again provided the elderly members
of the (extended) family with great authority since familial solidarity was highly needed in those difficult times. After 1979, the
new Islamic government, furthermore, cancelled the restrictions on
polygamy, and many legal grounds for women to initiate divorce
were annulled (Rudolph Touba, 1985: 132–39). Although the actual effect of these reforms is difficult to explicate statistically, a new
perception of family and gender issues can be identified in governmental decisions in the few years after the Islamic Revolution. For
example, sex segregation was introduced at elementary schools,5
school books were revised in a way to stress “traditional” gender
roles, both men and women were encouraged to dress modestly, the
use of cosmetics was labelled as immoral, the universities’ curricula
became “Islamized,” the few female judges were dismissed and because of low salaries and decreasing employment opportunities for
women, they were forced to primarily adopt the status of mother
and wife (ibid.: 142–45).
Matters of family and gender also formed a central issue in the
public statements of the founder of the Islamic Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, shortly after the Revolution of 1979. In a report published
by “The Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works” (2001),6 he speaks rather favorably about the “revolutionary transitions” that women and, in extension, the institution
of family went through. According to Khomeini, contrary to the
pre-Islamic Iran (before 651 CE) when Arabs buried their girls alive,
as well as during the Westernized Pahlavi regime when the despotic
Reza Shah and his son turned women into “beguiling creatures,” Islam would now present a way towards “enlightenment” (Khomeini
2011: 3–4). A considerable number of Khomeini’s quotes are listed
in this report, which mainly illustrates his appreciation of and respect for women’s position as moral “educators of men.”
A year after the revolution Khomeini declare the birthday of
Fatima, the daughter of Prophet Mohammad and the wife of the
first Shi’i Imam, Ali, as Women’s Day:
If a day is to be designated “Women’s Day,” what day is more deserving, is prouder, than the day commemorating the joyous birth of Fatimah Zahra, upon whom be peace, a woman who is the pride of the
family of divine revelation, and who, like a sun, shines brightly in the
crown of beloved Islam. (ibid.: 7)

Farah Azari, a professor in women’s studies, describes the symbolic
role of Fatimah in that period as most appealing to women because

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51

of the political activism and a strong sense of justice that was associated with her as opposed to the Westernized woman “occupied
by her self-presentation” (1983: 66). In the following quotes, Khomeini continues praising Islam as the only ideology that “guides”
people in all aspects of their personal and public life, especially in
the case of marriage, “because it is through marriage that human
beings are created” (2001: 66). In several places he emphasizes the
role of Islam in creating “upright” or “true” human beings by placing
“spirituality” in the center of their lives instead of being concerned
with “material” issues. As mothers, women would have the outstanding position in society to realize this virtue (ibid.: 67). He, furthermore, makes a specific connection between women’s important
societal “responsibility” and the role of family in nation-building.
Rear strong children for the future of our country. Your laps are like
schools in which strong youth should be raised. Seek to acquire the
highest virtues so that in your care your children will also acquire
them. (ibid.: 68)

In his view, women and young people in general were “distracted”
and “occupied” by “devilish inclinations and desires”—indulging in
bars, cinemas, casinos, and “houses of ill repute”—during the monarchical regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi. In Khomeini’s words, Islam
served as the source of transformation towards morality, communal
responsibility, and spirituality. The condemnation of homosexuality was part of this morality rhetoric, as a small community of gays
was increasing in the years before the revolution (Katarzyna and
Nasirzadeh 2016: 55). The emergence of a gay culture was seen as
another sign of moral decay. In 1981 and 1982, in the name of tradition and Islam about two hundred homosexuals were executed
(ibid.).
Khomeini, moreover, speaks highly of women from poor areas of
southern Tehran in particular:
I see the ladies in the vanguard of this [Islamic] movement and I have
said repeatedly that they have done more than anyone for Islam, especially the ladies from the Southern areas of Tehran who are the
motivators of the Islamic uprising and the leaders of the other classes.
(2001: 68–90)

Those women from lower classes who felt left out in the modernization project of the Pahlavis were now admired by the new leader
of the nation, Khomeini. In the aforementioned quotes, a woman’s role is predominantly reduced to the domestic environment,

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Sexual Self-Fashioning

but paradoxically it is at the same time directly connected to greater
societal ends. Women were thus encouraged to take their position as
mothers seriously and to perceive it as a fundamental contribution
to the nation’s future improvement by carrying the responsibility of
“producing” loyal Muslims. As Minoo Moallem notes, with respect
to this period of Iranian history, women were “reskilled, and given
an identity, but their sense of subjectivity and agency [was] based
on domestication” (2001: 133). Women’s presence outside the domestic domain was praiseworthy for as long as it served the Islamic
movement. By directing women towards the “right path,” an Islamic Iran became imaginable. Islam was presented as the comprehensive ideological framework within which this message becomes
meaningful, but also as the means to mobilize and to imagine an
alternative to the “despotic other,” symbolized by the Pahlavi regimes and the West. In order to emphasize the latter contrast, morality and spirituality were assigned to Islam and materiality and
haphazardness to the “Westernized” Pahlavi regime. In Chapter 3, a
different configuration of this entanglement between discourses of
Islam and enlightenment utilized through questions of gender will
be presented. As I will show, claims to an authentic religious self become possible by rejecting so-called false and hollow modernity in
the larger Iranian Dutch community.
The pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, in Najmabadi’s view, should
not be perceived as completely separate eras in terms of gender ideology (1991). In fact, she poses, the continuity between the paradigms
of modernity and Islam in Iran lies in their notions of gender, or “the
woman question.” The model of the woman as modern-yet-modest
that she ascribes to the Pahlavi period was according to her replaced
by the alternative of Islamic-thus-modest after the 1979 revolution.
In other words, women’s modesty was and remained an ideal, with
middle class women subjected to more discipline than working class
women. For Islamists, the “Westoxicated woman” became the symbol of all societal ills, wearing too much make-up, too short a skirt,
too tight a pair of pants, too low-cut a shirt, and being too loose in
her relations with men. From the secular point of view, wearing a
skirt was accepted, but its length would determine a woman’s (lack
of) modesty. Although women’s education and presence in the public sphere was appreciated during the Pahlavi era, women were still
subjected to chastity and modesty norms, leading to confusing and
contradictory notions of desirable or ideal womanhood. The role
ascribed to women in the modernization projects, Najmabadi concludes, was ambiguous and confusing (ibid.: 49–65).

Sexually Crafting the Nation

53

In a detailed description of the professional life of a famous Iranian female artist known as Shahrzad who was born in 1946, the
American-based Iranian professor of Persian literature Kamran Talattof (2011) explores the connection between sexuality, modernity,
and ideology in Iran during the 1970s. Seeking to illustrate “the
root of the problem of Iranian modernity,” Talattof argues that modernity in fact never took place in Iran because of the lack of “a
true modern conceptualization of sexuality and gender” (ibid.: 6,
9). The latter, according to him, entails an integration of sexuality
in intellectual, long-term, and critical public discussions and debates
rather than being subjected to reductive idealist discourses. Based
on how Shahrzad’s work was discussed in the media, he identifies
a strong tendency to make a distinction between nudity and poetry,
sexuality and intellectuality, sex and art, each time condemning the
former and idealizing the latter. Such dichotomizations were used as
a vehicle to “locate women’s so-called wrong or right place” (Talatof 2001: 205). Consequently, he argues, the modernization of Iran
could have never happened, whereby he explicitly ascribes a direct,
key role to sexuality in nation-building in the historical context under discussion. Without a modern sexual culture, he assumes, no
modern Iran can be achieved. Although Tallotof’s critique of modernity in Iran from a gender and sexuality perspective seems to
correspond with Najmabadi’s observations, his analysis does imply
a class-based distinction between true and fake modernity, a view
that Najmabadi rejects based on a poststructuralist approach to modernity that allows much more complexity, fluidity, and messiness.
The complexity of gender perceptions in the post-1979 revolution is additionally taken up by Shahidian (2002b). Initially, he suggests, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) aimed at “returning the locus
of patriarchal domination from public to private” by strengthening
men’s role in family and society and defining women primarily in
their role as wives and mothers (ibid.: 163). Women would then
be excluded from the public sphere and protected by men within
the household, an approach that Shahidian calls “exclusionistprotectionism” (ibid.: 200). Marital duties, including sexual satisfaction of the husband, and household tasks, such as child rearing,
cleaning, and cooking, were the main categories of female labor recognized by the IRI (Etemad Moghadam 2004: 167–68). However,
for various reasons prohibiting women from involvement in the
outdoor social life appeared to be unfeasible. As a result of gender
reforms during the Pahlavi regimes women had already become acquainted with a public position. This public engagement in a way

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Sexual Self-Fashioning

enabled women to play a significant role later during the Islamic
Revolution, a role that was explicitly recognized and strategically
employed by Khomeini. Moreover, one income per household was
in most cases insufficient due to the economic exigencies. Consequently, the IRI was forced to change its policy into “segregationistprotectionism,” whereby public appearances of women were tolerated in female-exclusive spaces, guarded by the state (Shahidian
2002b: 213).
As it appears from the discussions in this section, the development
in gender relations accompanying the Pahlavi regimes’ attempts at
“Westernizing” and “modernizing” (which often meant the same)
Iran led to anxieties at different levels of Iranian society. At the political level, this anxiety resulted in a common ground among different
oppositional parties, who otherwise might have been less successful
in forming a unified block against the regime in power. Although
they all agreed on the need for counteracting the “Westoxication” of
Iranian culture, facilitated and promoted by the “corrupted” Pahlavi
regimes, their ideas about an alternative approach were not clear.
The lack of a clear position on the gender agenda of these oppositional parties is explained in terms of their ambiguous notions of
ideal womanhood. Whereas women were supposed to act “modern”
in order to help create a progressive nation, they were simultaneously subjected to contradictory norms of modesty. However, as an
exception, the Islamists presented a clear alternative. As is apparent in Khomeini’s statements, after the Islamic Revolution of 1979,
women’s role became central in promoting a strong Islamic Iran,
as opposed to the “materialist” and “immoral” previous regime. As
mothers and wives, “ideal” women were to guarantee the kind of
household that would produce strong Muslims and thus a strong
Islamic nation. A woman’s position therefore became crucial in the
new processes of nation-building.

“Cultural Duality”: Faking Female Virginity
Scholarly readings of today’s sexualities in Iran are still highly entangled with a discourse of modernity and traditionality, as is apparent in various studies. Many scholars describe the Iranian sexual
culture as “paradoxical,” for according to their analyses elements of
modernite/tajaddod (modernity) and sonnat (tradition) simultaneously
characterize this culture. It is argued that Iranians both collectively
and individually hold on to both modern and traditional values.

Sexually Crafting the Nation

55

According to the Iranian American social anthropologist Shahram
Khosravi, for many Iranian young men and women imagining a
“modern identity” is one of the most dominant ways to make sense
of their life (2008: 173). Through satellite TV channels and internet,
Khosravi explains, these young people find other representations
of being Iranian. The diasporic popular culture, primarily concentrated in Los Angeles,7 functions as the producer of an image of Iran
and “Iranianness” that provides the Iranian youth with a more attractive alternative from what they see in their own country (ibid.:
173–74). For this reason, the consumption of anything that can be
called khareji (foreign/Western) symbolizes access to an imagined
better life. The tendency to choose “modernity” over the alternative
available in Iran, Khosravi assumes, is reflected in the consumption
culture of the Iranian youngsters. According to him, the consumption culture among the youth should be seen as claiming a modern
identity and as upward cultural mobility. Against the restrictive Iranian society, a modern American alternative of Iranianness is positioned in Khosravi’s analyses of the Iranian youth culture.
Scholars, however, more often locate the dualistic conception
of modern versus tradition within the present-day Iranian culture
rather than perceiving it as a matter of Iranian versus foreign cultures. Whereas Khosravi emphasizes the role of the Iranian diaspora
in claiming subjectivity among the Iranian youngsters, Fatemeh Sadeghi, the Tehran-based Iranian political scientist, focuses more on
domestic sociopolitical configurations in her analyses of the Iranian
youth culture. She asserts that being disappointed in the ideological commitments of their parents which resulted in a restrictive
life under the IRI, young people in Iran are now skeptical of collective politics and instead concentrate on “privatized individualism”
(Sadeghi 2010: 275). One of the main fields in which this “privatized individualism” becomes constituted is sexuality. Although punishable by law, premarital sex appears to be quite common among
Iranian youth in urban areas (ibid.). Sex before marriage, it is suggested, functions as an outlet for discontent and simultaneously
provides the tools to dissociate the self from the rest of the society. In other words, within an unsatisfactory sociopolitical context,
the dissociation of the “privatized” self from an Islamic oppressive
collective is enabled through sex before marriage. Instead of politically framed notions of an idealized Iranian “us” among the older
generation, Sadeghi claims, individual cultural violations of the
virginity norm have come to represent the current Iranian youth’s
self-constructions.

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Sexual Self-Fashioning

The discrepancies or paradoxes of the Iranian (sexual) culture in
terms of tradition and modernity, as already appears from Sadeghi’s
study, are especially observed among Iranian youngsters. Discussing premarital sex in an ethnographic study on the sexual culture
among young people in Tehran, the American-based Iranian anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi (2009) explains how her research participants engage in sexual and leisure activities despite socio-familial
pressure and risking harsh punishment by the Islamic regime. She
quotes an eighteen-year-old female participant: “We know that if
we get caught, we could go to jail. We recognize the consequences
of our partying, but we do it anyway. It’s sort of an F-you to the
system, if you know what I mean; it’s our way of protesting” (2009:
22). Mahdavi’s observations are largely similar to Sadeghi’s analyses
in presenting sexuality as the means through which young people
are enabled to act rebellious against the Iranian Islamic authorities
and to establish a distinct identity. Their disobedient sexual behavior, both authors assume, replaces oppositional collective political
movements. A “sexual revolution” as called by some of Mahdavi’s
research participants, is realized by using bodies and social behavior to subvert the power of what the Iranian youth perceives as an
oppressive government (Mahdavi 2009: 37). Correspondingly, interpreting practices of sexual autonomy among Iranian youth in recent years as a form of “having fun,” the American-based Iranian
sociologist Asef Bayat argues for understanding this development as
a significant site of social and political struggle (2013: 132).
The sexual revolution of the youth is as such understood as part of
the broader social movement and activism that currently helps construct a different Iran. Both Sadeghi and Mahdavi, however, notice
that this apparently open sexual culture among young Iranians also
contains many exclusive and undemocratic aspects (Sadeghi 2010:
275; Mahdavi 2009: 146). The perceptions of women’s behavior,
they argue, are still subjected to notions of modesty, even though
sex before marriage happens more often. This means that women
who engage in premarital sex are not immune to societal stigmatization, including stigmatization by their own generation. Furthermore, men enjoy more freedom to create private spheres enabling
them to transgress the IRI rules, which puts women in a less powerful position (Sadeghi 2010: 281). It should be mentioned here that
renting a residence in many places in Iran is considerably easier for
single men than for single women both legally and practically. Sadeghi concludes that Iranian youth culture represents “the third way,”
a mix of tradition and modernity (ibid.: 286). Based on hierarchies

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57

of gender and class, young people combine elements from tradition
and modernity when and where it suits them. Tradition, in Sadeghi’s analysis, is represented by the notion of modesty as applicable
to women exclusively. Modernity refers to women claiming sexual autonomy by engaging in premarital sex. Although “the third
way” seems to challenge the modernity-versus-tradition dichotomy,
it nevertheless understands the behavior of young people in Iran
in terms of modern-thus-liberated and traditional-thus-hampered.
“The third way” mixes modernity and tradition without fundamentally shaking their internal homogeneity as concepts.
Iran has been noticed for being the country with the fastest growing concentration of internet users in the Middle East. Studying the
activities of women in blogistan (Iranian blogosphere), the American-based Iranian sociologist Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi (2008), shows
how these women who mostly live inside Iran negotiate with a triple set of standards: Islamic law of Sharia, urf (Islamic custom), and
modernite (based on urbanization, literacy, education, and modern
technologies such as satellite and internet). More specifically, what
she observes is that the first two—sharia and urf—are being transgressed by the latter—modernity—among women in cyberspace.
What these transgressions and performances of modernity entail,
she classifies as becoming more visible, speaking out, and creating
a new identity closer to the inner self. Through self-narrations, Iranian women bloggers reflect on their everyday experiences including sexual relations, whereby they break a huge religious, political,
and sociocultural taboo. Modernity as understood by Amir-Ebrahimi
refers to expressions of inner experiences, of which gender and female sexuality are two of the most important dimensions.
In studies on faking virginity via the reconstruction of the hymen
or avoidance of vaginal intercourse in order to preserve a “virgin
identity,” these practices are seen as representative of the current
paradoxes in the Iranian (sexual) culture. In her research on diasporic narratives of sexuality among Iranian-Swedish women, the
Swedish-based Iranian ethnologist Fataneh Farahani (2007) discusses women’s strategies in Iran where women both engage in
premarital sexual activities and act according to female virginity
norms. Although her work deals with the accounts of Iranian Swedish women, she also discusses related issues of sexuality within the
context of Iran. She describes, for instance, how a gynecologist
providing a certificate to verify a woman’s virginity is a common
phenomenon in contemporary Iran. Farahani uses the term “artificial virginity” as a reference to a frequently occurring practice in

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Sexual Self-Fashioning

Iran. Virginity is maintained or becomes reconstructed via hymenoplasty—surgical restoration of the hymen—as well as through various ways of faking virginity, such as using menstruation blood or
other substances that resemble blood as proof of the bride’s virginity
on the wedding night. Avoiding coitus, while being otherwise sexually active is also included in this category. Quoting Ayse Parla,
Farahani defines this practice in Iran as “a particularly modern form
of institutionalized violence used to secure the sign of the modern
and/but chaste woman” (Farahani 2007: 92). Assuming an irreconcilable dichotomy between modernity and tradition, Farahani concludes, is proven problematic, as both modern medical technology
and notions of female chastity are entangled in practices of “artificial
virginity” (2007: 81–92). A simplistic dualism between modernity
and tradition is thus explicitly problematized and a more complex
picture is proposed. In Farahani’s reading of “artificial virginity”
however, tradition still represents the condemned norm of female
virginity and chastity as reflected in the use of the word “violence.”
The meaning of modernity instead seems to be reduced to contemporary technologies.
Artificial virginity and its relation to modernity has been the topic
of various other discussions. In one of her comic books, Embroideries
(2005), Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian French author of the trilogy
Persepolis (2000–2), sheds light on the issue of artificial virginity in
a fictive context. The book is about an afternoon gathering of tea
drinking and talking by a group of Iranian women from three different generations who share their own and others’ secrets regarding
issues of sexuality. Faking virginity through plastic surgery is one
of the topics that they seem very comfortable to discuss and even
recommend in times of need. The title of the book becomes clear
when Marjane’s grandmother jokingly asks her for a gift of “full embroidery,” which refers to tightening the vagina for increased sexual
pleasure of both the woman and her partner, but also as a way to
reconstruct virginity after a failed marriage. Overall, a strong sense
of negotiability and malleability of societal norms and taboos regarding sexuality with women as the main actors is reflected in Satrapi’s
book. Experiencing premarital sex and if needed, the reconstruction
of virginity, are celebrated as a form of mocking tradition and as a
sign of women’s strength and independence.
The blogger Negar Farshidi8 emphasizes the normative discrepancy with regard to premarital sexuality in her online article titled
“virginity as a commodity in Iran” (2011). According to her, while
premarital sex among men is increasingly acceptable, the virginity

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59

norm in case of women is still upheld. This gendered double standard seems in accordance with the previously discussed findings of
Mahdavi and Sadeghi. Although there are no statistics on surgical
interventions to restore virginity, its “booming market,” Farshidi argues, indicates a rapid growth. She refers to a few advantageous aspects of this phenomenon among divorced women, whose chances
to remarry increase considerably when they undergo such surgery.
The same issue has been briefly mentioned by the British author
and journalist John R. Bradley in the context of the intensification
of temporary marriage, which in his view is facilitated by the possibilities for “restoring technical virginity” (2010: 95). Whereas restoring virginity was often used in cases of rape and incest in the
past, Afary states, nowadays sexually active women in large cities
of Iran form the main group seeking hymen repair (2009a).9 Farshidi also mentions the point of view of the “adventurous girl” who
gains more space for negotiation with “constraining society’s traditions and customs” through hymenoplasty. Iranian culture in Farshidi’s account is in the process of loosening itself from a traditional
norm, but still has not entirely succeeded in doing so. According to
Mahdavi, the hymen reconstructions reflect a cultural discrepancy
between the sexually active modern girlfriend and the modest, sexually inexperienced bride, which is often a source of confusion and
insecurity for women (2009: 153). Practices of faking virginity are,
according to these authors, a site of negotiation between modernity
and tradition, albeit some of them are more optimistic in their interpretations by recognizing women’s agency, whereas others emphasize a persistent patriarchy.
Hymen reconstructions as a way to revirginize the female body,
as the examples of scholarly work in this section show, indicate a
sense of in-betweenness, a transitional, dubious phase between modernity and tradition in current Iranian society. Some of the scholars regard the phenomenon of hymen reconstruction partly as a
sign of a woman’s agency and as creating space for negotiation, and
these scholars interpret the popularity of such practices as an indication of an open sexual culture among young Iranians. The technologies involved in hymen reconstruction, they argue, attest to
contemporariness and adaptability rather than backwardness and
stagnation. Simultaneously, though, they point out that this phenomenon serves as evidence for continued existence of traditional
norms and patriarchy regarding female sexuality. Moreover, they
argue, women would be confronted with contradictory models of
“the perfect girlfriend as sexually active and adventurous” on the

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Sexual Self-Fashioning

one hand and “the perfect bride as sexually inexperienced and modest” on the other hand. Nevertheless, hymen reconstructions are
mainly understood as a form of mocking the traditional notion of
female modesty which is perceived as disadvantageous for women.
In short, the way Iranians are dealing with female virginity is understood as a reflection of a cultural duality consisting of a complex
interaction between modernity and tradition. This duality, however complex in its configurations, remains steady as the conceptual
framework in which to interpret today’s Iranian sexual constructions in general and premarital sexuality in particular. Furthermore,
in this dual relation, modernity’s advantages for women compared
to tradition seem to be something that goes without saying for most
of these authors.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I discussed the constructions of the ideal Iranian
“us” as explored in understandings of male homoerotic practices
during the Constitutional Revolution, discourses of ideal womanhood and family around the Islamic Revolution, and scholarly conceptualizations of female premarital sexuality in present-day Iran.
I showed how these constructions have been strongly related to
conceptual dualities of modern and traditional, civilized and backward, religious and Westernized. In an assumed struggle between
the poles of these dichotomies, sexuality and gender became a vehicle for negotiation between ideal and condemned collective identities. During politically and socioculturally turbulent periods, the
male pederast and the Westoxicated woman came to symbolize the
abject “other,” from which the ideal Iranian “us” dissociated itself.
In the more recent historical context, gender and sexuality in Iranian society are increasingly described as transitory and ambiguous
based on a scholarly assumption of cultural duality between modernity and traditionalism, symbolized for instance by artificial virginity. The discussions in this chapter, I suggest, form the backdrop
against which the current notions of the Iranian Dutch in regard to
sexuality can be understood. Furthermore, one of my goals in this
book is to challenge this dualism in the following empirical chapters
as some of the scholars whose work has been discussed in chapter
have already done (e.g., Moallem 2005).
Taking modernity as a claim-making device (Cooper 2005), the
cases in this chapter illustrate how articulations of nationalism and

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Sexually Crafting the Nation

ideal collective identities have been expressed through deployments
of sexuality and gender. In this specific Iranian context, positioning
oneself towards issues of sexuality has certain sociopolitical implications connected to ideas of modernity and tradition. Historically, a
civilized and modern Iran, a strong authentic Islamic culture, and,
more recently, a demand for fewer restrictions by the youth have
been expressed via sexuality and gender. This raises the question
of how the Iranian Dutch in contemporary Dutch society deal with
comparable issues of sexuality, given these historical and cultural
particularities. Especially, it is interesting to keep in mind the rather
fundamental difference between Western nineteenth-century perceptions of male homosexual practices as an “Oriental perversion”
and current notions of homosexuality as a marker of Western “civilization.” The historical contingency of discourses on homosexuality
is a telling example of sexuality’s malleability as a social construct.
This chapter’s goal has been to historicize sexuality as a politically
and socially loaded field as part of the context in which the current Iranian Dutch perceptions of sexuality are to be positioned. In
particular, this significant potential of sexuality and gender to be
deployed in processes of collective identification will be taken into
account in the subsequent ethnographic chapters. In this respect,
I will investigate the various framings of sexuality in relation to
modernity as a point of orientation in the constructions of the self
among the participants in this book.

Notes
1. “Intellectuals,” a term often referred to in various sources in this chapter,
seems to lack a precise definition. In the context of the twentieth-century
Iran, the historian Ali Gheissari, defines “intellectuals” as “those who,
although differing in ideological motivations and in solutions to social
problems try to maintain what they regard as an up-to-date vision, seek
social and political change, and identify with the spirit of the modern
world, i.e., with change both as a necessity and as historically inevitable”
(1998: x). Discussing the ideological foundations of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, Hamid Dabashi a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature, describes how in the build-up to the Islamic Revolution of
1979 the concept of “intellectuals” which was previously associated with
secular aspirations, came to include the clerics (1993: 93). The category
of “intellectuals” thus expanded by including those who institutionally
operate in a religious frame of reference (ibid.). This suggests that until a
few decades before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, this category entailed

62

2.

3.

4.

5.
6.

7.

8.
9.

Sexual Self-Fashioning

a secular connotation. It also shows how specific historical circumstances
determine the social meaning of widespread, presumably univocal categories of identification.
The information on Reza Khan originates from the Encyclopedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/293359/Iran/32184/
Rise-of-Reza-Khan, accessed 15 April 2021.
This satirical book was a firm answer to an earlier publication called
“Ta’dib al-Nesvan” (The education of women, 1895) by an anonymous
Qajar prince who discusses in detail the transformations that Iranian
women in his opinion ought to go through in order to become “civilized” (Javadi et al. 1992). The need for women, like children, to be educated by men, never to ask a favor from their husbands, being selfless at
all times except in bed, to walk slowly and not to talk during meals are
among the recommendations in “Ta#dib al-Nesvan.”
Via Encyclopedia Iranica: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/mollanasreddin-ii-political-and-social-weekly, last modified 15 July 2009, accessed 15 April 2021.
The high schools were already sex-segregated and the universities remained mixed.
http://www.iranchamber.com/history/rkhomeini/books/women_posi
tion_khomeini.pdf, accessed 15 April 2021. As no author is mentioned
in this collection of Khomeini’s statements on the position of women, in
the text I will refer to Khomeini himself as the author.
The biggest diasporic Iranian community resides in Los Angeles, reflected
in the popular expression of “Tehrangeles” as a portmanteau of Tehran
and Los Angeles. Around two hundred thousand Iranians are estimated
to live there (Tsubakihara 2013: 335).
Negar Farshidi is a pseudonym of an Iranian journalist in Malaysia.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/12/virgin-hym
en-repair-iran, accessed 15 April 2021.

Chapter 2

A CONDITIONAL MODERN SELF
SEXUAL NEGOTIATIONS OF “MODERNITY”
VIA AN ENDOGENOUS MORALITY

Dancing away Tradition
In 2011, the famous Iranian American pop singer Faramarz Asef
was invited to the Dutch city of Nijmegen for a summer festival.
Before the concert and dancing started, and in between songs, he
emphasized a few times that this kind of celebration was what “we
Iranians” would like to have in Iran. Implicit in his statement was a
reference to the strict rules of the Iranian Islamic regime which does
not allow for such gatherings to take place inside the country. Given
that a considerable part of the Iranian diaspora in Europe consists of
political refugees, anti-regime sentiments are not unusual. He kept
expressing his appreciation for the opportunity to be a part of this
valuable union with his “compatriots,” associating a collective sense
of Iranianness with this kind of celebration. His statements elicited
cheerful reactions from the crowd. Through these acts, one could
say, this group of people rebelled against what the Iranian authorities might find appropriate in terms of public collective leisure activities and instead created their own alternative.
For several years Iranian music artists have been invited to this
Dutch summer festival, drawing a big crowd of approximately five
hundred visitors, mostly of Iranian descent. Attending this multicultural event, the Iranian Dutch from several Dutch cities dance,
drink, and sing during the two or three hours that are set aside for
Iranian performers. Accompanied by friends and family, I visited

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Sexual Self-Fashioning

these annual parties four years in a row, usually starting between
eight and nine p.m., held in the middle of July. Women wearing
colorful, backless, low-cut dresses and high heels are not an exception, neither are men with well-tailored suits or shirts, tightly fitting
the shape of the body. Dolled up young women sometimes arrive
as a group and enter the dance floor together, catching the attention of many bystanders. However, women are often outnumbered
by seemingly single men with fashionable hairstyles wearing strong
cologne. Within ten to fifteen minutes the majority of the fancily
dressed group, including middle-aged people and children, starts
dancing to the loud Westernized popular Iranian music played by a
live band or a DJ.
These summer festivities are part of the international, annual
four days of walking in Nijmegen, called 4Daagse. As the largest
multiday walking event in the world, each year 4Daagse attracts approximately 42,000 participants, who, depending on their age and
sex, walk a total of 120, 160, or 200 kilometers. Dutch media covers 4Daagse extensively, as it is a well-known national festival in
the Netherlands. A source of national pride, this event presents the
Netherlands as a tolerant country that warmly welcomes various
nationalities and cultures. A sense of peaceful togetherness is prevalent, while differences are displayed using national flags explicating the origin of groups of participants from other countries. At the
Dutch national level, an organization called Whaa1 celebrates “ethnic plurality” by inviting, usually, non-Western artists to Nijmegen
for musical and dance performances, including Somali, Sudanese,
Kurdish, and Iranian artists. If an optimistic approach of internationalism can be attributed to the 4Daagse festivity as a whole, a
more recent ideology of multiculturalism seems to characterize the
policy of the Whaa organization. The goal of this organization, they
claim, is to provide the opportunity for various ethnic groups to
express their own cultural sentiments through music and dance.
Furthermore, around the podium of Whaa a variety of popular international cuisine is served, giving the atmosphere an extra multicultural look. As such, a positive approach to cultural diversity is
articulated.
If the 4Daagse in general and the contribution of Whaa in particular are at some level celebrations of diversity, then a question can
be posed about the kind of diversity that would be constituted by
the Iranian participants. The remarkable emphasis on appearance
among the Iranian Dutch as practiced during the summer festivities raises the question of what it means for them to distinguish

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65

themselves in this particular way and how this performance might
be perceived by others. Especially in the broader context of how
immigrants from Islamic countries are usually represented in the
Dutch media, their appearance seems exceptional. The general perception of Muslims, a religious and cultural category to which the
Iranian Dutch are also assumed to belong even though they might
not identify as such, would suggest a much more puritanical and
prudish public presentation. Outsiders often associate people from
the Middle East with an orthodox version of Islamic culture and traditionalism. Could this then mean that during these festivities the
Iranian Dutch figuratively dance away this potential traditional collective identity attributed to them by outsiders? Either intentionally
or unintentionally, they differentiate themselves from other Islamic
immigrant communities at the level of representation. The Iranian
festivity during 4Daagse can be understood as a setting where identities are performed, enacted, and negotiated.2 In this chapter, I am
concerned with a collective story about “modern” sexuality among
the Iranian Dutch through which they perform an identity in opposition to tradition. While the previous chapter was concerned with
the entanglement of Iranian discourses of sexuality and modernization from a historical perspective, this chapter engages with contemporary Iranian Dutch constructions of modern sexuality using
ethnographic material.
During my fieldwork, I encountered various stories told by the
research participants about how they perceive sexuality. Looking
for patterns when analyzing those stories, I noticed that for many of
them talking about sexuality was entangled with imagining a linear
development that they ascribed to their own attitude from backward to progressive, from traditional to modern, and from restrictive
to more open—often with the migration to the Netherlands as the
turning point. Although the stories differed individually, framing attitudes towards sexuality as a domain undergoing progress was observed in fifteen of the thirty individuals I interviewed one-on-one,
in four of the five group discussions, and in almost every occasion
where I conducted fieldwork by doing participant observation, including a clear majority in the online discussions analyzed via the
method of text analysis. Next to this narrative framing of sexuality
containing ideas about improvement in thoughts and behavior to
be discussed in this chapter, there were two other collective stories
which will be presented in Chapters 3 and 4.
More specifically, this chapter deals with the accounts of those
Iranian Dutch participants who made explicit and sometimes implicit

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references to an ideal of modernity when answering my questions
about sexuality. The main questions to answer in this chapter are
how this modernity-related sexuality is understood, what negotiations are involved in conceptualizing sexuality as modern, and what
is being accomplished through those negotiations? The goal is to
unravel the underlying rhetorical efforts to construct a modern self
through sexuality. Important to emphasize here is that, as explained
in the Introduction, “modernity” is in this project understood as a
“claim-making device” (Cooper 2005) rather than an attributable
and measurable self-evident quality. In other words, the claims that
the Iranian Dutch make in the name of and in reference to modernity will be analyzed instead of, for instance, evaluating how modern their perceptions of sexuality are.
In the next sections, I will first present a conceptual framework
underlying the analysis in this chapter. A brief discussion will then
follow on how the participants perceived virginity, homosexuality,
and nonmarital cohabitation with a reference to an ideal of modernity as opposed to a condemned traditionality and religiosity. The
next sections will further focus on claims of subjectivity via conceptualizations of virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation. In the conclusion, I will reflect on how discursive constructions
of modern sexualities enable the fashioning of what I will call a
conditional modern self among a group of Iranian Dutch participants.

Sexual Dialogues within the Multicultural Self
As a consequence of increasing exchanges of capital and communication, the anthropologist Toon van Meijl posits that more and more
people are living in “cultural contact zones” other than where they
grew up (2008: 182). The growing number of multicultural societies, he argues, affects the sociopolitical environment as well as the
mind of the individual selves. To understand how the intercultural
exchange in the globalized world translates to the transformations of
the individual mind, he borrows the concept of “the dialogical self”
proposed by the psychologist Hermans. By employing this concept,
Van Meijl explains, the complexities of multicultural circumstances
and multiple cultural identifications can be covered. It allows for
taking into account the voices and counter-voices represented in
“the self of multicultural citizens” (ibid.: 166). As such, the negotiations, disagreements, and tensions in multicultural settings, Van
Meijl suggests, also take place within the dialogical self of multicul-

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tural individuals. This dialogue is understood as essential in maintaining a balance between the different “cultural landscapes” with
which people are confronted in current globalized contexts (ibid.:
182).
Apart from being particularly useful in multicultural contexts,
this notion of the dialogical self underscores the constructed character of subjectivity and incorporates the social into the individual
simultaneously. In this chapter, I will look for the dialogues in the
individual selves of the Iranian Dutch research participants when
talking about virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation. More specifically, I am interested in various discursive cultural
fields within which the Iranian Dutch navigate in order to continuously take a stance upon issues of sexuality. While tracing the dialogue within the self will be employed as an analytical thread, I will
also investigate whether temporary outcomes of this dialogue can
be indicated.
Understanding the conceptualizations of sexuality as forms of “sexual storytelling” was introduced by the sociologist Kenneth Plummer
and is another part of the analytical component of this chapter. As
explained in the Introduction, according to Plummer, sexual stories
have the potency to speak to highly ambivalent and wide cultural
concerns other than merely sexual concerns (1995: 176). To tell
sexuality-related stories, he suggests, is a way to order and organize
the social life. As part of this process of ordering and organizing, ambiguities will emerge and phenomena will appear which threaten the
purity of the established order. In fact, “the greater the sensed disorder, the stronger may be the need for stories to create tighter classifications, stronger boundaries, rules for living” (ibid.: 177).
This notion of “sexual storytelling” places sexuality at the heart
of negotiations on the sociocultural level, making it a barometer
for the vast changes taking place within and across societies, as was
also argued by the anthropologist Florence E. Babb (2004: 225). In
the words of James Farrer, whose work is inspired by Plummer’s
concept of “sexual storytelling,” sexual cultures can be understood
as “a process of social mapping and social criticism as well as selfpresentation and self-identity formation” (Farrer 2002: 8). In mapping and engaging with the social world, then, sexuality is assumed
to play a crucial role. More specifically, the acts of sexual storytelling are in Plummer’s view indicative of marking out identity via a
differentiation between the self and the other, and as a way to construct the moral life. Conceptualizations of sexuality then become
associated with negotiations of (im)morality, going hand in hand

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with processes of identification and “othering.” Understanding the
accounts of Iranian Dutch individuals on sexuality as socially embedded, I will in this chapter particularly pay attention to the kind
of morality that is being constructed via those accounts.
The concepts of “dialogical self” and “sexual storytelling” will
be employed in this chapter as the theoretical tools to simultaneously capture the ongoing dialogues in the individual minds of the
research participants and the socially embedded moral concerns
expressed in their stories about sexuality. In the following, I will explain how modernity is an important point of orientation in the dialogue within the self and how it guides the way the participants talk
about issues of sexuality. First, however, I will briefly discuss a positive change that many research participants claimed had taken place
in their attitude towards sexuality or a change that they thought
was necessary more generally in the Iranian Dutch community.

An Ideal of Modernity
Of the thirty individuals with whom I spoke in a one-one-one setting, fifteen emphasized that their attitude towards sexuality had
changed radically since they had migrated to the Netherlands. “Do
you want to know about my position on this topic at this moment or
how I used to think about it until eleven, twelve years ago?” asked
Amin, a middle-aged man when we were discussing sexual relations
before marriage. He, his wife, and their baby daughter had come to
the Netherlands fourteen years prior to our conversation. Amin had
studied medicine in Iran for a few years before they left the country.
In the Netherlands, both he and his wife were unemployed and still
looking for a job. Explaining the difference between his previous
and current ideas about sexuality, he referred to his observations in
Dutch society and companionship with certain people as two reasons why he had changed his mind.
There is a difference between this [Dutch] and that [Iranian] society.
My ideas began to change here [in the Netherlands]. I started to think
of premarital sex as something normal. I used to think that those who
have sex before marriage are unable to control themselves. But here I
see that it is possible to have sexual relationships with even ten people and have a good marriage later in life.

An active premarital sexual life, Amin had come to witness in the
Netherlands, does not necessarily lead to promiscuity, endangering

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stable future marital relationships. Given that sexual relationships
are socially and legally problematic in Iranian society, his former
theories on how such interactions would ruin marriage were not
put into practice until he moved to the Netherlands, a country were
premarital sex is rather common. Further explaining how such observations made it easier for him and his wife to deal with their
daughter’s sexuality, he continued:
I think that having contact with modern Iranian and Dutch friends
has influenced me profoundly. If I had hung out with traditional Iranian families, I would have stayed the same or maybe had changed
only a bit.

The special thing about these “modern” Iranian friends, he explained,
was that “sex before marriage was not a taboo for them anymore.”
I then asked him whether he was happy with this change, and he
said: “I want to be able to accept my daughter’s hagh (right) to decide about her own body. I’m still working on it, but I definitely
would say that I have improved, yes.” This quote shows how the
growing acceptance of premarital sex is directly connected to an improved self.
Aref, another male participant in his thirties initially thought he
was not “suitable” as a participant in my research for he had changed
so much that he could not be considered “a typical Iranian man with
traditional ideas and beliefs” anymore. With his mother and sister,
he had left Iran about fifteen years ago, at which time he was nineteen years old. He said that if I was interested in understating the
Iranian culture, he was not the right person to interview. “It is a long
time since I belonged to that [Iranian] culture. I have the same ideas
and thoughts as the Dutch people. I have the same ideas.” I asked
him how he would describe his current ideas, to which he replied:
“Fortunately, I have become much less gheyrati [being protective of
the family honor]. . . . The more roshan-fekr [open-minded] Iranians have changed a lot. They have become very modern. I am glad
I have changed.” Accepting female premarital sexuality, both Amin
and Aref suggest, is a sign of becoming modern, a process unfolding
in the Netherlands among “open-minded” Iranians.
During the fieldwork, I encountered many more such claims of
changed attitude towards sexuality. Maral, a highly educated woman
in her thirties, stated that although she was quite critical about
Dutch society, she had improved herself in many ways since she
came to live in the Netherlands. “I’m more open now. I have been
confronted with things here that were taboo in Iran. In my opinion

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when someone migrates, he or she migrates also internally. This is
really valuable, compared to someone who stays in one place. There
is more freedom here, . . . . We now live in a jame’e modern [modern
society]. Here I have learned to be more flexible and open.” One of
those taboos was homosexuality, which she now considered “an utmost shakhsi (personal) issue . . . . Now, I don’t judge. I have really
thought about this, although I had difficulties with it in the beginning.” In “modern” Dutch society, Maral assumed, she had released
herself from a judgemental attitude towards homosexuality by putting effort into reconsidering her previous restrictive conceptions.
This idea of change was seen as both welcome and necessary,
indicating the extent of one’s progress. Comparing herself to her
husband, Soraya, a young mother of two children was dissatisfied
with the extent of change in her attitude regarding her children’s
sexuality:
My husband is more open-minded than I am. For him it’s easier to accept things. He says that children have their needs and that if we had
the same freedom in the past, we would have wanted the same for
ourselves. He says that we probably would have loved to have [had] a
boyfriend or girlfriend to go out with. “These children are just having
fun, they are doing something very natural,” he says. Because of the
freedom here in a modern and free society, children can live a very
different life compared to us.

Soraya and her husband are cousins who married at a very young
age. They never had the chance to envision a life with someone else,
she said when reflecting on her early teenage years. Their marriage
was arranged when they were children. “As kids, we played together and he was always nice to me.” They both grew up in a small
southern town in Iran and had decided to try having a better life in
the Netherlands after their first child was born. Although she spoke
affectionately about her relationship with her husband, she wished
a different situation for their children than the circumstances under
which she had married her partner. Because she made this realization, she is now expecting herself to become more open to opportunities provided in “modern” Dutch society enabling people to gain
experience and to make more informed relationship decisions.
This openness towards Dutch society sometimes went hand in
hand with dissociation from the Iranian Dutch community. Talking
about social networks, Nasser, a highly educated man in his midtwenties, said that he had almost no contact with other Iranians and
would never attend Iranian gatherings. Nasser came to the Nether-

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lands to join his father and brother when he was thirteen and he
grew up in one of the bigger Dutch cities. At the time of our conversation, he was studying mathematics and living in a dormitory.
Nuancing his previous statements, he added “I do have a few good
[Iranian] friends. They are not religious, though. They are modern.
They have liberated themselves from Iranian customs. I feel comfortable with them.” Explaining what characterized those Iranians
with whom he did not feel comfortable, he said:
I haven’t inherited anything from Iranian culture. . . . I don’t know
how to behave as a traditional Iranian man in relation to homosexuality, for example. It’s unknown to me. . . . I don’t like making jokes
about homosexuality, as other Iranians do. I don’t participate. For two
reasons: they are insulting a group of people and, secondly, I don’t
even see why their statements are funny. If someone acts strangely,
a man who behaves like a woman, I may find it remarkable, but not
funny.

Placing himself almost in the position of an outsider in relation to the
Iranian community, Nasser makes a distinction between traditional
and modern Iranians based on attitude towards homosexuality.
The acceptance of homosexuality, especially in online discussions, was also seen as a necessary outcome of a more “objective”
approach. In an article published by Radio Zamaneh, called “An
Analysis of Reasons to Reject Homosexuality,” the author claims
that perceiving homosexuality as a sickness is one of the main arguments in the mainstream homophobic discourse among Iranians.3
After mentioning that such argument lacks any scientific ground,
he refers to organizations such as the World Health Organization
and “other scientific, health and medical centers” as impartial, reliable sources which have declared homosexuality tabi’i (natural).
In “our country,” meaning Iran, he further explains, “political and
social circumstances on the one hand and the general difficulties to
discuss issues of jensiyat (gender/sexuality) on the other hand have
prevented us from having serious, impartial scientific discussions
[on homosexuality].” Bellow the article, twenty-five readers continue the discussion among themselves, expressing both criticism
and affirmations. Paraphrasing the well-known Iranian poet Sohrab
Sepehri, one of them says in agreement with the author: “We need
to clean our eyes and look differently.” In this particular discussion,
the word modern or modernity is not used. Several references, however, are made to Iran as a sonnati (traditional) society and gharb
(the West) as an exemplary region in terms of the ongoing struggle

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for homosexuals’ rights and the openness in dealing with issues of
sexuality.
Although my research focused on notions rather than experiences of homosexuality, some of the research participants identified
as gay, lesbian, or queer. For instance, I was introduced to Farhad,
a homosexual young man in his thirties, via acquaintances who
worked for a Dutch center that provides legal and social help to refugees. Farhad was initially a client and later started to do volunteer
work for the same organization as a social worker. During the eight
years he had been living in the Netherlands, he earned a bachelor’s
degree in sociology. Only after receiving a residence permit in the
Netherlands, he told his family in Iran about his homosexuality on
the phone. “It wasn’t an easy conversation. They were shocked.” A
few years later when his mother visited him in the Netherlands and
met his cohabiting partner, she admitted that the family in a way already knew about his homosexuality but was afraid of talking about
it. “My mother likes my partner. She says that she doesn’t see him
as her son-in-law, but she thinks that he is a very nice person. He is
Dutch and we have been living together for three years now.”
Farhad had limited contact with other Iranian Dutch, which according to him “has nothing to do with my homosexuality. . . . I could
easily go to an Iranian gathering with my husband and kiss him without any problems. Ten years ago, I wasn’t like this. . . . I have learned
to do the things that I like and to be the way I want to be.” Apart from
two friends, he felt restricted among Iranians. He further explained:
These two friends of mine are heterosexual. They are so open. We
discuss things that I can’t imagine other Iranians could even mention.
For example, things related to sexuality. They are highly educated.
They also don’t have much contact with other Iranians. The four of
us, me, and my partner and these two friends, are very close. . . .
In the Iranian community, it is not usual for a woman to say something about her menstruation among men. It is absolutely a taboo.
. . . I don’t think it’s normal for an Iranian woman to say something
about having pain in her breast. We also talk about whether we had
nice sex. We can talk and ask each other about everything. It is very
modern, very Western. If you are a free person, then it shouldn’t be
just about what you wear, but also about what you think. I want to
be completely free and that is a bit difficult among Iranians. Not that
they are extreme Muslims, but they are free until a certain level; they
dance and wear modern clothes. I know that they accept me, but at
some point, I can’t be completely free when I’m around them and I
don’t want that.

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Complete honesty, feeling at ease with others, openness about sex
and sexuality, and being “truly modern” are, in Farhad’s statements,
appreciated and all connected to one another. This is opposed to taboos related to gender and sexuality, extreme religiosity, and certain
degrees of pseudo-modernity. True acceptance of homosexuality,
Farhad suggests, is lacking in the Iranian Dutch community, preventing him from feeling comfortable and free. The othering of “extreme Muslims,” furthermore, is a reference used by several other
research participants to draw a contrast between the Iranian Dutch
and other immigrant communities with an Islamic background, particularly Turks and Moroccans. Such dissociations containing religious, racial, and classed connotations, are not unique to the Iranian
Dutch and have been observed in other Iranian diasporic contexts
as well (Fathi 2017: 140). To Farhad, however, this dissociation has
succeeded only partially.
Especially for those research participants who had experienced
marriage in Iran, the possibility of nonmarital cohabitation in the
Netherlands was seen as an important advantage, compared to the
situation of couples in Iran which they assumed to be rather problematic. In a focus group with only women, Shiva, a young mother
of two children reflected on her marriage which took place in Iran
by saying: “We didn’t have any freedom. My parents made all the
decisions. It’s here [in the Netherlands] that I started to realize what
marriage and being someone’s partner means.” The four women
who took part in this focus group discussion presented themselves
as religious and overall expressed conservative ideas about sex before marriage and homosexuality. When Shiva stated that nonmarital cohabitation would be a suitable way for her daughter in the
future to get to know her partner before marriage, the others reacted with surprise. One of them asked her: “Do you mean sigheh
[Shi’i temporary marriage]?” Shiva replied: “I have studied this
matter and know for sure that samenwonen [nonmarital cohabitation in Dutch] is not the same as sigheh.” Nevertheless, assuring the
others, she added: “Of course, I will not allow her [the daughter]
to change partner every day, but we should make use of the opportunities of living in a modern society where people have more
azadi-ye jensi [sexual freedom].” In reaction to this, another woman
said with a disproving tone that in Iran the only two qualities the
marital partner has to have are a higher educational degree and a
well-paid job. A third woman nodded and followed: “Even medical
doctors sometimes abuse their wives.” In this way the group seemed
to agree that nonmarital cohabitation in the Dutch context would

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solve many of the problems couples experience in Iran. This glorification of Dutch sexuality culture as modern not only helps to position the self “on the right track” towards improvement, but it also
ignores the ongoing emancipatory struggles within Dutch society
(Hekma and Duyvendak 2011).
Beside nonmarital cohabitation, other practices were identified
as domains for improvement. Discussing sexual experiences with
women with different nationalities, Mohsen, a young male research
participant, reflected on how he had noticed a difference in the level
of openness and ease in indicating sexual needs during intimate
moments. Especially when it came to oral sex, in his experience,
“women with an Iranian background seem to feel ashamed, including the more sexually liberated women.” Trying to understand this
in a conversation with one of his Iranian ex-partners, he came to
understand that, at least for her, being brought up with the idea of
her vagina as a “dirty place” and the hair surrounding it as ezafeh
(redundant), made it difficult for her to enjoy oral sex. Subconscious
discomfort with certain body parts as well as not being used to receiving sexual pleasure, he concluded, prevented otherwise sexually liberated Iranian woman from fully enjoying sexual intimacy in
a relationship. Detecting such ingrained cultural barriers, Mohsen
suggested, would help women further their sexual liberations.
As these extracts from my conversations with several research
participants indicate, becoming modern or modernity was perceived
as an ideal to be achieved through certain attitudes towards sexuality. Openly discussing and breaking sexual taboos, acceptance of
premarital sex and homosexuality, and making informed decisions
about relationships are seen as opportunities to become modern,
provided in the context of the Netherlands. Migration is the core
setting in which such positive transformation can take place. Implicit in the articulations of the Iranian Dutch research participants
introduced in this chapter are two opposed grand narratives of sexuality: open and modern versus traditional and restrictive. While
the former is idealized and often associated with the Netherlands
in particular or the West in general, the latter is condemned and
ascribed to the Iranian culture, tradition, and orthodox religiosity.
In this way the two grand narratives of sexuality represent opposed
cultural spaces in relation to which the participants position themselves. Having briefly presented a picture of a dominant framing of
sexuality among the Iranian Dutch research participants, in the following three sections I will provide a more in-depth analysis of how,
with respect to the contested fields of virginity, homosexuality, and

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nonmarital cohabitation, many of the research participants negotiate between the two perceived opposing cultural spaces.

The Mental Hymen
An awkward situation happened during one of my conversations
with a highly educated twenty-four-year-old Iranian Dutch woman
Elnaz when we were talking about virginity. While she was telling
me about her first sexual experience around her twentieth birthday,
I remembered a previous conversation that I had with her mother,
Pari, as part of another research project.4 Pari, a hard-working nurse
and experienced jogger, told me about how proud she was of her
daughter for not causing any problems with respect to sexuality.
“Fortunately, she is not sexually active, and she doesn’t seem interested [in sex] either.” Her daughter, she repeated a few times, did
not even think about “those kinds of interaction with men.” She
emphasized that her daughter was a paak (clean) girl, who would
never give herself away easily. When I asked Pari how she would
feel if her daughter decided to have premarital sex in the future, she
resolutely replied “no problem,” since she believed in tarbiyat-e azad
(open upbringing), and her daughter was free to decide about her
own body. She did not want her daughter to be raised under the
pressure of what she called agha’ed-e sonnati (traditional beliefs) like
herself. The impression Pari was trying to make was a peaceful relationship between a chaste daughter and an open-minded mother.
At that time, Elnaz was well past her twentieth birthday.
Contrary to what Pari told me, Elnaz appeared to have been engaged in sexual relationships for some years, a discrepancy I did not
mention to Elnaz. She went on talking about her emotional problems after ending her first relationship at the age of nineteen. Her
mother, she said, wanted her to move on as quickly as possible and
not to mention the failed relationship too often, especially not in
front of their family in Iran. In fact, Elnaz continued, her mother
always avoided talking about sensitive issues like sex and menstruation. Internet, books, and friends were the important sources of
information about sexual issues for Elnaz. In dealing with her sexual
relationships she, furthermore, complained about being burdened
by implicit family expectations:
My mom is quite gheyrati (protective of one’s honor), even though
she sees herself as a modern mother. I don’t mention my relationships

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to her right away, because I know that she wouldn’t like it, neither
would our family in Iran. If I did something controversial, I don’t
know how to say this . . . I need to take these things into account all
the time. I know that I would hurt them. I don’t want them to be embarrassed just because I want to date men.

While gheyrati is often used as a reference to men protecting women’s honor, Elnaz here breaks with this gendered connotation and
applies it to her mother as a single parent who seems to be concerned with both her daughter’s reputation and an imperative to
act modern. Dealing with mixed messages from her mother and the
fear of offending family members in Iran made it emotionally difficult for Elnaz to manage her sexual life. To deal with this contradiction, Elnaz had developed a strategy which was to wait for a while
and to inform her mother about a relationship only if it seemed serious enough. A failed relationship rather than the premarital relationship itself would potentially damage the family’s honor.
A comparable yet more transparent mother-daughter dynamic
appeared during a focus group discussion in which four men and
four women of different ages and backgrounds participated. Hoda,
a twenty-two-year-old student who was sitting next to her mother,
shared with the group her feelings of anxiety and insecurity about
her relationship with her boyfriend. Even though her parents were
aware of this relationship, Hoda and her boyfriend did not dare to
express their love for each other in front of her parents or even in
public places by sitting close to each other or holding hands. This
could provoke gossip in the Iranian community, giving her family a bad reputation and hurting her parents’ feelings. Expressions
of affection in public by a woman, she assumed, would be socially
unacceptable among the Iranian Dutch. Hoda’s mother, Minoo, responded to these comments by expressing her regret and confusion. She emphasized that she and her husband explicitly allow
their daughters to have premarital relationships and have always
respected their “individual freedom.” “As parents, we try so hard to
liberate ourselves from the backward traditional culture in which
we grew up.” Hoda then replied that her feelings of shame and guilt
were not based only on what her parents officially tell her. “I am sure
that you [looking at her mother] would mind other Iranians talking
badly about me. You and dad say it’s ok, but it just doesn’t feel ok to
me.” Experiences of Hoda and Elnaz suggest that the younger generation of Iranian Dutch women does engage in premarital sexual
relationships with the knowledge of parents, though not without

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a sense of guilt that seems to be informed by contradictory signals
from their parent about what is allowed versus what is desirable.
In another focus group discussion, two fathers started to talk
about their daughters when the topic of virginity came up. Javad, a
father of two teenage girls, made his position clear by stating: “Let
me very clear. My daughter [oldest one] is free to experience sex
before marriage. In fact, I think it is healthy for women and men to
have such experiences.” In his view, young people should experience this kind of intimacy before entering a committed relationship.
Mahmood, a father of two girls and one boy, supported Javad in
his opinion and stated that young people should be allowed to find
out about what they want in life, including sexual relationships.
“Yes, but it should be based on mantegh (logic/rationality),” Javad
continued. To which Mahmood replied: “Yes, of course, otherwise
they end up hurting themselves.” They both agreed that superficial
relationships would be hurtful and should be avoided by using one’s
mantegh. Thus, while losing virginity before marriage as part of a
relationship was applauded as “healthy,” mantegh was presented as
a condition for premarital sexuality to be appropriate. Furthermore,
mantegh was opposed to superficiality and seen as a tool to decrease
the chance of getting hurt. Javad added that he wished he and his
wife would have had the same opportunity as their children. “I am
glad that our daughters can taste modernity in this society.” Both
fathers, similar to the mothers in the previous paragraphs, expect
themselves to accept their daughters’ premarital sexual engagement. Nevertheless, this acceptance tends to be limited, which is
either communicated indirectly through mixed messages or by setting conditions, such as using mantegh. The self in the case of these
parents is in a contradictory dialogue with ideals and discontents
regarding premarital sexual behavior. While for Pari and Minoo this
dialogue is still ongoing at the time of our conversations, for Javad
and Mahmood a notion of rationality seems to provide a way out.
A rational self that they imagine for their daughters is seen as reliable in making the right decision. In all these discussions, virginity
is exclusively associated with women, pointing to its self-evident
gendered connotation.
Other kinds of “conditions” were suggested by the research participants for engaging in premarital sex. Raha, a highly educated
married woman in her thirties, stated that unlike her “traditional”
family she was convinced that having sex before marriage was not
immoral, as long as one manages not to let it harm one’s “soul.”
Raha had an interest in ma’naviyat (spirituality), which she pre-

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sented as a framework for how she talked and thought about (premarital) sexuality. According to her, a woman should protect her
soul by using her “wisdom” to engage in “truly loving relationships”
only. “I personally wouldn’t want to be with someone for just two
months and with another person for three months. You know? Your
partner should be worth getting close to. That is how I understand
ma’naviyat.” Spirituality, as a form of wisdom would protect women
from harming their souls. Losing virginity, which presumably applied only to women, did not seem to be an issue in itself; rather, the
condition for having sex more generally was her concern. Having
sex was approved of in a specific frame of “spirituality,” excluding
loose, short-term relationships.
“Commitment” was another condition that was brought forward in discussions on virginity and premarital sex. “Real love,”
said Fariba, a middle-aged woman, “does not exist without commitment, especially for women.” In a focus group discussion and in
presence of her husband she said that their children were allowed to
have premarital sexual relationships, as long as they were aware of
the importance of ta’ahod (commitment). She added:
I agree. I don’t want to generalize, but when I look around me, just in
my own environment, I see that people are not really capable of having truly affectionate relationships. For me, an important characteristic of a profound relationship is that partners are not just concerned
with their individual sexual needs but that they are able to selfsacrifice if necessary. We should not go too far in our mission, our wish
to become modern. Even though that is a good thing as a principle.

Contrasted to an individualistic approach, commitment is presented
as a sign of profoundness in a relationship, with a focus on women.
What the conditions of rationality, spirituality, and commitment
have in common is that they provide limitation to licentiousness,
which is perceived as a potential danger of “modern” sexuality.
Embracing modernity by allowing premarital sexuality, yet fearing its assumed looseness, is elaborately discussed on the website
of the Netherlands-based Iranian broadcaster Radio Zamaneh following an article provocatively titled “Let’s Take Back Our Vagina.”5
The author, Parisa Kaka’i, is a feminist activist calling for openness
about the topic of the female body, which is according to her taboo,
especially when it concerns the genitals. This openness, she argues,
is an act of reappropriation, since men are not the real owners of
women’s bodies. A woman is in current society the amanatdar (safe
keeper) of her vagina. They are supposed to take care of it for some-

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one else, namely the husband. The comments below the article vary
enormously from total agreement, recognition, and appreciation of
the author’s “courage” to complete rejection, loathing, and accusing
the author of “shamelessness” for even mentioning such an “outrageous, irrelevant topic.” A number of readers expressed feelings
of uneasiness about being confronted with this topic and warned
against the danger of “being too eager to become modern.” Yet,
overall, a collective need for modernization among Iranians is emphasized by both the author and most readers. The way to realize
this change and how quickly, however, cause disagreements.
For the majority of the research participants I talked to, as we
have seen in the previous narrations, whether to have sex before
marriage was not the main concern; what mattered mostly were
the conditions for having premarital sex. Considerable effort was put
into explaining a certain attitude that they thought was appropriate when engaging in premarital sexual relations. The acceptance
of premarital sex was both associated with becoming modern, and
mainly discussed in relation to women. The ideal of modernity, as
such, becomes attainable via female sexuality, making modernity a
gendered affair. Almost everyone who had grown up in Iran claimed
to have left their traditional and religious past behind, a process that
often translated into the will to raise their children with a liberal
sexual upbringing. The children themselves, though, felt differently
for they still experienced some sort of (implicit) restrictive expectations from their parents and the wider community. To make premarital sex acceptable, limits were set, including rationality, spirituality,
and commitment. Whereas concrete rejection of premarital sex was
disapproved of as backward in a dialogue within the self, rationality,
spirituality, and commitment functioned as rhetorical strategies that
narrowed sexual freedom without becoming prudish. In this way
the potential danger of licentiousness attributed to modern sexuality could be tamed. The discursive rhetorical manoeuvres (rationality, spirituality, and commitment) thus enabled both fashioning
a modern self by allowing practices of female premarital sexuality
and simultaneously limiting this freedom by promoting an ideal of
female piety and chastity. In her research in the Swedish context,
Farahani (2017) points at the importance of a gendered virginity
norm regardless of whether women are actually sexually active or
not before marriage. My research shows that in the Iranian Dutch
context this norm is perceived as backward and yet reintroduced
through the backdoor by setting gendered conditions for acceptable
premarital sex. It is through women’s sexuality that modernity is

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simultaneously embraced and policed. The boundary that according
to this conditional modernity cannot be crossed is not one between
virginity and non-virginity; it is a boundary between acceptable and
unacceptable premarital sex. Moreover, this conditionality depends
on the individual’s attitude, instead of clear restrictions on certain
practices. The mental hymen, rather than the physical hymen,
seems to be at stake.

Homosexuality as a Tragic Misfortune
The topic of homosexuality appeared to be more sensitive among
the research participants than virginity. Some took a position of distance, others felt that they had to accept it as something that simply exists, and another group expressed feelings of uneasiness. For
instance, Rasa, a young highly educated woman, formulated her
opinion on sexuality as follows: “I haven’t really thought about it.
It’s just something that happens in this country. They have decided
to give these people the freedom to act upon their sexual needs.” By
presenting homosexuality as part of “their” (Dutch) culture, Rasa in
a way discharged herself from having an opinion.
Some of the participants felt they had no choice other than to
accept homosexuality as part of human sexual behavior. Mehri, a
middle-aged religious woman and a single mother, said: “What can
we do about it? It’s in their genes. They can’t change who they are,
even though a lot of them would probably want to. We are forced to
accept it.” As something that is genetically determined, homosexuality becomes a natural phenomenon and thus a matter of fact. This
interpretation of homosexuality reflects a sense of tolerance, rather
than, for example, acceptance as in the case of premarital sex. This
was especially apparent in Amin’s statements, a middle-aged father
of two teenage girls. “I think that it’s a pity that they have to live like
this. It’s not that I would take a fanatic position in this regard, I just
think that it’s a pity.” Earlier in the conversation, Amin explained
his position on homosexuality in a far more positive way:
Like other human beings, homosexuals are entitled to act upon their
sexual needs. In fact, if there was a referendum about saying yes or no
to homosexuality, which of course is not needed in the Netherlands
anymore, I would say yes.

Nevertheless, homosexuality provoked a sense of pity in Amin. This
notion of pity attributes an unfortunate status to homosexuality.

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Amin feels sympathetic sorrow for what he perceives as homosexuals’ suffering and regrets the fact that nothing can be done about
their misery. According to Amin, getting married and having children are crucial elements of happiness in life. When I asked him
how he thinks he might feel if his daughter happened to be a lesbian:
I won’t stop her and just feel sorry. That’s how it is. I think I have
the right not to like my daughter’s decision. But I won’t do anything
about it. Sometimes you lose your child because of sickness . . . that’s
how I see it. I couldn’t say it doesn’t matter to me, because it does.
It really does. I want my daughters to have a nice, happy life, to get
married to men and have children. But sometimes they do a blood
test and tell you that your child has cancer. What can you do about it?

The association between having cancer and homosexuality underlies the unfortunate quality that Amin ascribes to the latter. Homosexuals, in other words, are incapable of having a nice, happy life,
which explains the feelings of pity. In a dialogue within the self, the
acceptance of homosexuality as a human right is weighed against
homosexuality as something regrettable. The rhetoric of pity, furthermore, assumes a hierarchy: one is in the position of feeling sorry
for another person. Pity entails simultaneously tolerance and regret.
That homosexuality framed as “genetically determined,” “innate,” or “fixed” is easier to tolerate than homosexuality perceived
as a “choice,” can be illustrated through some of the few discussions
on bisexuality I encountered during my research. Especially a lack
of controlling one’s sexual desire was associated with bisexuality. In
a focus group, Mahmood rhetorically asked: “It’s one thing to say
homosexuals are born like this, but what are we supposed to think
of bisexuality? If you are able to be with both men and women,
then why can’t you just choose the opposite sex like other people?
Isn’t it that a matter of bibandobari (unrestrainedness)?” These questions suggest that homosexuality understood as a choice would be
problematic. Only within the framework of nature or genetic confinement, is homosexuality tolerated. In another focus group, one
of the participants, Fariba, shared a story about a female relative
who she said had become bisexual and started a relationship with
a woman after thirty years of a heterosexual marriage and having
three grownup children. This was completely incomprehensible for
Fariba: “How can someone manage to live in a heterosexual marriage for such a long time and suddenly realize that she is bisexual?” This kind of behavior, she stated, could only be the result of
“boredom and egoism.” A comparable notion of looseness, as was

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associated with unrestrained premarital sexuality discussed earlier,
is apparent in how these participants conceptualize bisexuality.
Ideas about homosexuality also served to distinguish between
true and fake modernity. Lida, a highly educated, single young
woman, described her position on homosexuality as follows:
I totally accept homosexuality and I must say that Iranians that I have
contact with are modern and accept homosexuality too. Still, they do
make jokes about it. My ex-boyfriend (also an Iranian Dutch), who
considers himself a very modern person, would refer to my gay friend
as gay, in the sense that he would ask me “where is your gay friend?”
The sexual orientation of this person becomes the most important
aspect of his identity. This means that he (ex-boyfriend) hasn’t really
accepted it. It is still a strange thing to him.

Lida presents herself as someone belonging to a modern group of
Iranian Dutch, but she reports simultaneously on a superficial acceptance of homosexuality. The jokes and the explicit reference to
someone’s homosexual identity would reveal the lack of real acceptance—that is, the lack of real modernity. While stating this, she
positions herself in the group of the “truly modern” Iranian Dutch.
The explicit reference to modernity in discussions of homosexuality happens frequently in online debates. Contrary to what I
observed in one-on-one conversations, the online discussions, especially those on Radio Zamaneh, deal elaborately with the topic of
homosexuality. This might have to do with its audience being more
concerned with culturally and socially controversial topics and the
progressive mission of this platform. One such discussion follows an
article titled “Queer Struggle, a Step towards Democracy?” in which
the author argues that the acceptance of queers should be perceived
as an inevitable condition in “the transition of [Iranian] society from
traditional to modern.”6 Not all readers, however, agree with the author. One of them comments:
I think that this is too much to ask, considering that even free Western societies have difficulties with accepting hamjengera’i (homosexuality), due to the pressure of religions or traditions or because of the
abnormality of this sexual orientation. . . . What is disturbing is that
Radio Zamaneh uses these kinds of advertising in order to normalize
deviations such as pedophilia and hamjensbazi (homosexual play) . . . .
If this is modernity, then I’d say we are going too far.

Hamjensgera’i is Persian for being attracted or inclined to the same
sex. It generally carries a positive connotation, meaning that people
who use this reference implicitly show a tolerant attitude towards

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the phenomenon.7 A less respectful term is hamjensbazi which has a
longer history, is more familiar in popular speech, and means literally “playing with the same sex.” Its employment is either a way of
intentionally expressing dislike or an unintentional reproduction of
a negative connotation attached to homosexuality. In this quote, the
more positive reference to homosexuality is replaced by a negative
alternative as a way to express a concern regarding the suggested
path towards modernity. It is in the course of a dialogue within the
self that such a shift becomes possible. It is not “modernity” that is
perceived as problematic, but the extent to which it accepts sexual
diversity that causes anxiety.
Moreover, in various other online discussions the removal of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses by the World Health
Organization in 1990 was emphasized as a legitimate ground for
the acceptance of homosexuality as “normal” and “natural.” The
ability to accept this “natural” phenomenon was, furthermore, connected to the ability to criticize religious moral prescriptions. For
instance, in a discussion following the article called “Homosexuality Is Natural,” one of the commentators says: “I hope we will be
able to reach the necessary level of tolerance regarding sexuality
in the third millennium and free ourselves from God, religion and
other kinds of nonsense.” 8 A few lines below, another commentator
states: “We can’t expect average people to accept homosexuality,
given the profound influence of religion on the perception of people
in our society, something that they are not even aware of.” In these
cases, religion is opposed to what has been scientifically proven to
be “natural.” As part of the dominant discourse on modernity which
implies the acceptance/tolerance of premarital sexuality and sexual
diversity, religion is here represented as an inevitable obstacle.
In conversations with those Iranian Dutch who articulated a positive stance towards homosexuality often a line was drawn at having
and raising children. This position was explained by assuming that
society in general, including Dutch culture, was not ready to accept homosexuality and therefore children of homosexual couples
would have to face hurtful name-calling and bullying. It was therefore not in the best interest of the child to be raised by homosexual couples. Also, feelings of doubt were expressed about the ability
of homosexual parents to fulfill all needs of the child by providing
good male and female role models. For these parents, homosexuals who wanted to raise children were “selfish.” This is how Aref, a
single man in his thirties, formulated his thoughts on homosexual
parenting:

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As having gay parents is something special, these children might get
hurt by society. People might make fun of them. The child might get
psychologically damaged. This is very important for me. . . . When
homosexual people adopt a child, it’s for 99 percent a matter of selfishness. The child doesn’t decide to be raised by them. I don’t have
a problem with homosexuals getting married, but raising children is
entirely different.

Similarly, during a public discussion on human rights and homosexuality in Iran organized at Mezrab, a cultural center in Amsterdam,
a young man posed the question of whether it would be morally
justified to let homosexuals adopt children. A young woman, who
had just presented her work on the Iranian legal system in relation
to homosexuality, answered: “If we truly respect the modern notion
of an individual’s right to have a family, then how can we make an
exception when it comes to homosexuals?” Again, modernity as an
assumed collective goal was brought forward to argue for the acceptance of homosexuality and homosexuals’ right to raise children.
Part of the audience responded by being silent and the other part
reacted with approval.
What these cases shows is that the outlines of acceptable homosexuality are being negotiated among a group of Iranian Dutch,
with childrearing as an important element in this debate. Protection
of children, a cause that perhaps no one would call into question,
functions as a way to ventilate uneasiness in relation to homosexuality. Child protection is then a moral boundary in negotiations with
modernity in a dialogue within the self about homosexuality.
Relatedly, a fear of sexual abuse of children was spontaneously
mentioned by a few participants when discussing homosexual parenting. Leila, a middle-aged mother of two young children, stated:
I don’t think that gay people should have the freedom to do whatever they want, especially those who are capable of abusing children.
Whenever I hear about a child who has been sexually abused, I feel
sick for days. I don’t think I would ever understand how someone is
able to abuse a child. That’s something that I can’t deal with. It’s like
a nightmare.

According to Lee Edelman, an American professor of English literature, “the child” symbolically figures as the reproduction of the
past and as such guarantees the future (1998). Although Edelman’s
statements about this symbolic figure of the child concern American politics, his analyses seem to be useful in a broader sense. The
privileged figure of the child, he argues, “has come to embody for

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us the telos of the social order” (ibid.: 21). More specifically, this social order is associated with heterosexuality and the child represents
the future of heterosexuality. In the words of Edelman, “the child
impregnates heterosexuality with future signification” (ibid.: 22). I
take this to mean that “the innocent child” helps reproduce heterosexuality as opposed to nonreproductive sexuality. To protect the
child, as emphasized by some of the Iranian Dutch research participants, could then be interpreted as guaranteeing the future of heterosexuality. The need to protect the child is justified in situations
assumed to be threatening, which becomes possible through associating homosexuality with child abuse in a dialogue within the self.
The previous narratives of the research participants illustrate that
homosexuality is subjected to more skepticism and reservation than
premarital sexuality, even though both are conceived of as forms
of sexual freedom that should be acknowledged and accepted as a
necessary step towards modernization. Interestingly, whereas this
modernization was more or less assumed to have been achieved by
the older generation when discussing virginity, in the case of homosexuality, modernity is more often perceived as an ongoing process.
Although homosexuality indeed operates as a powerful symbolic
tool in discussions about modernity, as also observed by Shakhsari
(2012) in the wider diasporic Iranian Western cyberspace, its acceptance in the case of my interlocutors is perceived as a gradual
matter. Here, space is created to ease the difficulties experienced in
incorporating homosexuality in the realm of appropriate sexualities.
Analyzing these experiences helps to move beyond the mere representational level, showing the complexities of the everyday reality
and the cultural work that the acceptance of homosexuality entails.
The dialogues within the self with respect to homosexuality accommodated both the necessity of its acceptance as well as the articulations of conditions for this acceptance. The reservations towards
homosexuality are mainly expressed via issues of conscientious childrearing and biological inevitability of homosexual desire. Homosexual parenthood and especially the possibility of having a choice
in sexual orientation are frowned upon. Furthermore, by conceptualizing homosexuality as an element of “natural” human sexuality
or as part of “Dutch culture” some of the participants expelled themselves from having a moral opinion on the matter. Also, the rhetoric
of pitying functioned as a way to express dislike yet reflect a sense
of tolerance towards homosexuality. Homosexuality, then, is seen
as a tragic misfortune. The rhetorical strategies of rationality, spirituality, and commitment when it concerned premarital sexuality

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suggested more engagement and conceptual appropriation of that
issue, whereas the rhetorical strategies of pitying, child protection,
and biological inevitability used when talking about homosexuality
reflect a position of distance.

The Perfect Bridge of Nonmarital Cohabitation
Almost all of the research participants referred to the phenomenon
of nonmarital cohabitation by using the Dutch term samenwonen
(living together). In fact, nonmarital cohabitation was considered a
typically Western Europe phenomenon, which is regulated by law
and sometimes replaces marriage. To most of the participants nonmarital cohabitation had a nonreligious connotation. Furthermore,
many of them were or had been either engaged in this form of cohabitation or knew a close relative or a family member who did. The
majority reacted far less sensitively to this topic than to premarital
sexuality or homosexuality. As a discursive field of sexuality, nonmarital cohabitation seemed to be least contested and required less
rhetorical effort when conceptualized by most of the Iranian Dutch
participants.
“Although it is unreligious,” Zahra a middle-aged devout Muslim woman said, “I have respect for those people who are willing
to commit themselves to such a long-term relationship in a modern
country as the Netherlands where sexual promiscuity is the norm.”
In Zahra’s opinion only serious, responsible couples would decide
to live together as otherwise they could just meet up occasionally
for a purely sexual relationship. She added that “morally speaking”
people with gharaze mohtaramaneh (honorable intention) enter such
relationships, which proves their ta’ahod (commitment), bavafa’i
(faithfulness), and nejabat (modesty). In the modern Dutch context,
where sexuality is presumably rather unbounded, nonmarital cohabitation is in Zahra’s view an admirable decision and a sign of
modesty and willingness to commit.
According to Arash, a young Iranian Dutch man, the value of
nonmarital cohabitation lies especially in the opportunity it provides for couples to get to know each other. So much so that he
would recommend it to everyone, as sharing the household would
be “the perfect test” for a relationship. Contrary to dating, when
people understandably tend to show their “good sides,” sharing the
household, he argued, exposes “all there is.” This also meant that
nonmarital cohabitation was seen as a temporary arrangement, a

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preparation for marriage. Ta’ahode vaghe’i (real commitment), he
explained, “means getting married.” Another young man, Reza,
contrasted the option of nonmarital cohabitation in the Netherlands
with what he perceived as a “normal” marriage in Iran: “In Iran
when you marry, you are supposed to besoozi o besazi (suffer and endure). Here, in the Netherlands, you don’t have to marry blindly.”
This idea of nonmarital cohabitation as a useful try-out for marriage
was shared by some of the other participants. In a focus group discussion, Azar, a young mother, said:
Nonmarital cohabitation is the perfect way to get to know your future
husband. In Iran, we don’t have this option. That’s why so many couples end up divorcing each other after two or three years of marriage.
I married my husband without knowing him. He was living here in
the Netherlands and I was living in Iran when we got married. I had
never seen him before. I would have decided to cohabit before marrying him, if I had the option.

This reference to divorce underlines the importance attributed to
nonmarital cohabitation as a tool for strengthening marital commitment. Commitment, in-depth knowledge about the partner, and
marital stability are, as such, important elements of a discourse in
which nonmarital cohabitation is conceptualized and approved.
However, not everyone agreed with the idea of marriage as a superior form of commitment. To Laleh, a young woman, nonmarital cohabitation was in fact more “real” than marriage. According
to her, marriage, “especially the Iranian kind” involves a “show”
meant to “please others.” In particular, she found the ceremonial aspects of an Iranian wedding “irritating.” Her dream wedding would
be private, including only very close relatives and family members.
“I prefer a nice walk with a small group of people on my wedding
day. That is purer than a big party which requires months of planning and stress. Iranians think modern boodan [being modern] means
having an expensive house and car. Modernite vaghe’i [real modernity] is in my view about being truthful to oneself.” Marriage, symbolized by the wedding ceremony, is here mainly seen as a public
affair and opposition to nonmarital cohabitation is seen as private,
pure, and truly modern. Via the notion of “truthfulness to oneself”
rather than putting up a show, nonmarital cohabitation then comes
to represent modernity.
Another important element in the conceptualizations of ideal relationships was the role of children. Mehdi, a middle-aged man emphasized the importance of both partners’ willingness to “sacrifice”

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to make their relationship work, which he thought is especially necessary when children are involved. Imagining his daughter cohabiting outside marriage with her boyfriend, he said:
If they decide to have children, then they should provide a safe place
for them. I think that when a relationship is formal [marital], there
will be a stronger sense of commitment. . . . They would be willing to
sacrifice in their marriage, to sacrifice means giving up your needs,
right? Yes, you sacrifice to make the marriage work, to continue that
path. . . . Some of the classmates of my daughters have two separate
homes. They live a few days with their mother and a few days with
their father. Their parents are separated. I personally think that these
children are not happy, because they don’t have a warm, stable family. . . . I would like my daughter to give her children what we gave
them. We gave them a safe, peaceful, nice home. We protect them,
no matter what. She should do the same for her children. That’s all.

Prioritizing the “emotional safety” of children, Amin presumes, requires formal commitment. Marriage is then idealized compared to
the less formal arrangement of nonmarital cohabitation. Later in
the conversation he added: “Parents should comply with the institutional rules of marriage, instead of focusing on their own needs
and desires.” The role rhetorically attributed to children is one that
entails moral obligation to self-sacrifice, an assumption also made
in some of the discussions on homosexuality. Again, as a red line,
children reflect the ambiguities in the negotiation between acceptable and unacceptable sexualities in a dialogue within the self. In
principle, nonmarital cohabitation is accepted and even celebrated
as both a product and a sign of modernity. However, to ensure some
limitations for this freedom and to accommodate one’s ambiguity in
practice, the moral tool of child protection is called upon, allowing a
conditional acceptance.
The data discussed in this section clearly reflect a sense of appreciation concerning nonmarital cohabitation. Among these Iranian Dutch participants, some perceive this phenomenon as a sign
of moral conscientiousness and commitment in a boundless modern
environment, some see it as pure and resembling “real” modernity,
and others take a more pragmatic stance and emphasize its potential
role to guarantee future family stability. When evaluated as a form
of parental arrangement, nonmarital cohabitation leaves something
to be desired. The stability and safety that marriage presumably has
to offer to children is then lacking. The figure of the innocent child
here symbolizes the importance of protecting the structures of the

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nuclear family. Overall, the articulations of the participants about
nonmarital cohabitation seemed to entail less rhetorical maneuvers
compared to the topics of virginity and homosexuality. Apparently,
the phenomenon of nonmarital cohabitation, as conceptualized
here, carries less provocative elements and consequently fewer dilemmas and discrepancies are reflected in the dialogues within the
selves. The potential promiscuity and boundlessness “feared” in relation to premarital sexual activity and homosexuality, form less of a
risk with respect to nonmarital cohabitation. In fact, nonmarital cohabitation is relatively a morally respectable arrangement. As such,
in the moral negotiation between what is seen as the old and the
new, the acceptable and the unacceptable, the traditional and the
modern, nonmarital cohabitations appear to figuratively function as
a “perfect bridge.”

Conclusion
In the Iranian Dutch research participants’ stories about sexuality,
“modernity” is often presented as an ideal. As perceived by many of
the research participants, modernity is associated with a promotion
and appraisal of sexual freedom and sexual diversity, entailing an
open attitude towards premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage. Opposed to this ideal, the participants positioned religiosity and/or traditionality. The latter is mainly done
in reference to a past that has been left behind, assuming that residence in the Netherlands would allow for this transition. In dialogues within the self, two opposed cultural spaces were assumed,
between which the participants negotiated and positioned themselves when talking about sexuality. As discussed previously, Dutch
public and academic discussions on the integration of individuals
with a migrant, often Muslim, background heavily depend on sexuality to determine assimilation (e.g., Kalmijn and Kraaykamp 2018).
Although the relation between this background, which in the Netherlands is often depicted as “ethnicity,” and sexuality is in fact “flexible, slippery and changeable” (Krebbekx, Spronk, and M’charek
2017), this relationship does intervene to produce meaning in real
life. The findings in this chapter illustrate how this happens in case
of the Iranian Dutch who seek a position within the host society.
This process of meaning-making, however, does not entail a simplistic and uniform embracement of “modernity.” The in-depth conversations and discussions revealed that rhetorical strategies were

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employed in order to create specific conditions for what the research
participants saw and idealized as “modern” sexuality. A moral vocabulary was then used with no reference to a higher authority,
attributing the responsibility for appropriate behavior to the individual. Rather than a matter of imposed regulations, morality was here
assumed to entail self-discipline and self-protection. In dialogues
within the multicultural self, negotiating between perceived opposing cultural spaces, an endogenous morality was employed to draw
boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable modern attitudes
and behavior with respect to sexuality. Such conceptualizations of
sexuality enabled the participants to construct a “conditional modern self.” Although such dialogues are necessarily ongoing processes
in the Dutch multicultural context, I identify the creation of a conditional modern self as moments of closure in the narrative.
Given that a norm of premarital virginity was rejected as traditional by those who used the modernity frame of reference, the
discussions mainly centred on the conditions for appropriate premarital sexuality instead of questioning the very phenomenon. An
ideal of modernity was articulated through or as a framework for
the acceptance of premarital sex. The presented data illustrated how
premarital sex can be an occasion for intergenerational debate and
negotiation. From the daughters’ perspective the parents were less
“modern” than they would claim. Nevertheless, the younger generation do regularly engage in premarital sexual relationships. At
the same time, however, the dialogues within the self revealed that
premarital sexuality was required to entail “rationality,” “spirituality,” and “commitment.” These requirements reflected the concerns
of the participants when envisioning modernity through sex before
marriage. In most cases, these discussions concerned female sexuality. As such, a “modern” self was fashioned via a discursive deployment of premarital female sexuality. Analyses of the negotiations
and dialogues in the construction of this modern self showed that
while the acceptance of sex before marriage was deployed as a vehicle to claim modernity, female piety and chastity were guaranteed
simultaneously. The notions of rationality, spirituality and commitment functioned as crucial elements in gendered constructions of
appropriate premarital sexuality. The fashioning of this “modern”
self relied on the preservation of a “mental hymen” rather than the
actual premarital virginity.
Perhaps paradoxically, the sensitivity of the topic of homosexuality translated into a position of distance among some of the research
participants in their conceptions of this phenomenon. Dissocia-

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tive expressions, such as presenting homosexuality as specific part
of Dutch culture or as merely genetically determined and thus inevitable, reflected the difficulties in dealing with this topic. These
difficulties were mostly clear in applying the notion of “pity” to homosexuality. Pitying homosexuality enabled a distant yet tolerant
attitude, while articulating disapproving sensibilities. Associating homosexuality with irresponsible parenthood, moreover, allowed for
a morally justified attempt at limiting the realm of acceptable sexual
diversity. As an unavoidable tragic misfortune, homosexuality was
tolerable up to the red line of parenthood. Instead of directly declaring homosexuality as immoral, the immorality is attributed to some
of its configurations. Although a necessary step towards modernization, as assumed in some of the online discussions, the acceptance of
homosexuality entailed a greater extent of moral reservation, mirrored in various acts of dissociation or postponing the discussion.
More effort was put into outlining what is not desirable than into
providing criteria for the circumstances under which homosexuality would be appropriate. In the dialogues within the self regarding
the ideal of “modernity” and its potential dangers, homosexuality
provoked the articulation of more restrictive and limiting—rather
than enabling—conditions compared to premarital sexuality. This
conditional “modern” self as marked via tolerance of homosexuality
as such appeared to be more defensive and thus fragile.
Nonmarital cohabitation was explicitly embraced as a desirable
aspect of “modern” Dutch society. The use of the Dutch term samenwonen in otherwise Persian conversations underscored the association between this phenomenon and the Dutch or, more broadly
Western European culture. Because of the potential promiscuity of
“modern” sexuality, some of the participants emphasized that nonmarital cohabitation was welcome as an arrangement that requires
a certain extent of commitment. It was perceived as a sign of modesty and willingness to settle, symbolizing an “endogenous morality” of the couples. The moral authority also in this respect was
placed within the self rather than connected to an external higher
institution. Using a discourse of stability, commitment, and modesty allowed the participants to appropriate modernity via applauding nonmarital cohabitation. In a comparable way, as happened in
discussions on homosexuality, “child protection” was also here introduced as a rhetorical maneuver to draw boundaries and explicate what is (not) appropriate. This made clear that (heterosexual)
marriage was taken as the normative framework and nonmarital
cohabitation was especially appreciated as a try-out for marriage,

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a temporary phase for the couple to get to know each other. The
claim of a romantic (heterosexual) marriage as an ideal, however,
is sometimes questioned based on ideological-liberal or pragmatic
reasons. Overall, nonmarital cohabitation seemed to form a perfect
bridge between an idealized “modernity” and the moral concerns
with commitment and stability.
The analyses in this chapter illustrate that a cultural change towards modernity is being pursued by a considerable number of Iranian Dutch participants. Generally, this change is envisioned as one
from a backward, traditional, religious past towards a modern present or future. While the discussions in the previous chapter pointed
at a much more complex interplay between religiosity, sexuality,
gender, and modernity in the recent Iranian history, in this chapter
we saw how the pairing of progressive sexuality with modernity and
how the opposition to tradition and religion have come to dominate
the contemporary Iranian Dutch identity constructions. In this regard a liberal attitude towards sexual decision-making and sexual
diversity is assumed to represent modernity, which is opposed to a
traditional restrictive sexual culture. Tradition and religion are as
such “othered” in order to mark off a modern self. However, rather
than being a smooth process, as it appears from the dialogues within
the self, the marking of a modern self is often accompanied by dilemmas, negotiations, and discrepancies leading to a rearrangement
of the old and the new sensibilities. In order to deal with these difficulties a moral vocabulary is employed that makes an appeal to
an inner strength to find a balance between what are perceived as
unrestrained “modern” notions of sexuality on the one hand and
oppressive “traditional/religious” sexual culture on the other hand.
This endogenous morality, although in different ways and to different degrees, operates as a crucial tool to facilitate an ongoing dialogue within the multicultural self, enabling the constructions of a
“conditional modern self.”

Notes
1. Stichting WHAA: Ontstaansgeschiedenis van de WHAA, accessed 15
April 2021.
2. This particular issue of appearance in the Iranian context has also been
noticed in other studies. For instance, Kamran Talattof describes the
distinctively “modern”-looking Iranian women and men during the
anti-governmental protests in 2009 as an indication of “their desire to

A Conditional Modern Self

3.
4.

5.

6.
7.

8.

93

express sexual agency, their self, their identity” (2011: xii). After the Iranian presidential election in 2009, mass protests followed as hundreds of
thousands of Iranians believed the outcome was false. Much attention
was paid to this event by the media around the world and a sharp contrast between the conservatism of the Iranian regime and the progressive attitude of the majority of protesters was noticed, which was often
based on the fashionable-looking younger Iranian men and women on
the streets asking for more freedom and justice.
http://www.zamaaneh.com/degarbash/2009/12/post_17.html, accessed
15 April 2021.
This research project was conducted at the Aletta institute in Amsterdam
about cultural constructions of sexuality among Iranian Dutch women
in the year 2008.
The original link http://www.radiozamaneh.com/society/women/2011/
02/27/2075 (accessed 15 January 2013) is not available, however, the
article excluding readers’ comments can be found elsewhere: ‫ﺷﻨﺎﺳﯽ ﺟﺎﻣﻌﻪ‬
‫ﺳﮑﺲ‬: ‫( ))زﻧﺎن ﻣﻤﻨﻮﻋﻪ ﻋﻀﻮ درﺑﺎره(ﺑﮕﯿﺮﯾﻢ ﭘﺲ را ﺧﻮد واژن‬sociologyofsex1.blogspot.com, accessed 15 April 2021).
‫| زﻣﺎﻧﻪ رادﯾﻮ | !دﻣﻮﻛﺮاﺳﯽ؟ ﺳﻮی ﺑﻪ ﮔﺎﻣﯽ دﮔﺮﺑﺎﺷﺎن؛ ﻣﺒﺎرزه‬Radiozamaneh, accessed 15 April
2021.
A recent and even more positively charged term that seems to be emerging is “hamjenskhahi,” which means “homophilia.” The latter ascribes a
more active role to support gay people compared to “inclination.” “Hamjenskhahi,” however, is at the moment mainly used by a select group of
highly educated and activist Iranians.
http://archive.radiozamaneh.com/society/degarbash/2011/11/05/81
28/, accessed 15 April 2021.

Chapter 3

PASSING ON THE TORCH
AUTHENTICATING THE SELF VIA RELIGIOUS
AND TRADITIONAL NOTIONS OF SEXUALITY

A Minority within a Minority
As a young woman in Iran I became seriously interested in Islam.
When I was seventeen or eighteen, I regularly followed courses on
Islamic topics. Here in the Netherlands, though, no one in the Iranian
community seems to be concerned with religion. They have forgotten
about their tradition and who they are. I talked to some friends, and
they all confirmed that they too missed the old religious gatherings.
First we went to Arabs’ mosques, but we didn’t understand anything.
. . . Eventually, I decided to organize religious gatherings myself. I do
that because it gives the women who come to my house the opportunity to clean their hearts and to find their true selves.

Mahin, a middle-aged Iranian Dutch woman, expressed these words
in a focus group discussion, in which three other women participated. We met at Mahin’s house. She was introduced to me as a
devout Muslim woman by an acquaintance. When we talked on the
phone to make an appointment, she already emphasized that religion was an important part of her identity and that she regularly organized religious gatherings for Iranian Dutch women, called sofreh
(tablecloth). Sofreh refers to a cloth laid on the ground or on a table
on which food can be served. Although controversial in the eyes
of many religious authorities, these gatherings are quite popular in
Iran and associated with informal or local religiosity (Torab 2005).
They are “dedicated to Shia saints or supernatural spirits, who act

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as intercessors with God for request and favors” (ibid.: 207). For
Shi’i women who are relatively excluded from public religious activities, Sofreh gatherings are a way to express their belonging to the
religious community, performed in a domestic sphere over which
they have complete control (Jamzadeh and Mills 1986 in Soomekh
2012: 91).1 Mahin had started setting up such gathering in the Netherlands. She was willing to discuss her life with me and even suggested to invite a few friends, in case I was interested to hear more
stories from other women who also considered religion to be “a very
important part of who they are.” Before discussing various issues of
sexuality, we talked about their experiences of being religious in the
Iranian Dutch community.
As the previous quote suggests, Mahin accuses the Iranian Dutch
community of eradicating religion, and thereby tradition, which has
resulted in “not knowing who they are.” Religion and tradition are
here connected to each other and presented as sources that provide
a stable sense of selfhood. To Mahin, religious gatherings have a purifying function through which people connect themselves to their
past. Through these gatherings, Mahin claims, the Iranian Dutch
can clean their heart, which would bring them closer to the core of
their selves. The other participants nodded in agreement. Elham,
another woman, added:
I always feel enlightened and relieved after a collective prayer. Because of it, I become more and more the person that I really am, the
true me. I think that a lot of other Iranian women would be interested in these kinds of experiences too, but unfortunately they think
very negatively about Islam, because somehow they are traumatized
by the Iranian regime, which uses Islam as an excuse to oppress the
people. . . . The Iranian Dutch have alienated themselves from their
Islamic background, resulting in losing their true identity. They come
to the Netherlands and try to be modern, but in fact they are lost. I’m
telling you, this modernity has corrupted our culture.

In contrast with those Iranian Dutch who have presumably rejected
religion from their lives, Elham remains faithful to her “true identity.” Moreover, she presents the urge to become modern as a threat
to the self and opposed to being authentic. Whereas a modern identity was perceived as an ideal in the positions discussed in the previous chapter, here modernity is explicitly presented as a hindrance
to the “true” self. Creating a modern self requires the abandonment
of religion, as some of the research participants assumed in Chapter 2, while for Elham and others who will speak in this chapter

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modernity stands in the way of authenticity. Although these two
positions—embracing modernity and embracing religiosity—seem
opposite to each other, they both share a discursive framework in
which a dichotomy is presumed between modernity and religion/
tradition. Both positions completely rely on each other in order to
make sense. This dichotomization, moreover, needs to be understood in the specific Dutch context in which religious pluralism is
celebrated within a secular framework that assumes the state’s prerogative to determine the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable modes of religion. During this research project, “political
Islam” was increasingly used in public debates to emphasize the
danger particular to this religion as well as its inflexibility to adapt
to a modern context.
In an environment where a specific religion evokes suspicion
and is seen as backward, one can imagine that explicit references
to one’s religious identity could result in being marginalized by the
rest of the community, as done by Elham and Mahin. The question
is then what it means for some of the Iranian Dutch, such as Mahin
and Elham, to run counter to the mainstream by openly positioning themselves as religious individuals. This “mainstream” is coconstructed by those who assume modernity to be the norm and
either celebrate it or reject it as such. The Iranian Dutch form a
minority group in the Netherlands, which makes people like Mahin and Elham who claim an explicitly religious identity a minority
within a minority.
In this chapter I will focus on a position among the Iranian Dutch
characterized by a claim to what I will call “self-authentication”
through the rejection of modernity and appropriation of religious or
traditional identity. I will analyze how the constructions of sexuality
within this group serve the processes of authenticating the self. The
specific ways that sexuality is deployed in order to achieve a sense
of “real” or “true” self will be explored. The goal is to illustrate that
an appeal to religion and tradition when talking about sexuality,
requires a remaking of an authenticated self in the now. Religiosity
and traditionality are then remade via sexuality in the present-day
context.
As we witnessed in Chapter 2, according to a dominant position
among the Iranian Dutch modernity is to be achieved through a
liberal attitude towards sexual decision-making and sexual diversity. This could mean that explicit rejections of modernity would
go hand in hand with a dogmatic approach to sexuality. However,
in this chapter I will argue that the religion- and tradition-oriented

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positions rather than being exclusively sex-negative or sex-restrictive,
in fact use sexuality as an instrument to discipline and craft an authentic self. In both the previous and the present chapter, the research participants employ specific sexual moralities as the means
to construct a certain identity. As Michel Foucault states, “pleasure
and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek
out, overlap and reinforce one another” (1998: 48). Discourses of
sexuality, he further argues, are productive, even when they administer silences or function as prohibition, in the sense that they enable
transformations of subjectivity (ibid.: 12). Whereas in the previous
chapter I focused on the power of a modern discourse in constructions of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch, here I will zoom in on
how the configurations of a claimed religious or traditional sexual
morality produce and determine a sense of self-authentication.
In the following, I will discuss the particular ways in which the
discursive regulation of virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation among some of the Iranian Dutch provides them with the
tools for creating an authenticated self. As mentioned previously,
there seems to be a rather negative connotation of religion among
the Iranian Dutch, which is the topic of the next section. The third
section will offer a conceptual framework in which the discussions
in this chapter are embedded. This will be followed by a brief overview of the relation between the participants’ ideas about sexuality
and their notions of religious and cultural authenticity. In sections
five to seven the empirical data and the analyses will be presented
more extensively, followed by a conclusion.

Skepticism toward Religion
A lack of interest in or reservation towards institutionalized forms
of religiosity such as setting up mosques or religious foundations
seems to be one of the characteristics of the Iranian Dutch. Partly
for this reason I had trouble finding people like Mahin and Elham
who identified as religious. In particular, finding explicitly religious
Iranian Dutch men appeared to be challenging. A study on Iranian
Dutch cyber activities in which religion represented the smallest
subnetwork compared to cultural, political, and economic sectors
confirms my observation that organized religion is relatively absent
from Iranian Dutch lives (Van den Bos 2006: 92). As a considerable number of the Iranian Dutch and of the Iranian diaspora more
generally, have left Iran upon political confrontations with the Ira-

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nian regime that frames itself as Islamic, reservations towards religion and religiosity are perhaps not surprising. In her research on
Iranian left-wing political female activists who were compelled to
leave Iran due to their politically oppositional activities, the anthropologist Halleh Ghorashi (2003) reports on a marginalized religious
identity among her interviewees (ibid.: 100). Explaining the political background of her research participants, Ghorashi describes how
the openly expressed anti-religious attitudes among leftist activists
became dangerous in Islamic Iran, where religiosity was seen as the
most essential part of people’s life. “It became obvious that they had
no place in the newly established Islamic society. This was, of course,
if they had not already been arrested” (ibid.: 111). Even though not
all of the Iranian Dutch have a leftist political background, Ghorashi’s findings attest to marginalization of religiosity among a group
of Iranian political refugees. Due to this particular migration background, being openly religious in the Iranian Dutch community
might be perceived as a sign of possible alliance with the Islamic
regime of Iran and provoke suspicion. One of the participants in my
research project who was known for her strong religious convictions
stated that she had found herself accused of working for the Iranian
embassy and spying on Iranians living in the Netherlands on several
occasions. For this reason, she said, she had limited her contacts
with the rest of the Iranian Dutch community.
When I mentioned to a relative of mine that I had attended a religious gathering for my research, after being amazed about the very
existence of such event, he sarcastically said: “It wouldn’t surprise
me if all those involved including their family traveled to Iran several times a year and owned a business there, which isn’t possible
without having some sort of approval from the regime.” Furthermore, at the annual conferences organized by the Iranian Women’s
Studies Foundation2 which I have attended four times, a tension between religion and women’s rights remains the topic of a heated debate every year, revealing a profound sense of skepticism regarding
Islam.3 According to Minoo Moallem, more generally, Iranians living
outside Iran tend to align with anti-Islamic tendencies in Western
societies, whereby the liberated diaspora tries to save other Iranians
from Islamic fundamentalism (2005: 6–7). Moreover, I have noticed
a reoccurrence of often emotionally charged Facebook debates on
religion and religiosity in the Iranian (Dutch) community in which a
strong sense of hostility and distrust towards religion in general and
Islam in particular is articulated. This is especially the case among
the young, highly educated and (ex-)political activists.

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99

The following dialogue between two young, highly educated Iranian Dutch men is a part of such a discussion on Facebook, which
was initiated by a woman posting a short animation that ridiculed
religion:
Shahram: Although Islam might have so many negative aspects, it
sometimes protects people. For my mom, Islam was the most important thing when she lost my dad back in Iran and was left alone with
three children, including me. To me, Islam is motivation to be kind to
other people. What is wrong with that?
Sina: It truly saddens me to hear this pro-Islam story from a fellow
countryman, especially here in the Netherlands. What women like
your mother in Iran need is not religion, but an adequate, fair, and
protective government. People should be educated or assisted in their
evolvement towards ethical beings so that there is no need for God,
angles, heaven, hell, etc.

As the choice of words in this conversation suggests, both Sina
and Shahram are quite articulate individuals. Looking at the content of the quote, Sina’s reaction to the almost apologetic statements of Shahram shows what kind of an offensive attitude and
how much belittling can be counted on when religion is “defended”
publicly. An assumption underlying Sina’s statements is that an Iranian should know better than to attempt to justify his/her religious
convictions. Having experienced various kinds of oppression and
ill-treatment in the name of Islam by the current regime, Sina seems
to suggest, Iranians should have learned their lesson and disregard
religion altogether. He argues for an “enlightened” morality as part
of a modern world, which diminishes the role of a religious morality, as provided by Islam. From Sina’s nonbeliever perspective, the
religious Shahram and his mother are portrayed as individuals with
“the immature desire for consolation, meaning [and] extra-human
sustenance,” to borrow from Charles Taylor (2007: 563). In Taylor’s
view, this is characteristic for how believers are generally perceived
in our contemporary “secular age” (ibid.).
However, it should be mentioned that this assumption of mutual exclusiveness between religiosity or traditionality and modernity that underlies Sina’s statements has been increasingly criticized
and passionately debated by the Iranian Dutch in different forums,
including Facebook. In 2010, an acquaintance who is a public figure
and well-known among the Iranian Dutch, initiated a Facebook discussion on religion as an inextricable part of Iranian identity during
the Shi’i mourning month of Moharram. He sarcastically stated that

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“Iranians would rather put a Christmas tree in their living room
than acknowledge the fact that Moharram is part of their identity,
whether they like it or not. They wrongly assume that you have to
get rid of the past in order to become modern.” This possible reconciliation of religiosity and modernity has also been associated with
a movement called no-andishi-e dini (religious reformism). The Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, currently a visiting scholar
in the United States, is perhaps the most prominent thinker of this
movement. He has been described as an advocate of a version of
Islam as “a rich religious, ethical, and intellectual heritage and . . .
responsive, in a positive and serious sense, to the imperatives of
modern human values” (Jahanbakhsh 2009: xv). Another famed
Iranian philosopher and cultural theorist, Dariush Shayegan, has argued that neglecting Islamic cultural memory can result in a sense
of denial of the self and, simultaneously, a selective and superficial
modernization or Westernization (1977: 57). By the latter two processes, he means a lack of deep understanding of the modern Western culture and yet being influenced and controlled by it. The loss
of the self is the price for having failed in passing on “the torch of
cultural inheritance”4 within the group, a process which in his view
should be understood as being critical and reflective instead of passive and disengaging (Shayegan 1977: 57).
This chapter engages with the question of what it means for some
of the Iranian Dutch to construct an explicitly Islamic identity, given
the potential hostile and suspicious reactions that they might encounter both in their community and in the current Western environment. As discussed in the Introduction, “Islamic identity” has
also been subjected to public criticism in Dutch debates on integration of Muslims. In both contexts a dominant notion of modern
sexuality as liberal and religious sexuality as repressive is prevalent.
In the subsequent sections of this chapter on discourses of virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation, I intend to analyze
the mutual constitution of sexuality and self-fashioning among a
group of Iranian Dutch who explicitly identify as Muslims. First,
however, I will present a brief conceptual framework for the rest of
the chapter.

When Belief Becomes an Option
In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that what characterizes religion in contemporary Western societies is that belief has be-

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come optional (2007: 3). According to him all individuals, whether
they regard themselves as believers, unbelievers, or take a stance
somewhere in between, are aware of alternative positions. He describes this development as the death of religious naiveté, assuming that being religious is now more the outcome of a reflective
approach instead of something that goes without saying (ibid.: 14).
Especially being part of multicultural and multireligious societies
would therefore imply a certain extent of individual reflection on
matters of religiosity. Leaving aside the question of whether “religious reflection” is as recent as Taylor claims, I assume that reflecting on one’s religious position is inevitable in the case of the Iranian
Dutch as an Islamic minority group. Given that being a Muslim is
considered a sensitive issue both within and outside their community, the Iranian Dutch might feel pressured to reflect on their religiosity, especially those who explicitly claim an Islamic identity. More
generally, according to Weeks, “sanctity of faith can seem an appealing antidote” in a context such as migration in which social change
and moral and cultural uncertainty are widespread.
Self-fashioning, as outlined before, is to be understood as a processual affair enabled through the appropriation of certain perceptions, positioning, and attitudes concerning sexuality. As such, the
claim to authenticity made by some of the research participants
via their stories about sexuality will be seen as an ongoing process
rather than completed. I am thus interested in the ways certain conceptualizations of sexuality enable the construction of an “authentic” self, instead of asking whether the produced selves can actually
be qualified as “authentic.”
In order to emphasize the processual dimension of the discursive
efforts put into becoming authentic, I will borrow the term “authentication” from the cultural anthropologist Lara Deeb, introduced in
her book An Enchanted Modernity: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (2006). In this book she studies a group of Shi’i Muslim women
in Beirut who consider themselves at once pious and modern, contrary to the popular belief that modernity and Islam are incompatible. These women imagine “modern-ness without disenchantment”
(2006: 26). In her book she uses the concept of “authentication” as a
reference to the process of “establishing the true or correct meaning,
understanding or method of various religious and social practices
and beliefs.” (ibid.: 20). Authentication then connotes a sense of
being genuine or true to one’s faith and community. In this chapter,
I will investigate the research participants’ stories about sexuality as
enabling a process of self-authentication.

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Discussing “Islamization in the West,” Olivier Roy argues that references to an Islamic past as made by an increasing number of Islamic citizens of Western societies, are in fact part of “the modern
reconstruction of new identities among Muslims, even if it resorts
to historical themes” (2004: 39). As a consequence of globalization
and immigration, Roy states, many Muslims have come to perceive
themselves as detached from their “home” cultures. This process,
which he calls “deterritorialization of Islam” forces Muslims who
live in the West to evaluate their religiosity at the personal level and
leads to a quest for a true Islamic identity. In other words, Roy defines “Islamization” as a contemporary phenomenon that expresses
the globalization and Westernization of Islamic communities. In
this way religiosity and traditionality are reinvented in a “modern”
context. Here “modernity” is understood as a historical and geographical as well as a cultural quality. It refers to the “now” of multicultural societies and implies a reflective attitude (ibid.: 20–24). This
is a different notion of modernity than previously assumed in this
book. Whereas ethnographically, I have approached modernity as
a claim-making device (see Introduction), both Roy and Taylor understand modernity as a context in which the research participants
such as the Iranian Dutch are positioned. In the process of reflection
upon one’s religiosity in contemporary societies, as argued by Taylor
(2007), tradition and religion become reinvented. In this chapter,
I will look for the ways deployments of sexuality enable the reinvention of tradition and religiosity among the Iranian Dutch in the
multicultural context of the Netherlands that both Roy and Taylor
consider “modern.”
Positioning and analyzing contemporary Islamism as part of contemporary dynamics of social mobility is also argued by the sociologist Nilufer Göle (2006, 2010b). Among those Muslim populations
who are uprooted and seeking new opportunities in the context
of migration, she argues, family backgrounds, social origins, and
local traditions are no longer taken for granted and become subject to critical evaluation and reinterpretation (2006: 10). In line
with Taylor’s analysis that religious experiences in the modern age
have become part of “expressive individualism,” she emphasizes
the element of “self-fashioning” of the current revival of religious
movements (2010b: 376). In this regard, she is inspired by Stephen
Greenblatt, who conceptualizes modern personalization of religion
as “not-boundless” and the fashioning of the self as “the outcome
of the mechanisms of discipline, restrain and a partial suppression
of personality” (1980 in Göle 2010b: 376). Islam, Göle concludes,

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provides an alternative repertoire for self-fashioning by means of
disciplinary practices such as control of sexuality. For example, as
she discussed elsewhere, the increasing public visibility of Muslim
women in some Western countries by wearing a headscarf, while
not being in conformity with traditional gender roles, is an act of
fashioning a pious self (2010a: 256). Rather than being mutually exclusive, modernity and religious piety are in fact mutually constitutive in this specific case. In the stories about sexuality as told by those
Iranian Dutch research participants who emphasize the importance
of religion as part of their “authentic” self, I will investigate what
elements and qualities in their view constitute such authenticity.
Various scholars, moreover, have proposed that in the current
multicultural modern contexts, fashioning a religious self equates
to a political act. For instance, Salwa Ismail, a professor of politics,
argues that in a Western secular context where religion is supposed
to be left out of the public sphere in order to preserve the latter’s
neutrality, fashioning a pious Muslim self as an alternative moral
citizen becomes a political undertaking (2007). According to the
anthropologist Willy Jansen, Islamism can function as an identity
strategy for women, and, using the concept of “identity politics,”
Jansen emphasizes women’s active role in relating themselves to
Islam in order to shape personal identities (1993a). In a discussion
on women and gender in Algeria and Jordan, Jansen illustrates
that also in a non-Western context veiling can function as a way to
gain respect. She explains that the new veil no longer refers to the
respectful women secluded in the home, but rather to the young
career women (ibid.: 89). While an Islamic identity is maintained,
Jansen’s analyses show, religiosity is transformed in line with women’s needs (1993a, 1993b). Corresponding to Jansen’s and Ismail’s
findings, the professor of women’s studies Leila Ahmed, describes in
her book A Quiet Revolution (2011) how today’s multiple meanings
of wearing hijab by Muslim women in the US and Europe include
acts of identity affirmation. More than just religious reasons, she
argues, veiling is a way of taking a stand against discrimination and
cannot be seen as merely an emblem of patriarchy, especially in the
aftermath of 9/11. To understand the political aspects of claiming
an authentic self among the research participants, the sociocultural
meaning of such practices of self-fashioning in relation to both their
own community and the broader Dutch society will be studied in
this chapter.
As the cultural anthropologist Saba Mahmood reminds us in her
book Politics of Piety on a women’s piety movement in the mosques

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of Cairo, a tradition’s adherents are neither passive follower, nor
are they all-powerful agents that make a purely strategic use of tradition to reach certain ends. Instead, she proposes to investigate
“the conditions of discursive formulation that require and produce
the kind of subjects who may speak in [tradition’s] name” (2005:
116). This understanding of tradition allows the researcher to integrate the concept of agency in claims of traditionality. It is not only
through resisting tradition that agency operates; the multiple ways
in which one inhabits traditional norms are simultaneously part of
what constitutes the domain of agency. “The individual,” she states,
“is contingently made possible by the discursive logic of the ethical
traditions she enacts” (ibid.: 32). In this chapter, I am interested in
framings of sexuality as providers of discursive conditions in order
to authenticate the self.
Using Mahmood’s concept of agency is thus not to deny existing
structural constrains, against which Sarah Bracke warns us (2003).
Rather, it will open up some space for understanding how people
engage with those constrains. Furthermore, it should be mentioned
that institutional religiosity is not the concern of this chapter, which
has been described as more stringent and binding than personal religious behavior based on ethical convictions (Batum and Jansen
2013). Organized religious Sufi practices among Iranian British migrants in London, Kathryn Spellman argues, help many Iranian
British migrants to deal with displacement by providing a sense of
belonging (2004). Organized religious gatherings fall outside the
scope of this book. Rather, my focus is on tracing research participants’ experiences of belonging in articulations of informal configurations of religiosity when talking about sexuality.
In the current globalized Western world, in the words of Taylor, belief has increasingly become an option and appropriating a
religious identity becomes a political act. In the specific context of
multicultural societies, such as the Netherlands, claiming an Islamic
identity perhaps conveys an additional political dimension. Such
claims potentially position someone as an outsider in two ways: as
religious in a presumably secular public sphere and as Muslim in a
time when Islamism and terrorism intersect. In the case of the Iranian Dutch, even a third possible “otherness” can be added: that of
being potentially associated with the Islamic authoritarian regime of
Iran. In the following sections, I will investigate the reconfigurations
of tradition or religion via conceptualizations of sexuality as a way
to fashion an authenticated self. The appropriation of this “otherness,” rather than an exclusionary act, I will argue, is in fact a form

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of incorporating the self into dominant discourses of sexuality and
identity.

Religious and Traditional Authenticity
Not long after I started my fieldwork for this research, I met a hairdresser who lived and worked in a small Dutch town where a notably high number of people with an Iranian background reside.
She suggested to introduce me to some of her “interesting” clients,
whom I might want to interview for my research, an offer I gratefully accepted. The first person she suggested was Mina, a divorced
middle-aged woman and mother of a teenage boy. According to the
hairdresser, she was an openly religious person and probably willing
to talk to me about her life. After a phone call with Mina a few days
later, we made an appointment for an interview at a café in a shopping mall, a place of her choice. She wore a dark-colored long, wide
skirt, a long-sleeved shirt, a jacket, and a gray headscarf tied tightly
around her head and completely covered her hair. To me this was a
remarkable outfit, for she was the first Iranian Dutch woman I met
who wore what could be considered explicitly religious and traditional clothing. Furthermore, she made a strong impression given
her determined way of talking and her openly expressed curiosity
about me and why I wanted to have this conversation with her.
Mina presented herself as a religious person, who in fact had found
her Islamic faith again in the Netherlands.
Already at the beginning of the conversation she said about
other Iranian Dutch: Farhang-e khodeshoono gom kardan (they have
lost their culture), khodeshoono kharab kardan (they have destroyed
themselves). She explained that while she had very limited contact
with other Iranian Dutch due to her strong religious beliefs, she kept
observing them from a distance. Even her own family had criticized
her for wearing a headscarf, she said, which made her even more
mosammam (determined) to keep doing it. Against this “lost” Iranian Dutch community, she positioned herself as enlightened: bayad
bedooni ki hasti (you need to know who you are), chi mikhai (what
you want), chi mikhai be dast biyari (what you want to achieve). She
added that she had to go through a hard process of intense thinking
and studying before she came to this conclusion: man khodamo to in
rah peyda kardam (I found myself in this process). What it meant to
be “lost” or “become oneself” was reflected in how she talked about
issues of sexuality. For instance, she explained why going to a mixed

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swimming pool was not an option for her: “Since I wear a headscarf,
I don’t go to swimming pools. I just don’t do it. I have found a way
to be truthful to myself. It’s my decision. . . . I would like for everybody to find their own way. It hurts to see that so many people are
so shallow. Why? They just copy Dutch behavior and show their
bodies in swimming pools.” Refusing to copy conventional behavior
in the Netherlands, Mina suggests, reflects both independence (own
choice) and authenticity (being truthful to oneself), qualities that
she finds lacking among the Iranian Dutch.
I wondered about other Iranian Dutch with a similar attitude towards issues of sexuality and identity. I met Sara after having specifically asked around for religious Iranian Dutch as potential research
participants. When discussing life in the Netherlands with her, a
woman in her fifties and living with two grown-up daughters, she
said she did not have many friends, including those with an Iranian
background. In Iran, Sara had worked as a teacher until she left
the country about twelve years ago. However, in the Netherlands
she had been unable to find a job at first because of her lack of fluency in Dutch and later because of illness. To her, the reluctance of
other Iranian Dutch regarding religiosity was inconceivable: “You
can’t believe in nothing. You should find something to believe in.”
She thought she was incapable of finding friends among the Iranian
Dutch because “to Iranians, especially those in the Netherlands, religiosity is backward and stupid.” During our conversation, Sara was
not wearing a headscarf or anything that would directly be associated with her religiosity. However, she did mention that she did not
appreciate revealing clothing. In her view, hejab-e darooni (inner hejab) and having a ghalb-e paak (clean heart) were more important.
She then gave the example of her sister who “wears a headscarf and
very tight trousers. You can easily see all her curves.” After a pause,
she said: “I would never do that.”
Discussing the veil as a discursive practice in Muslim contexts,
Farahani postulates that a process of “hijabization,” regardless of
whether women actually wear the hijab or whether they are believers or nonbelievers, works to discipline women in their behavior, including how they talk, move, or present themselves to others. “The
hijabization of behavior results in invisibility, silence, shyness, bashfulness and modesty” (2013: 105). By internalizing the sociocultural
connotation of the hijab, Farahani argues, women are “constituted”
rather than “constituting” by a misogynist, patriarchal culture. In
this chapter, I take a different position by investigating the constituting potential of a religion-driven modest self-fashioning among

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some of my research participants. I will follow Sara in her own narrated experience to investigate that potential.
Describing her views on the Iranian Dutch community, Sara repeatedly mentioned the topic of divorce. “Iranians have too much
freedom in the Netherlands. . . . Iranian women want to experience
different things. That is why they want to divorce after they come
to the Netherlands. There is no ta’ahod [commitment].” She gave
me the example of a couple who had approached her at the Iranian
embassy in The Hague and asked her to be their witness in order
to formalize their divorce. “The woman told me they both agreed
to have a divorce, but I couldn’t do it, because I don’t like divorce.
. . . Iranians should remain faithful to those arzesh-ha [values] with
which they have been raised.” She positioned herself as a mote’ahed
(committed) person who prays even late at night, a quality that she
said her daughters found “beautiful” about her. Commitment to old
values, Sara suggested, dissociated her from the rest of the Iranian
Dutch who were enjoying “too much freedom.”
According to Hamid, a highly educated young man in his thirties
who came to the Netherlands as a child, Iranian diaspora suffers
from “anti-religious anxiety.” Having had the opportunity to travel
around, he had noticed that especially in Western European countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden, Iranians tend
to be hostile to anything that has to do with Islam. Connecting this
to traumatic experiences of the Iranian Dutch as (former) political
activists, and as a consequence of living in exile, he accused them of
having extreme and unrealistic ideas about Islam. Instead, he proposed, “They should come to terms with who they are.” He, in fact,
presented himself as “epistemologically an atheist” and considered
religion a cultural heritage rather than a set of beliefs. To him, Islam
formed an important part of who Iranians, including himself, are
and denying this would mean denying oneself. “It is not healthy to
keep running from your roots and embrace modernity uncritically.”
At the time of our conversation, which took place at a café in
Amsterdam, Hamid and his girlfriend were cohabiting. His friends
had reacted surprised when he told them about their plan to get
married. “Who marries nowadays, they wanted to know.” Getting
married, Hamid suggested, was not fashionable among his generation. According to him Iranian Dutch people of his age have failed in
having a profound, meaningful relationship and are afraid of losing
their freedom. He, on the other hand, emphasized the importance
of “surrendering to old rituals such as marriage” and saw this as an
act of “maturity.” Beside maturity, in his view, it took courage to

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surrender to something beyond one’s control such as religious background and tradition.
I was introduced to Maral, a highly educated woman in her thirties, by an acquaintance. We had already met a few times at occasions where I conducted participant observation. She seemed very
interested in reading about Iranian history and spirituality. Attending the Iranian New Year, called Nowruz, and Yalda5 festivities,
she was one the few who enthusiastically discussed the symbolic
meaning of such celebrations and their place in Iranian history. She
would listen carefully and ask clarifying questions when someone
expressed the importance of such events. After requesting some information about my research project, she agreed to participate as an
interviewee. She suggested that we meet at a café in the same small
town where she lived. It was her day off and she was wearing a
well-tailored purple dress, high heel shoes, and had styled her hair.
Reflecting on her life in the Netherlands, she said that despite being
integrated in Dutch society, she still considered Iran to be her home.
“I didn’t come here as a child. I definitely prefer living in Iran. . . .
People who have lived here since they were a child, feel more comfortable living here, of course, . . . but I still see Iran as my home.”
What made Iran a better place to live for her was its impressive
tamaddon (civilization) and farhang (culture), as became clear during
our talk. She said she travelled to Iran at least once a year.
Especially at her workplace, which was a pharmacy, Maral said
she was astonished about how often Dutch people tend to gossip, which she considered a rafter-e sath-e pa’in (shallow behavior).
“Given that this [Dutch] society sees itself as civilized, this is rather
astonishing.” Explaining her life in Iran, she said she came from
a family of highly educated people. “One of my sisters has a PhD
from an American university, my brother has an MA, and I have
an uncle who is a poet and interested in mysticism.” From this she
concluded: “How should I put it, the things that we discussed in
our family were not sath-e pa’in [shallow]. I was concerned with
chizaye balatar [higher things] in my relations with people around
me.” She came from a Muslim family, “but not an orthodox one.”
Maral described her own religiosity as “I am a human being who
believes in god, but does not follow a strict line. . . . I studied a lot
about different religions. I think in their essence, all religions stand
for the same profound things. Things beyond everyday concerns.”
What Maral tried to incorporate in her life was to act and think according to those “profound things.” In relation to sexuality, one of
those profound things meant long-lasting romantic relationships, of

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which eshgh (love) was an important criterion. “Love is something
that you can’t experience with a lot of people. I believe that if there
is love, then sexuality can be part of the relationship. . . . If you
think you are in love with someone and two months later it’s over,
then I don’t think that is real love.” In Maral’s statements, home,
religiosity, profoundness, and committed romantic sexual relationships are all linked together.
In a focus group with only women, which I also discussed at the
beginning of this chapter, various issues of religiosity and sexuality
were brought up. Except for me, all of the participants were mothers, which resulted in discussing many topics related to childcare.
One of them was a shop keeper and the others were unemployed at
the moment. The most talkative person, Mahin, in whose house the
group discussion took place, was dressed rather fashionably: skinny
jeans, a transparent blouse, and high heels. The rest were dressed
in less trendy, less eye-catching attire: a pleated midi skirt, a cotton pair of trousers, and long-sleeve shirts and jackets. Having observed that religious gatherings were uncommon among the Iranian
Dutch, Mahin had contacted her previous religious teacher in Iran
in order to gain information about how to organize a religious gathering for Iranian Dutch women herself. Although she had left Iran
many years ago, she had been keeping in contact with her previous
female religious teacher, she said. “I have never told this to anyone
before, but I sometimes call her just to have a conversation and to
hear her advice about different things, often related to religion, but
not always.” Motivated by this teacher and many enthusiastic reactions from her Iranian Dutch friends, Mahin started inviting women
to her house for majales-e mazhabi (religious gatherings), which she
felt very proud of.
I know that not everyone who comes might be really a mo’taghed [believer], but even those people are welcome. They might come only
for vaght gozarooni [to pass time]. I do hope that their faith will grow
stronger because of our gatherings. . . . Like a plant, the seeds are already planted, but they need to be nurtured, they need water, light,
and a suitable place to grow. Deep down, they all have it and what
would be better than such gatherings to help people find their true
self.

This religious nurturing, Mahin suggested, would help people to
find and become themselves. Elham, another participant, replied:
“Like me. I came here by coincidence. At first, I couldn’t even believe that such gatherings existed. Iranians tend to leave their reli-

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gion behind when they migrate. Let me be frank, we are not like
Turks and Moroccans. We immediately get rid of our hijab when
we get the chance.” Elham thought that previous negative experiences with a regime in Iran that forces Islam upon society was the
reason why, once away from the country, the Iranian immigrants
were eager to distance themselves from anything religious. She told
us that she was a very religious person back in Iran and that during
her life in the Netherlands she had neglected that part of herself.
“Fortunately, I found out that I can nurture those feelings, thanks
to Mahin. . . . At first it was very difficult. I felt ashamed. I still can’t
believe in every prayer equally. I am very honest about that.” The
other participants, including Mahin, replied that they felt the same
way. They were all still in the process of finding the religious part of
themselves again.
I met Mahnaz one year into my fieldwork, a female student who
had migrated to the Netherlands together with her parents as a teenager. When we met for the first time, we realized we were wearing
almost exactly the same outfit—blue jeans and a white blouse—
which caused some laughter before the interview started. An Iranian young woman who was a mutual friend had introduced us
to each other. Raised by “more traditional than religious” parents,
during her adulthood Mahnaz had developed her own way of being
religious, which she described as “a sense of morality.” “A mo’men-e
vaghe’i [true believer] doesn’t need strict religious rules.” Mahnaz
stated that although she felt “quite comfortable” in Dutch society,
she firmly rejected what she saw as a set of values shared by many
Dutch students. To explain this, she referred to an article in a student-run newspaper in which a successful, beautiful female student
tells about how she partly pays for her study by being a high-level
escort girl. “So basically she sleeps with wealthy men to pay for her
college expenses and her food. . . . She seemed very proud, in fact.
. . . Unbelievable, right?” The way this article was written and how
the girl told her story, Mahnaz thought, suggested that the readers
regarded such practices as stoer, a Dutch word for “cool.” “This shows
that Dutch students, not all, but many, have other values than I do.
. . . My sense of religiosity and morality doesn’t even allow me to
find this interesting.” Here, the entanglement of religiosity, morality,
and sexuality serves to enable a sense of distance from the Dutch
student culture and the positioning of the self as more authentic.
Having provided a general sense of the narrative framing of sexuality, tradition, and religion in articulations of an authenticated self
in this section, I will focus on the three contested fields of virginity,

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homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation in the following sections to dig deeper into the particularities of this narrative framing.

Female Virginity as a Shield of Modesty
Sara, a middle-aged mother of two grown-up daughters and a practicing Muslim, at first insisted that she did not have any interesting
story to tell. She was introduced to me through another research
participant, who according to Sara had a much more adventurous
life and far more interesting stories to share. After trying to assure
her that I was not looking for any particular kind of life story, I
suggested talking about her experiences in the Netherlands as a migrant. About twelve years ago, she had decided to come here for her
daughters’ education, leaving her husband behind in Iran. The latter
decision is quite unique, as most of the Iranian Dutch I have come
to know prefer not to break up the nuclear family or at least try to
reunite later when that becomes an option, which Sara did not seem
to want to pursue. Exactly why she left her husband behind and
whether she used her daughters’ education to leave an unhappy
marriage without getting a divorce, I do not know.
Initially, their plan was to stay for just a few years, but in the
meantime Sara’s daughters had come to the conclusion that continuing their education and finding a suitable job in the Netherlands
was much easier than in Iran. Based on how she framed her story of
migration, it seemed that at least for the past twelve years Sara’s life
was dominated by what she thought was best for her children. This
had far-reaching consequences for her personal life, such as being
far away from her husband and the rest of her family for more than
a decade.
With regard to her religiosity, she said that having lived in Dutch
society for so many years she had changed her previous ideas about
strict distinctions between Muslims and Christians. “In the past I
thought of Christians as fundamentally different from me. In my
mind, I kept them at a distance. Now I think they are in fact following the same life-path as I do. As long as they do that, there is no
real difference between us.” Appropriating a religious identity gave
her the opportunity to present herself as part of a specific section of
Dutch society. Interestingly, she almost had no contact with Dutch
people, whether religious or not. This, however, did not prevent her
from imagining mutuality between herself and Christian Dutch people. Moreover, later in the conversation, she expressed how difficult

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it was for her to find people with iman (devotion) among Iranians. “I
don’t expect people to have the exact same religious ideas, but some
kind of iman is in my view necessary for people to have.” To Sara,
what was important about religiosity had to do with its capacity to
provide a source of attachment and adhesion, something that she
felt was lacking among the majority of Iranians in the Netherlands.
Her religiosity, thus, enabled her to both distinguish herself from
some and to construct a bond with others.
Sara became more talkative when the discussion concerned her
daughters, suggesting the significance she attributed to her parental
role. When I asked her about her thoughts on virginity, for instance,
the conversation almost immediately turned to her daughters. She
said:
Oh that’s not an issue for us at all. My daughters are very paak (clean).
They’re not interested in these sorts of things. I haven’t talked to them
about it specifically, but I know them very well. I believe that girls
should manage to stay untouched. Good girls have sex with only one
person in their life, namely their husband. I just teach them things
about what to do in the future, when they get married. I tell them
to always wear beautiful, matching lingerie, perfume, and make-up
when they go to bed with their husband.

Explaining her reasons for paying attention to sex after marriage she
added: “It is important to me that they learn about their duties, that
they are ready to take their responsibilities towards their husbands.”
Avoiding sex before marriage and providing sexual pleasure for the
husband in the marriage are qualities that help Sara to create an
identity for her daughters as both sexually modest while unmarried
and sexually informed dutiful wives in the future. As the conversation went on, Sara’s role as a mother became more explicitly linked
to her daughters’ premarital sexual modesty and piety. “They know
how hard I have worked and how much I have sacrificed for them
in order to give them the life that they have at the moment. That’s
why they respect my wishes and stay far away from inappropriate
relationships.” This reciprocity was manifested in her daughters getting temporarily married to their future spouses, even though they
still lived with their mother. Sara had requested them to join in a
sigheh marriage, which is an Islamic temporary matrimony,6 until
they were ready to have the actual wedding. Although sigheh normally serves as religious justification for a short-term sexual relationship, in this case it seemed to function for an opposite end. Sara
explained the situation as follows:

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At this moment they are married on paper according to the Islamic
rules, but the actual wedding [permanent marriage] will come later
when they have finished their education. Also their future husbands
need to find a job after their current PhD-projects. Just to make sure
that no one in the Iranian community will gossip, I have asked them
to do this for me. Fortunately, they are very obedient and agreed to
do so.

For practical reasons, Sara assumes, her daughters and their partners are not ready to get married permanently yet. In the meantime,
sigheh functions as the means to rule out the possibility of gossip.
What is remarkable in Sara’s understanding of sigheh is that it does
not equate religious approval for having sex contrary to the meaning generally given to this marital arrangement. Rather, sigheh protects her daughters’ sexual modesty. “They sometimes go out and
if people see them together and accuse them of having a [sexual]
relationship, we can always say they are religiously married.” Sigheh
thus operates as a safety measure in case anyone would suspect
Sara’s daughters to be engaged in an illicit sexual relationship. This
interpretation of sigheh as a strategic measure rather than an authentic concern with modesty is not unusual in Iran, as aptly discussed by Haeri (1989). Nevertheless, Sara uses this flexibility of
the concept to adapt it to her own specific circumstances based on
convenience rather than, indeed, intrinsic and metaphysical virtues.
In Iran, sigheh provides some maneuvering space beyond the political authority of the Islamic regime to experience (sexual) freedom
before marriage while remaining an unattractive option socially and
culturally, especially for women (Haeri 1989). In the Netherlands
and in case of Sara, however, its function is limited to a cultural
safety measure: it will remain a secret until someone questions the
modesty of Sara’s daughters.
In a discussion on the veil in France, Göle argues that being Muslim in secular public places requires improvisation and creativity
(2010a). According to her, Islamic traditions, or rather Islamic “habitus,” a notion that she borrows from Pierre Bourdieu, “allow for
continuous correction and adjustment” (2010a: 263). This means
that the behavior of Muslims should not be seen as pure conventions, handed down unconsciously from generation to generation.
The way Sara adjusts the conception of sigheh according to her concerns for creating piety and modesty for her daughters suggests an
engagement in the principle of religious or traditional improvisation
as Göle refers to it. Through this reinvention of a religious tradition, Sara creates protection against potential communal gossip that

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would endanger her daughters’ good reputation. Although this can
be interpreted as a conservative move to preserve premarital modesty, it can simultaneously be seen as a creative act of adjusting a
religious practice to contemporary needs. The latter reading would
problematize the secularist notion of religion and religious people as
stuck in the past.
The connection between Sara’s self-positioning as a parent and
her daughters’ sexuality was more concretely articulated when she
explained why her daughters took her advice on sexual matters so
seriously:
My daughters are aware of the fact of how devoted I am to my Islamic
principles. [. . .] For them Islam is not a crucial part of who they are,
but for me it is. They see that I have managed to preserve my own
identity. I am not ashamed of being old-fashioned because of my religious identity. They respect that by listening to me and not causing
any troubles with men.

Sara connects the sexual modesty and piety of her daughters directly to her own devotion to Islam. Given that Sara takes her role
as a mother to be very important, she can also employ it as a vehicle to express her strong religiosity. In a way, the sexuality of her
daughters can be seen as a significant extension of how Sara perceives herself as a devoted Muslim woman. Being a good mother,
measured by her daughters’ modesty, is crucial to how she perceives
herself religiously. Her daughters’ piety and modesty therefore apply to her own attitude as a mother and simultaneously as a believer. The virginity of her daughters provides Sara with the means
for self-authentication, indicated by the phrase “I have managed to
preserve my own identity.” By devoting herself to religious and parental tasks, Sara cultivates an authenticated self, which is based on
her interpretation of an Islamic ethos.
The youngest religious female research participant was Mahnaz,
a twenty-eight-year-old university-educated chemist. At the time
of our conversation, she was living at her parents’ home, while she
was looking for a suitable job. She stated that she was raised under
strict parental rules, especially her father’s, whose rigid decisions she
had come to respect and appreciate after she was mature enough
to understand the reasons behind them. For example, she was not
permitted to wear revealing clothing in the presence of namahram,
which is a reference to all men whom she could potentially marry.
“Wearing revealing clothing would make a wrong impression on
others, my parents said. I understand why they said that, because

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now I know that there are more profound things in life than focusing on appearances. Now, I completely agree with them.” This
emphasis on moral maturity kept coming back in our conversation,
also when the issue of virginity came up:
Love before marriage is something that we all experience, but I believe that it should not include sex. . . . I think that there are higher
things in life, on which I rather focus instead of getting involved with
cheap relationships. Look at Dutch fourteen- or fifteen-year-old children who have sex. . . . They live in a society where sex at such young
ages is permitted and even promoted. I truly think that because of
that, these children are deprived from their chance to grow at other
levels, to become mature, socially engaged individuals. I prefer to
wait until I feel that I’ve fully developed. Of course, I don’t mean
developed in the physical sense, but az lahaz-e akhlaghi [in the moral
sense].

In this quote Mahnaz connects personal moral development to sexuality. Prior to discussing virginity, she indicated that her parental
upbringing had helped her to get to know who she is. “If it wasn’t
for their strict rules, I would have been lost. These rules were not
fun, but because of them I know who I am now.” In her conceptualizations of virginity, access to an “authentic” self becomes possible
through disciplining the sexual body. Her appreciation for a disciplined self, furthermore, shows that she does not believe in a fixed,
predetermined self that has to be discovered and protected against
the external and worldly developments. Rather, the self that she
promotes here, needs to be nurtured and cultivated. According to
Jeffrey Weeks “authenticity . . . indicates a willingness to anticipate
the future resolutely, to grasp our present and future as our own
responsibility in the light of changing circumstances” (1995: 67).
The possibility of “making the future” enabled through authenticity
seems to apply to Mahnaz’s statements on virginity. To Mahnaz, virginity embodies a goal for personal moral development and a sign
of liberation from what she sees as sexually promiscuous norms
and values of Dutch society surrounding her. Instead, and similar
to other research participants, she promotes engaging with “higher
things.”
Moreover, what is telling about Mahnaz’s statements is the frequent usage of “I” rather than referring to a collective will when she
describes her thoughts and attitudes about virginity. Especially the
concept of personal morality is indicative of this I-oriented approach
to discourses of sexuality. In the case of Sara’s understandings and

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ideas of virginity, she seemed far more concerned with a religious
“social I” than Mahnaz. Sara inserted herself into a religious collective through virginity (that of her daughters), which enabled her
to construct self-authentication via references to a religious “social
I.” However, for Mahnaz the authenticated self becomes accessible
through employing virginity as a site for fashioning an authenticated
self that is oriented around a religious “personal I.” Emphasizing the
importance of the globalized and modern sociopolitical context in
“processes of re-Islamization,” Professor Ismail observes a degree of
personalization of religion in the search for coherence and a desire
to identify with a “true” Islam among Muslims (2007: 11). The personalization of religion via a personal I-oriented morality, as in the
case of Mahnaz, could thus be seen as the result of a dialogue with
non-Muslims and other Muslims in a modern, globalized context.
In an online discussion on BBC Persian about “Sex before Marriage,” more than 250 Persian-speaking visitors from various
countries participated, the majority of whom were Iranians living
abroad.7 Different notions of virginity and sex before marriage were
discussed in relation to a variety of aspects such as religion, cultural background, health, sexual liberty, and morality. Among those
who firmly rejected premarital sexual behavior, the importance of
holding on to one’s own traditional and religious values was repeatedly emphasized. Azar, an Iranian woman said: “We Iranians are
Muslims. Virginity before marriage is one of the strictest rules in
our society. We believe that our humanity and our values, such as
virginity, are what really distinguish us from animals.” Withholding
from sex before marriage, is, for Azar, a sign of true humanity and
transcending animal desires. Sexuality at the level of bodily performance and practices, represented by premarital sexual behavior is
rejected in order to live up to the status of human beings. The attribution of an Islamic identity to Iranians, moreover, produces the
category of “true Iranianness,” to which some of the discussants assign themselves. Except for the content, the form of the discussion,
furthermore, is an interesting aspect to take into account in how
Azar and others situate and present themselves. The organization
of this transnational online discussion requires a public and individualized way of participation in which everyone contributes to an
ongoing, unsteady contestation. Azar needs to negotiate and defend
her own Islamic position within the structures of such platforms.
The production of a “true Iranianness” as a religious identity thus
depends on various considerations and contextual elements. As Roy
points out, the deterritorialization of Islam in our globalized mod-

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ern world leads to new configurations of religiosity (2004), one of
which is represented by this online discussion.
In the same discussion, next to din (religion), the term orf (custom) was oftentimes used by those who were in favor of premarital sexual abstinence. Orf in Persian refers to all those informal,
well-known, long-established, and often religion-based rules that
belong to a given locale. Such reference was, for instance, made by
Behrouz, an Iranian Dutch man: “Whether sex before marriage is
acceptable or not, depends on the orf of the society. For us Iranians, such matters are completely unacceptable.” In the statements
of both Mahnaz and Behrouz, the rejection of premarital sex is connected to “us.” By constructing this “us” through notions of sexual
modesty, Mahnaz and Behrouz seem to assert a sense of communal
belonging. This “us” was by various participants opposed to “Western culture” or “Western societies.” According to Nader, another Iranian Dutch man, “as long as Western culture is influencing us, we
will remain miserable and immoral.” Another man, Jamal, stated:
“Western societies have become a filthy quagmire as far as sex is
concerned. Their children start having sex at extremely young ages
and no one cares.” By using the metaphor of quagmire, Jamal ascribes moral instability to Western societies based on the assumption
of sexual promiscuity, against which a morally stable, sexually modest “us” is positioned. In this discussion, moral notions of virginity symbolically protect the boundaries between “us” and “them.”
Virginity functions here as a means to navigate the us-versus-them
dichotomization, through which a sense of communal authenticity
is constructed. The orf symbolizing what is appreciated about the
Iranian culture combined with the notion of the Western “other”
trapped in a moral quagmire, provide the discursive ingredients for
the emergence of a sense of authenticity. The discursive resistance
against a Western “other” should be understood as part of a power
network through which subjectivity is constructed. As Foucault
states, “resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power. . . .
The points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network” (1999: 95). As such, conceptualizations of virginity allow the
discussants to authenticate the self as a form of exercising power
aiming at inclusion in a broader transnational context.
The examples in this section illustrate how the rejection of sex
before marriage and the promotion of virginity, while having a disciplining dimension, also enable the fashioning of an authenticated
self. Through employing notions of devotion, personal moral development, humanity, and compliance with orf in association with pre-

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marital sexual abstinence, a true self was imagined. Talking about
abstinence was in this way an active approach to identity construction. Especially the religious aspect of these acts of self-fashioning
makes them political given the power relations in which the fashioning takes place. Against a background experienced as nonreligious, the claim to religiosity becomes a form of resistance. This
resistance was articulated through discourses of virginity as a shield
of modesty accompanied by individualized (re)interpretations of
personal or collective religious identifications.

Resisting Homosexuality through Cultivating the Nafs
Mina is a middle-aged woman, a divorcee and mother of a teenage
boy, whom I introduced previously. She has lived in the Netherlands
for twenty years and started to wear a headscarf about ten years
ago. She explains that her decision to become a mohajabe (a veiled
woman) is a deeply personal choice, as it is the result of a lengthy indepth study of Islam. Mina regarded self-awareness and reasoning
as important criteria in becoming a strong Muslim woman, qualities
that Deeb also observed in her ethnographic research among Lebanese Shi’i women (2006: 20). Deeb argues that self-awareness and
reasoning are two characteristics at the center of a relation between
modernity and Islamic tradition, which allows for understanding
the authenticated self as part of a modern discourse. What, in Deeb’s
view, makes this discourse modern is its reliance on rationality and
personal knowledge-seeking. Although the majority of the Iranian
Dutch research participants whose stories about sexuality and the
self are presented in this chapter explicitly distance themselves from
modernity, the very act of rejecting modernity through rational
reasoning could be interpreted as a part of their engagement with
modernity rather than detachment from modernity. Using an emic
perspective on modernity based on Cooper’s (2005) definition of
the concept as a “claim-making device,” allows to capture the way
modernity here continues to operate as a nodal point in processes
of self-fashioning, even when—if not because—explicitly rejected.
It was partially because of Mina’s extreme religious devotion that
her marriage to a Dutch man, who had converted to Islam, did not
last for more than five years. “He was scared by my complete dedication to Islam. He couldn’t handle it.” Her commitment to religion
was too strong for her to have any regrets about the divorce. In fact,
in Mina’s view, strong religious convictions enable people to endure

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difficulties, which is simultaneously a sign of moral purity. Comparing herself to others who go through a divorce, she said: “The divorce wasn’t that difficult for me. That’s because I have my religion
and my beliefs, pure beliefs. In fact, for religious people endurance
is a sign of strong convictions, it means we are pure, morally pure.”
Mina repeatedly made a distinction between ma’naviyat (morality/
spirituality), which symbolizes mental strength, and maddiyaat (materiality) as a symptom of weakness. To Mina, Islam is the way to
achieve moral and spiritual strength as opposed to getting lost in insignificant earthly matters. She distanced herself from the majority
of the Iranian Dutch by presenting them as materialistic and shallow and herself as religious and authentic. Talking about the Iranian
Dutch community, she said, “they don’t know who they are, what
they want, where they came from or where they’re headed. . . . I
have my religion. I don’t need their modernity. I have remained
faithful to myself.” She referred to other Iranian Dutch as the blind
mimics of the Dutch, being only interested in fashionable clothing.
“Instead of working on themselves, they only care about material
things. Morality means nothing to them.”
This distinction between morality and materiality was also evident in Mina’s statements about homosexuality. She described homosexuality as either a biological or a moral defect, arguing that
those homosexuals, who were born as such and have a “hormonal
problem,” need to take medication in order to become “healthy.” If
it is a matter of choice, she said, then they are morally corrupt and
dangerous people. In the latter case,
Homosexuality is just an uncontrolled feeling. . . . Homosexuals let
themselves go. They might be in love, but that is only a temporary
feeling. It’s just a matter of nafs [the carnal self]. You should ask yourself why you like someone. If it’s about sex, then you should stop
yourself immediately. If it’s not about sex, then you should just be
like brothers. Marry a woman, not a man. Live healthy. Look, it has
been a while since I don’t have a husband. Like other women, I have
feelings and needs. I can’t be with a new man every day. I could be.
I would like to, but I don’t allow myself to do it. It’s like eating too
much. Homosexuals are sick, because they want to eat too much.

Here, homosexuality is conceptualized as a basic drive and as such
contrasted with love and companionship as in the case of brotherhood. In Mina’s opinion, brotherhood is a sacred form of engagement among men, lacking any sexual or bodily connotation. The
metaphoric comparison between homosexuality and excessive eat-

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ing in Mina’s statements also emphasizes the objectionable physical aspect of homosexuality. Here, the narrative of homosexuality
draws from a wider metaphorical context. Excessive eating is a metaphor for not being able to control one’s appetite. Sexuality is only
accepted and controllable within the context of long-term heterosexual relationships. Hence, homosexual encounters are per definition morally corrupt, because of the inability of homosexuals to
control the carnal self. The nafs 8 needs to be mastered, in the way
Mina has managed to do by fighting against the power of her sexual
appetite since her divorce. In this sense, she takes a morally superior
position compared to those who are involved in “lustful sexual relationships.” At the same time, however, by comparing the lust that
she attributes to homosexuality with her own “feelings and needs,”
she expresses a sense of understanding regarding homosexuality.
Whereas from the perspective of morality Mina rejects homosexuality quite fiercely, she recognizes homosexual feelings of “lust” and
connects them to her own experience. In this way, homosexuality
becomes incorporated into the realm of imaginable yet abject sexualities. It becomes closer to her experiences. Moreover, the moral
self-disciplining as praised by Mina does not concern the desire itself, but controlling the desire, which leaves some space for that
desire to exist.
In analyzing the revival of Islamic movements in the West, Göle
refers to Islam’s role in providing the tools for self-fashioning and
self-restraining through self-discipline, including “controlling of sexuality, both in mind and body, called nefs in Islam” (2010b: 376).9 As
it appears from Mina’s quotes, the concept of nafs regards especially
the controlling of sexuality in the body, rather than in the mind.
In Sufism, nafs is understood as the source of all evil, sin, and lust,
tempting you to indulge in material desire (Dastagir 1999: 5–6). Nafs
understood as the carnal self was opposed to the true self in how
Mina related herself to the rest of the Iranian Dutch community.
While, in her view, others “have lost themselves” upon their arrival
in the Netherlands, she has managed to remain truthful to her true
self thanks to her religion. “The important thing is that you know
who you are,” Mina kept repeating during our conversation. The
concept of nafs then seems to be an allegory of a context in which
one might feel tempted to “lose” oneself. The construction of an authenticated self thus extracts its meaning from such imagined context. In this particular context, the construction of the authenticated
self relies on the need to prevent an undisciplined nafs resulting in
uncontrolled sexuality, symbolized by homosexuality.

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Some of the religious Iranian Dutch research participants rejected
homosexuality through an act of cultural dissociation, as was the
case in one of the focus group discussions. Homosexuality was presented as a phenomenon that belongs to the Western culture and its
sexual promiscuity. This act of dissociation should not be understood
as an actual denial of homosexual practices among Iranians in Iran
or outside Iran. Rather the dissociation concerns a Dutch discourse
of homosexuality that requires transparency (in/out of the closet)
and sexual identity (being gay). This suggests that this act of cultural
dissociation is not simply a rejection, but an active engagement with
certain Dutch cultural sensibilities concerning homosexuality.
In this focus group four women participated, all of whom regarded themselves devout Muslims, among them Mahin and Elham, who were introduced at the beginning of this chapter. Neda,
a mother of two teenagers expressed her strong feelings of rejection by the following statement: “I think it would be easier for me
to deal with the death of my children, than their homosexuality.”
Mahin, added: “Thank God, my children feel disgusted when they
see homosexuals. Fortunately, I have nothing to worry about.” She
continued:
Some people say that it’s a sickness. I actually don’t believe that.
Those who are sick, would never accept it. They would rather kill
themselves. I think that calling it a sickness is actually an excuse. Because, then we are supposed to accept it as something that they can’t
do anything about. I think that, in fact, Dutch people are bored. They
start having sex at a very young age and after being married for years
and having children, they get bored and they want to try something
new.

Elham agreed and continued:
Yes, I think so too. I think it’s because they have too much freedom.
They simply want to have fun. I have a homosexual colleague and
when he comes and sits next to us I just can’t accept it. I just can’t. I
think he plays the role of the woman. They always divide the roles;
one is the woman and the other one is the man. I try to act normal
around him, but I can’t. Can’t they just control themselves? Do they
have no morals at all?

Homosexuality, in the previous quotes, is presented as a sign of the
promiscuity of the Dutch culture from which the discussants distance themselves. Unable to handle excessive liberties and corrupted
by the need for pleasure and by an unrestrained upbringing, so the

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argument goes, Dutch people end up acting promiscuous. Whereas
in the previous chapter, the research participants praised Dutch society as “modern” for recognizing gay rights, here homosexuality becomes a marker of Dutch haphazardness. Homosexuality therefore
represents the sexually promiscuous, unbounded, Western “other,”
implicitly opposed to a modest, moral, and restrained “us.” The context against which this us–them dichotomy can be imagined is symbolized by homosexuality as a form of sexual looseness. Religiosity
is a significant aspect of “us,” but also a cultural difference between
Iranian and Dutch people is assumed here. The Dutch sexual culture
is portrayed as too free, suggesting an overlap between religious and
cultural morality against which homosexuality is positioned.
An explicit claim to religiosity by the research participants, however, did not always go hand in hand with a rejection of homosexuality. On the contrary, some of them argued that all God-created
creatures deserve a place in this world, including homosexuals. In
a one-on-one conversation, Maryam, a woman in her mid-fifties,
strongly condemned the way homosexuals are treated in Iran and
applauded how gay people are treated in Dutch society. She said:
I think it’s very shameful that they kill people in Iran because of this
[homosexuality]. They take advantage of Islam. God would never approve. He created all of us. Look at how Dutch people deal with it.
They treat them with respect. I prefer their system much better. . . .
As religious people, especially, we have a moral duty and responsibility to treat people in a good way.

In one of the online discussions on the website of Radio Zamaneh,
following an article titled “Sex, an Alternative Way,”10 which among
other things discusses the experience of a gay Iranian man, some of
the participants also referred to their religious convictions as a reason for the acceptance of homosexuality. Ramin, a male participant,
refers to zaat (the true nature of God) and how, based on that, punishing homosexuals would not make any sense: “How could God
knowingly create a group of people who are supposed to get executed by another group that is also created by him? This doesn’t
correspond with God’s zaat.” Masoome, a female participant states:
“In my opinion we should accept others and approach everyone
equally, since God used his great power and knowledge to make every one of us as part of the reality of life.” Within the current context
in which homosexuality has more and more become a popular topic
in Iranian online media as well as an issue connected to the integration of Islamic minorities in the Netherlands, a specific reading of Is-

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lam provides these discussants the possibility of religious “trueness”
by taking the opposite of a repressive stance towards homosexuality. Acting in accordance with the true nature of God by accepting
homosexuality as part of life helps them to claim a more authentic
religious identity compared to those who contradict God’s will. In
this case, the authentication of the self is in fact made possible via a
morally oriented religious tolerance and inclusion of homosexuality.
Analyzing the perceptions of homosexuality, the data in this
section illustrate how a sense of finding the true self is articulated
among a group of Iranian Dutch that identifies as religious. It is often
assumed that hard work is required in order to get access to and to
protect this true self. In this respect, the research participants called
upon a religious morality as a vehicle to enable the authentication
of the self, using a discourse of “truthfulness.” This religious morality sometimes forms a ground to reject homosexuality as a carnal
desire or as a product of a foreign, loose culture. In other cases,
religious morality functioned as a base for tolerance and inclusion
of homosexuals, which attests to the transformation of religion by
developing an Islam that accepts homosexuality in the Dutch context. Moreover, the discursive rejection of homosexuality entailed
ambiguities as resembled by, on the one hand, the apprehension
of homosexual desire and, on the other hand, the condemnation
of homosexual practices. In these narratives of homosexuality, the
participants distanced themselves from Dutch society as potentially
promiscuous as well as from a part of the Iranian Dutch community
that failed to remain truthful to itself. Alternatively, conceptions of
homosexuality helped to create the conditions for a claim to a disciplined authenticated self.

Nonmarital Cohabitation as the Conditional Promise
Talking about romantic relationships and marriage, Setareh, a highly
educated single woman in her thirties, expressed her feelings of suspicion regarding the phenomenon of nonmarital cohabitation. In
her opinion, “this kind of relationship gives men the opportunity
to take advantage of women, letting them believe that they will get
married sometime in the future, without having any intention to do
so.” In Setareh’s view, in nonmarital arrangements of cohabitation
women are potential victims of men’s refusal to commit. She stated
that given her age, she was interested in meeting and dating men,
but only if their intentions were “honorable,” meaning that the re-

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lationship would lead to marriage. When I asked her how she tried
to find a suitable husband and how she protected herself from men
with “dishonorable” intentions, she told me the following story:
A few years ago, I met an Iranian man from The Hague on my Facebook page. He kept sending me nice and flattering messages, complimenting me about my pictures and that sort of thing. In the
beginning, I did not pay any attention to it, because I believe that a
truly respectable woman doesn’t give in easily to these kinds of flirtation. But he didn’t give up. So after a few months, I started talking to
him. . . . I made sure that he knew that I wasn’t an easy target. I was
serious and short in my answers and he was the one who always took
the initiative for talking. . . . Men tend to misinterpret nice gestures of
women, because they think you want to have sex with them. That’s
why I restrained myself from being too nice.

To protect her boundaries as a “respectable” woman, Setareh chooses
to act detached and distant when approached by a potential partner.
In a study on working class women and sexuality in Britain from
1918 to 1940, Judy Giles, observes how for these women “playing
hard to get” was an articulation of control and choice (1992). Given
“the hard scrutiny of their behavior by social observers and their
own recognition of the importance of respectable femininity,” these
women played hard to get as “a measure of self-assertion and identification” (Giles 1999: 242). Although the sociohistorical contexts
are quite different, Setareh seems to use a similar strategy of “playing hard to get.” It allows her to protect her “respectable femininity”
as an important aspect of the self. Moreover, this attitude of playing hard to get is a form of negotiation between preserving female
sexual modesty and an active search for a suitable partner. In the
current Dutch context where nonmarital cohabitation is generally
not frowned upon, playing hard to get enables her to imagine such
engagement while protecting herself from those men with improper
intentions. On the one hand, nonmarital cohabitation is interpreted
as lacking real commitment, on the other hand, “playing hard to
get” provides her with the opportunity to “test” the honorability
of the man’s intentions to commit as well as to assert a respectable
feminine self. This respectable femininity was connected to how Setareh presented herself as religious:
I know that my religiosity puts me in an odd position in relation to
other Iranian women. I have a lot of nonreligious [Iranian Dutch] female friends. Whenever we go to a birthday party or something like
that, you can immediately see the difference between me and the rest

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[she laughs]. They look all so, how should I put it, so jelf [dolled up].
They act as if they are desperate to get a man’s attention. You should
see them. They look completely lost. Islam helps me reflect on these
things. I want people to respect me, instead of seeing me as a desperate woman.

The Persian expression jelf figuratively means dolled up or rather
exposed in a cheap way. It refers to a kind of behavior that is generally perceived as inappropriate. In this case, Setareh uses this term
to portray a feminine lost “other,” against whom she can position
herself as respectable and authentic. Based on how she interprets
nonmarital cohabitation and female modesty, the appropriation of a
gendered authenticated superior self becomes possible.
Most of the research participants were quite positive about their
residence situation and regarded the Netherlands as their home. Even
though they were critical about some aspects of Dutch society—
such as social “coldness” and “excessive bureaucracy”—and stayed
connected to Iran either through travelling or closely following the
Iranian social and political developments via media, they all seemed
to invest substantially in building a life in the Netherlands. Most
of them thought that they would feel completely alienated if they
went back to Iran permanently. Having lived in the Netherlands for
a considerable amount of time has culturally changed them in such
a way that they would feel like foreigners in Iran. One of the few
participants that did not feel Dutch at all and perceived herself to be
“a hundred percent Iranian,” was Maral, a woman in her mid-thirties.
About eight years ago, Maral came to the Netherlands upon marrying her partner. She and her husband were introduced to each other
through relatives and decided to marry while they were living far
apart and had never met one another. “It was very difficult in the
beginning. I made two huge decisions. I married and migrated to a
foreign country at the same time.” Even though she is now used to
living in the Netherlands, speaks Dutch fluently, and has a full-time
job at a pharmacy, she still feels an outsider. “I would prefer to live
in Iran, even though Dutch society offers me more freedom.” She
explained:
Iran has a very old culture. It is true that we are dealing with various
problems in our country at this moment, but we are one of the oldest world civilizations. If you look attentively, you can see that there
is so much profoundness underneath what is happing now. Look for
example at the depth of some of our cinema productions. Such profound movies can only be made by people who have an enormous,

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valuable cultural baggage. You don’t see that in the Netherlands. They
have freedom, but they are culturally shallow.

Whereas, in the multicultural debates Islamic societies are associated
with religious backwardness, Maral presents Iran as a country that
has a long civilizational history beyond Islam, to which she belongs
and feels proud of. Maral introduced herself as a religious person
to me, yet the richness of the Iranian culture should in her opinion
be related but not reduced to Islamic influences. “Of course, Islam
is very important, but we already had an impressive history before
Islam.” From references to Iran as “an old civilization” she derives
a sense of cultural superiority compared to Dutch society. This emphasis on civilization and a heritage beyond Islam could also be seen
as a reference to class.11 Othering Muslim immigrants in many Western countries depends on intersections of race and class through
associations with cultural difference, low education, and financial
independence (Fathi 2017); the emphasis on the Iranian civilization
could be interpreted as an effort to correct potential misrecognition
in a migrant context. These research participants, in other words, try
to disconnect religiosity from a low social status.
The profoundness ascribed to Iranian culture, similarly, played a
central role in how she conceptualized nonmarital cohabitation. To
Maral, the exact form of the relationship is irrelevant. The main issue is “profoundness,” characterized by ta’ahod (commitment).
Real love, which to me is the only criterion, has to do with commitment. . . . If you really love someone, would you then easily leave
that person, because you find someone else more interesting? The
official name of the relationship is not important. It’s about commitment and responsibility. . . . I am in favor of profound relationships.
If people cohabitate without getting married, because they want to
have an easy way out, then I would completely disagree. That would
be a shallow relationship. . . . I know that nowadays people are not
concerned with things like profound romantic connections. But for
me, it is something that I want to hold onto.

As this quote illustrates, the “profoundness” presented by Maral as
a quality of Iranian culture, is also part of a vocabulary that she uses
to conceptualize desirable relationships. The appreciation of profound relationships resembling “commitment and responsibility”
helps her to build on a unique, authentic self. The authentication of
the self, in this case, relies less on perceptions of religious differences
and more on cultural heritage, and less on notions of “trueness” and
more on commitment as a unique quality in present-day society.

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Hamid, highly educated and unmarried, was the only man among
the interviewed participants who explicitly recognized and welcomed Islam as part of his identity. A mutual friend had introduced
him to me as a Muslim man with “interesting ideas about Islam.” Already at the beginning of our conversation, I noticed Hamid’s bracelet with a Persian religious text on it, including the names of the first
and eighth Shi’i imams Ali and Reza and the word “love.” When I
asked him about his religious views, he said:
If you ask me about my epistemological views, I would say I’m an
atheist. But . . . I have a cultural background, which is Islamic. . . .
By saying that I don’t believe in Islam, the hundred years of Islamic
influence doesn’t just go away. Islam is part of my heritage. It doesn’t
work that way. I’m not allergic to saying that I have an Islamic background. You know, Iranians are allergic to Islam. . . . Moreover, I have
much respect for the Islamic part of the Iranian history. I think that
the most interesting texts are written after [the arrival of] Islam and
the most beautiful architecture belongs to the Islamic period as well.
It is nonsense to believe that you can easily disconnect yourself from
this background. Islam is simply part of who I am.

To Hamid, Islam is an inevitable part of the Iranian culture and thus
Iranians’ identity. He is very much aware of the unpopularity of
claiming a Muslim identity among Iranians which he interprets as
a form of neglecting a part of who they are, a part that he, despite
his atheism, remains in touch with and even celebrates. Religion
is in this sense a sociohistorical phenomenon that affects peoples’
lives deeply, rather than something that one might be able to put
aside consciously. In fact, he thought that it would be immature
for Iranians to deny an Islamic identity “It is actually kind of silly
to see Iranians act so anti-religious. It’s quite childish. . . . It’s like
closing your eyes in order not to see the truth.” Against this negligent, childish anti-religious Iranian “other,” Hamid presents himself
as truthful and more mature. This discourse of maturity was, moreover, reflected in how Hamid described his ideas about nonmarital
cohabitation:
What the phenomenon of nonmarital cohabitation basically says is
that the ritual of a wedding is superficial. It says that rituals are unnecessary. I don’t believe that. I think that rituals cannot be transcended that easily. In my view people have the innate need for ritual,
even though modernity does not allow to admit to such needs. I’m
talking about the ceremony of the wedding. . . . At the same time, we
try to control everything, and we are afraid of letting go or afraid of

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choosing. The ritual of a wedding has something unconditional, it’s
an unconditional promise. If you think about it, there is something
very mature about it. The experience of being wed in front of family
and friends is very pure and tense. It cannot be replaced. It is about
letting go of your fears and making a choice, even though you might
get a divorce someday.

Nonmarital cohabitation, Hamid suggests, fails to recognize the “innate need” for the ritual the way that a wedding does. Marital commitment is then a sign of maturity to find the path that corresponds
with what we actually need. Nonmarital cohabitation, he argues,
symbolizes a fear of facing the reality and the ignorance to accept
our limitations to control life. It represents a conditional promise,
which is a morally weaker and less pure arrangement than marriage. By formulating his view on nonmarital cohabitation in this
way, Hamid claims a self that has freed itself from the anxiety to
control life and instead finds wisdom in submitting to our “needs.”
To him, maturity works as a point of orientation in how he relates
himself to “anti-religious” sensibilities among other Iranian Dutch
as well as the unwillingness to choose which he ascribes to nonmarital cohabitation. By denying one’s religious background and deritualizing relationships, the “truth” about who we are is neglected.
A mature attitude is required to get access to the true, authentic self.
In the interpretations of nonmarital cohabitation by the research
participants in this section, discourses of respectable femininity,
profoundness, and maturity were employed in the processes of
fashioning a true self, which I have interpreted as an act of selfauthentication. In opposition to a loose, shallow, and negligent
“other” embedded in notions of nonmarital cohabitation as unconditional and lacking commitment, an authenticated self was constructed. The phenomenon of nonmarital cohabitation as practiced in
current Dutch society represents a sexual culture that in the perceptions of these participants fails to protect values of modesty and commitment. The authenticated self is as such fashioned in accordance
with present-day concerns, while making appeals to a celebrated past.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I explored the deployment of sexuality as a vehicle
to self-fashioning among a group of the Iranian Dutch who see Islam as part of their identity. What they all had in common is that

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they attribute an integral place to religion in current society, rather
than dismissing religiosity as outdated. Religious self-affirmations of
the research participants via sexuality were investigated in a contemporary context where religiosity rather than a matter of course,
demands self-reflection, re-evaluation, and reinvention. Moreover,
the religious-adverse sentiments and skepticism within the Iranian
community were taken as a background against which a religious
group of Iranian Dutch fashioned an authenticated self. In this regard, discourses of sexuality proved both restrictive and productive
as they were employed in processes of self-disciplining and self-construction. Far from being silent on the issue of sexuality, in the positions that were presented in this chapter, they called upon sexuality
to fashion an “authenticated” self. Whereas in the previous chapter,
a quest for modernity and tolerance towards sexual autonomy and
sexual diversity as an ideal went hand in hand, the participants in
this chapter invested in a sexually restraining morality that helped
constructing modesty and piety.
In the conceptualizations of virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation, often an appreciation for “purity,” “realness,”
and “trueness” was articulated through explicit references to “devotion,” “personal moral development,” “humanity,” “compliance
with tradition,” “morality,” “respectability,” and “profoundness.”
These qualities which were drawn from the participants’ interpretations of religion and tradition constituted a frame for “proper” sexualities. Premarital sexual abstinence was rejected, homosexuality
was associated with a carnal desire yet sometimes tolerated as Godgiven, and in the discussions on nonmarital cohabitation the sincerity of intentions for commitment were questioned. The “pure,”
“real,” or “true” self that emerged from these conceptions, I have
called the “authenticated self.”
Gender played a constitutive role in some of these constructions
of proper sexuality and the authenticated self, as for instance illustrated by the example of “respectable femininity” guaranteed by a
“hard-to-get” strategy. Moreover, when the topic of virginity was
discussed, either no sex-specific references were made or femininity automatically formed the main concern, as was also apparent
in the appraisal of “modesty,” which is generally regarded as a female quality. In the case of homosexuality, the concept of brotherhood revealed a notion of ideal masculinity as opposed to male
homosexuality. In general, male homosexuality received far more
attention in my interlocutors’ narrated experiences than female

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homosexuality. Interestingly the uncontrolled desire attributed to
male homosexuality was compared with the sexual desire of the
female participant that had to be tamed. This suggests that ideals of
heterosexual femininity and homosexual masculinity were in this
case perceived as interchangeable. Another striking aspect in relation to gender is the fact that except for one, all the research participants who used a religious discourse were women. Although no
statistical claims can be made in this regard, this could mean that
possibilities for non-organized, non-institutional—as in the case of
the Iranian Dutch—re-evaluation and redefining of religiosity and
tradition in a context of a deterritorialized Islam is particularly relevant for women. To men, claiming a religious identity in such a
climate is perhaps primarily a form of resistance against discrimination, whereas to women a reflective critical appropriation of religiosity would be an act of resistance against both discrimination and
patriarchy. Women, as such, have more to gain.
Religion as an integral part of the authenticated self was transformed in various ways, such as in the case of reinterpreting the
sigheh marriage in order to preserve modesty, redefining Islam in a
way to make homosexuality acceptable. Furthermore, the rejection
of homosexuality based on religious ideas sometimes took ambiguous forms. Using the concept of nafs (the carnal self), for example,
homosexual practices rather than homosexual desire was rejected.
Also, notions of tradition and culture intertwined with religiosity,
making a clear distinction difficult. Religion then became more a
sociohistorical phenomenon that constituted the Iranian culture in
a profound way, which no one could “suddenly” decide to get rid
of. Instead of employing static understandings of religiosity, religion
and tradition were either strategically or unintentionally reinvented
by the research participants. Interestingly, none of them defined religiosity as connected to an extra-national Islamic belonging, but
mainly in opposition to the rest of the Iranian Dutch community.
Their religiosity was thus a specific local phenomenon. What is being passed on among this group of Iranian Dutch is an authenticated self, which is drawn from revised versions of religiosity. This
authenticated self is made intelligible in the specific current context
in which religion-based self-identification has political implications
in the broad sense. Providing lucidity and a grip on an otherwise
unclear and unstable environment, authenticity functions as a torch
that has to be protected and passed on via the sexual fashioning of
the authenticated self.

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Notes
1. For a more detailed discussion of ceremonies of sofreh and constructions of gender through religiosity see Torab (1996, 2005, 2007).
2. http://www.iwsf.org/, accessed 15 April 2021.
3. A tension between Islam, women’s “agency,” and “emancipation” has
also been subjected to debates among Western European secular feminists (Van den Brandt 2014; Midden 2012; Göle 2010b; Scott 2007).
4. The title of this chapter is inspired by this expression and meant as an
aesthetic description of the experiences of the research participants in
this chapter, such as Elham and Mahin whom I introduced at the beginning of the chapter.
5. Yalda is an Iranian feast marking the longest night of the year, which
falls at the winter solstice in the Iranian calendar and has been popular
since ancient times. After this night the days grow longer, symbolizing the triumph of the light and goodness over the powers of darkness. From http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Celebrations/yalda.htm,
accessed 15 April 2021.
6. See Chapters 3 and 4 for more information on sigheh marriage.
7. ‫زﻧﺎﺷﻮﯾﯽ ﮐﯿﻔﯿﺖ ﺑﺮ آن ﺗﺎﺛﯿﺮ و ازدواج از ﭘﯿﺶ ﺟﻨﺴﯽ راﺑﻄﻪ‬, BBC News ‫ ﻓﺎرﺳﯽ‬, accessed 15 April
2021.
8. Nafs is a wide-ranging concept in Islam and can be translated into English in different ways (“self,” “oneself,” “ego,” etc.). However, in this
particular context nafs refers to a lower or carnal self that needs to be
disciplined.
9. “Nefs” is the Turkish and “nafs” the Persian pronunciation of the word.
10. http://zamaaneh.com/morenews/2007/06/post_718.html, accessed 15
April 2021.
11. For a more comprehensive discussion on the topic of class in the Iranian diasporic context, see “Intersectionality, Class, and Migration Narratives of Iranian Women Migrants in the UK” (Fathi 2017). Although
Fathi’s analyses do not engage with the connection between religiosity
and class, she does recognize its important for future research.

Chapter 4

BEYOND SEXUAL BOUNDARIES
TRANSGRESSIVE SELVES AND SEXUALITIES

Watching Alternative Pornography at Mezrab
In January 2011, together with a few friends and family members
we visited Mezrab,1 which is a cultural center in Amsterdam organized and hosted by a young Iranian Dutch man. The theme of that
night was “alternative pornography.” A producer in this genre, a
comedian, a researcher, and an artist were invited to talk about alternative pornography, its origin and different styles. After the talks,
some examples of such movies were shown. The overall goal of the
evening, as mentioned in the announcement of the program, was
“discussing some of the sexual taboos that still plague both East and
West” and “[talking] about a subject that’s been part of society since
the dawn of man: pornography.” In the description of the event, the
organizers openly articulated their concern for initiating a serious
discussion on the issue of pornography in general and “alternative
pornography” in particular.
What the organizers meant by “alternative” pornography, as became clearer during the program, had mostly to do with the possibility of and the need for women-friendly and nonheterosexual
pornography as opposed to the mainstream, heterosexual-maleaudience-oriented porn movies. For instance, in one of the demonstrations, we saw only the face of a porn actor, who actually met
his co-actress for the first time in front of the camera. Their only
“assignment” was to have oral sex and the rest of their interaction
was “spontaneous.” There was no background music, and the movie

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was narrated in real time, taking about fifteen minutes. The camera
was focused exclusively on the man’s face, which was, according
to the filmmaker, a technique for portraying “male vulnerability.”
While he met his co-actress and had sex with her, we followed
his facial expressions such as reservation, shame, surprise, excitement, and submission. The idea behind this short movie was to
provide an alternative for the usually aggressive, dominant, and selfcontrolled male porn actor, the filmmaker further explained. Other
examples were shown and discussed in which lesbian and romantic
heterosexual sex scenes were central, all of which were supposed to
compensate for the generally underexposed female perspective in
pornography. A discussion started when two lesbian women in the
audience expressed their discomfort with what they thought was the
assumption the women would prefer “nice, soft, romantic, penisfree” porn. This kind of critical questioning and reflection on assumed
boundaries and normative perceptions characterized that night’s
program.
For another part of the evening, a young Iranian Dutch woman
was asked to tell the audience about her first encounter with porn
in Iran as a teenager under the rule of the strict Islamic regime,
which strongly condemns and penalizes pornography. In her case, it
was not the content of the porn movie that resembled “alternativeness”—she actually could not remember much about the details of
what she had seen—but the very act of speaking openly in public
about her personal experience of discovering porn as the means to
pleasure for an unmarried young Iranian woman, that in itself represented “alternative-ness.” Whereas the alternativity of other performances that night became intelligible in contrast to the heterosexualmale-audience-oriented pornography, her performance derived its
meaning from assumed religious and gendered difference. The
other acts entailed a general critique of a social phenomenon and
providing multiple alternatives, while her act was itself the alternative because of its specific context—a young woman in Iran.
In this sense the implicit transgression in this young woman’s act
corresponds with what the research participants in Chapter 2 idealized as sexual autonomy. The difference, though, is that in Chapter 2 an endogenous morality was called upon as a condition for
sexual autonomy, whereas here morality or conditionality were not
that explicitly at work.
This young woman was the only speaker with an Iranian background; the rest were Dutch, Greek, and American. The audience
consisted of about fifty people, forming an ethnically diverse group

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as well. The language was English, which is quite common for Mezrab. Although the main organizer is of Iranian descent, almost all
of the programs involve international performers and visitors. The
main activities of Mezrab are storytelling (in English and Dutch),
art exhibitions, music gatherings, dance and art workshops (such
as nude model drawing), movie nights, and various debates (for instance on homosexuality in the Iranian context or sex during lockdown). Apart from personal interest, I have also visited Mezrab a
few times as a place for participant observation during this research
project. Almost all of the research participants in this chapter are
somehow connected to Mezrab. I either met them at Mezrab events
or I was introduced to them by their close friends who are regular
Mezrab visitors.
Beside its multiethnic and international allure, Mezrab differed
from other sites of participant observation in another sense. In contrast to the majority of the other public places where I conducted
my research, wearing revealing clothing, an extensive amount of
makeup and high heels for women and expensive and trendy outfits for men do not necessarily represent the ideal appearance in
Mezrab. Although these kinds of looks are not absent, the range
of possibilities is much broader and more equally divided between
gender-transgressive, artistic or creative, casual or sporty, classic
and trendy looks. In one case, when I attended a debate on homosexual rights at Mezrab, a veiled Iranian woman was also present,
which is quite exceptional for such a setting. She came from Iran
and was visiting her son in the Netherlands during the summer
vacation. She had specifically requested of the organizers not to
be photographed or filmed, as she wanted to avoid possible difficulties with Iranian authorities upon her return. Discussing homosexuality in a public place is often associated with nonreligiosity.
Her presence as a veiled woman conflicted with this widespread
assumption. The host condemned discriminatory anti-religious tendencies both inside and outside the Iranian context on several occasions, while welcoming constructive critique of religious or other
kinds of ideologies. Mezrab, in other words, does not represent anti-religiosity; however, neither does it actively promote (tolerance
of) religiosity.
From here on the focus of this chapter is not on the particular locale of Mezrab, but on a narrative framing of sexuality and the self
within which a group of participants attempt to go beyond certain
sociocultural boundaries. Such acts of transgression take place by
having open sexual relationships, decentering romantic love, ques-

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tioning sexual and gender identities, and imagining and practicing
unconventional family formations. The positions discussed in the
previous ethnographic chapters, entailed a notion of modernity entangled with a liberal attitude towards sexuality which was either
conditionally embraced or explicitly rejected by the research participants. These processes of identification appeared to be ambiguous,
paradoxical, and multifaceted. In this chapter, I will focus on performances of the self through conceptualizing “transgressive” sexualities. I will argue that although extensive reflections and boundary
crossings in the constructions of sexuality enable the participants to
claim an ideal transgressive self, there are simultaneously moments
of normativity and conformity involved in their perceptions of sexuality. The goal is to understand and to contextualize the meanings
given to sexual boundary crossing by the participants in terms of
self-fashioning. In the following three sections, I will introduce the
research participants, present a theoretical framework, and provide
a general impression of the kind of transgressive sexualities that I
encountered. The subsequent parts will deal with a more in-depth
discussion of sexual boundary crossings as the means to transgressive self-fashioning. In the conclusion, I will briefly recapitulate and
reflect on the main findings.

A Transgressive Younger Generation of Iranian Dutch
The research participants in this chapter form a relatively homogenous group. In the previous chapters, diversity in terms of differences in educational level, age, ethnic background, occupation, and
place of residence (big cities as well as small towns) characterized the
group of participants. However, the positions to be discussed in this
chapter are represented by exclusively young men and women in
their twenties and thirties, all of whom are actively involved in different kinds of cultural, social, and/or political fields as is reflected in
their choice of study or occupation. Furthermore, almost all of them
are regular visitors of the cultural center Mezrab, as mentioned before. They all speak English regularly and have close friends from
different countries and with different national backgrounds. The
reference of Iranian Dutch, therefore, might not completely cover
the international aspects of their identity. The five women and two
men who will be the main narrators in this chapter are moreover
connected to each other through friendship. Each one of them is
closely befriended with at least two others in this group.

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Focusing on this socially coherent group of informants provides
us access to the constructions of sexuality and subjectivity of an alternative kind. This chapter, in other words, is not about the Iranian
Dutch gay community, in which long-term intimate relationships
may not be uncommon. My focus is on a small group of young people who characterize themselves as experimenting, as creative, and
as interested in transgressive sexualities. The analytical relevance
of this chapter therefore lies in capturing the cultural density and a
discourse of sexuality that characterizes this group as a distinct way
of dealing with and thinking about sexuality in relation to the self.
Moreover, I have observed a recent trend of articulations of “transgressive” sexualities among Iranians in various (social) media, such
as on popular websites, weblogs, and on Facebook, which shows that
such narrative framing of sexuality is shared by more people than
just the participants interviewed here. An example is the contribution of Iranian women from different parts of the world in an online
campaign in 2011 to support the Egyptian Aliaa Magda El-Mahdi
who posed naked in protest against what she perceived to be a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment, and hypocrisy. A
group of Iranian women took off their clothes in front of the camera
as they shared Aliaa’s cause. Furthermore, a number of “queer movements” have been initiated in the past years by Iranians living around
the world. On the International Day against Homophobia in 2010,
for instance, a group of Iranians initiated a “queer coming out” by
claiming queerness and rejecting fixed sexual identity categories such
as homosexual and bisexual, and instead promoted radical diversity.
One of the aspects about the composition of the group that
merits particular attention is the overrepresentation of women.
Other literature on sexuality among the Iranian diaspora has suggested that progressive stances are indeed often to be found among
women (Shahidian 1996; Tohidi 1993; Ghaffarian 1989). The argument goes that given their past inferior position regarding sexual freedom compared to men and the lack of gender equality in
various aspects of life, Iranian women have less to lose, or rather
more to gain, by acting progressively in a more democratic and gender egalitarian environment outside Iran. Their dissatisfaction with
their previous sexual life and gender position would be the main
force behind their current progressive attitude. Although this line
of reasoning might sound convincing, my analyses in Chapter 3
show that an explicitly religious position can also be occupied predominantly by women. The prominent presence of women in exceptional positions might have to do with resisting the masculinity

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of conventional sociocultural frameworks. For instance, as we saw
in the discussion around an “alternative pornography” at Mezrab
mainly entailed a critical reflection on mainstream male-centered
and female-unfriendly pornographic productions. However, both
the small size of the group and the fact that some of the research
participants in this chapter tend to deconstruct a fixed gender identity, make it difficult to use categories of “men” and “women.”
Quantitative claims about gender exceed the aims of this research
and should be taken up and investigated in other studies. For the
purpose of this chapter, I will pay exclusive attention to how gender is represented and (de)constructed in articulations of transgressive sexuality among a group of research participants.
All of the respondents that I identified as transgressive live in the
Randstad (urban area), mainly in Amsterdam. Randstad is the Dutch
name for the highly urbanized area of the Western part of the Netherlands, consisting of cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague,
and Utrecht. Living in energetic and highly multicultural cities might
be crucial as they provide the research participants with more opportunities to feel anonymous and unrestrained on the one hand
and to find self-chosen ways of belongings on the other. Discussing
the relation between sexuality and living in the city, the sociologist
Henning Bech emphasizes “the inner, potential freedom from ‘being
oneself’ connected with anonymity and non-committedness of urban relations” (1998: 219). In the urban context, he implies, people
are less restrained by social norms of the broader society and enjoy
more possibilities to transgress those norms without being noticed
or judged. Two of the research participants emphasized that they felt
more Amsterdammer than Dutch or Iranian and ascribed a progressive, cosmopolitan mentality to people living in Amsterdam, which
they felt was lacking in the rest of the country and among Iranians in
general. Moreover, the ethnic diversity among their friends and using English on a regular basis is probably more common in big multiethnic cities like Amsterdam than in a small town. Although these
aspects are not necessarily characteristic for the whole population of
the Randstad, their prominence in the life of this group of Iranian
Dutch compared to other research participants was striking.

Malleable Sexualities, Reflective Selves
The sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, describes the contemporary “late
modern” or “postmodern” age as a time when eroticism has loosened

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itself from any functional use (1998). Whereas previously eroticism
served either reproductive or romantic purposes, in the late modern or postmodern age, he poses, eroticism has become its own end
with sufficient reason and purpose. Seeking sexual delights for their
own sake would now be a cultural norm, which he summarizes as
the “emancipation of eroticism” or “erotic revolution” (1998: 21).
Rejecting, on the one hand, reproductive necessities and, on the
other hand, love’s demands of eternal, selective, and exclusive loyalty, the postmodern subject is free to experiment. The validity of
Bauman’s analyses of late modern or postmodern sexuality and the
“erotic revolution” can be questioned in terms of its representativity.
Given the ethnic, cultural, class, and gender diversities that characterize contemporary Western as well as non-Western societies, one
might ask to whom Bauman’s “erotic revolution” applies exactly. To
examine the more complex and relational configurations of such
an erotic revolution, therefore, ethnographic research could be insightful (Rival, Slater, and Miller 1999). Moreover, a shift in attention from “white Westerners” to “other identities and communities”
would help to include more diverse meanings and practices in these
understandings of postmodern sexualities (Barker and Langdridge
2010: 763).
Unlike Bauman, the sociologist Anthony Giddens states that in
fact a direct connection between romanticism or love and sexuality characterizes our contemporary sexual culture (1992). However,
Giddens employs a different notion of “love.” For Bauman, love and
romanticism include loyalty and obligations, whereas Giddens here
refers to love as a pure emotion that “develops to the degree to
which intimacy does” (1992: 62). Love in this sense is active, contingent, and not necessarily exclusive. Using the concepts of “pure relationship” and “confluent love,” Giddens emphasizes the importance
and prominence of mutual (sexual) satisfaction, openness, integrity,
trust, and constant negotiation and reflection in postmodern intimate relationships. Instead of disappearing, love and romanticism
become redefined as fields of negotiation, intimacy, and honesty,
ascribing a central role to the partner in the process of self-making.
These recent developments in sexual cultures, called “the transformation of intimacy” go hand in hand with continuous “revolutionary processes in the infrastructure of personal life” (Giddens
1992: 182). Due to the weakening of institutional authorities and
repression, Giddens points out, sexuality has increasingly become a
property of the individual and is therefore intrinsically intertwined
with the self. Sexuality becomes a medium of emancipation and

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radical democratization of the personal, which Giddens describes as
“the reflexive project of the self.” This project regards individuals
to be free to choose who to be and how to realize their sexual desire in a rather creative way. While I am interested in these creative moments of self-fashioning among the Iranian Dutch research
participants in this chapter, I also wonder about the sociality and
contextuality of the self. According to Laura Rival, Don Slater, and
Daniel Miller, “even transgressive sexualities are involved with a
normative sociality” (1999: 297). Sexuality, including its discursive
articulations, is thus always connected to regulative social norms,
even from the viewpoint of a particularly creative actor.
Giddens’s account of the “transformation of intimacy” and in
particular his concept of “pure relationship” is criticized by Lynn
Jamieson (1999) for being too optimistic and for down-grading sociological explanations including gender dimensions. Empirical evidence, she claims, suggests a far less hopeful and much messier
picture, according to which few relationships are mainly about mutual appreciation, knowing, and understanding (ibid.: 482). There
is indeed a popular discourse on equality and mutuality in relationships, Jamieson argues, however, everyday reality shows that
sustaining a sense of intimacy in many cases occurs despite various
inequalities by which individuals are surrounded rather than in the
process of transformation. Equality in relationships often results
from constant effort and has to be carefully guarded. Moreover, recent feminist work illustrates that even though men and women
might live together as equals and intimates, all kinds of patriarchal
practices continue to exist at the level of state institutions and places
of work. Furthermore, these feminist works refer to cases where
intimacy can coexist with inequality, justified by reasons of convenience such as “she happens to be better at cooking [or] he doesn’t
enjoy cooking as much” (ibid.: 489). The findings from a study on
the role of male partners in women’s socioeconomic success in the
Netherlands (Komter, Renske, and Dykstra 2012), for instance, attest to the persistence of gender asymmetry in concrete activities
such as sharing household tasks, while egalitarian gender roles are
theoretically endorsed by both partners. Although the scope of this
research does not allow for a sociological approach to concrete gendered aspects of companionate relationships, I will pay attention to
the discursive constructions of gender when looking at the conceptualization of transgressive sexualities.
The postmodern primacy of possibilities for (re)making the self
through sexuality is also extensively discussed by Jeffrey Weeks (1998,

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2000). He connects postmodern sexual subjectivity to a combination of three cultural shifts “with women in the vanguard,” namely:
“detraditionalization,” “individualization,” and “identity creation”
(2000: 239). According to him traditional notions of belonging and
legitimacy are constantly undermined and replaced by new belongings. Also, individual autonomy has been centralized through which
the person seizes control over her/his own life. Moreover, new understandings of identity as being the focus of resistance and in many
cases a matter of choice, instead of destiny, have accordingly entered
our imagination and everyday lives in the late modern or postmodern world (ibid.: 239–40). These three cultural shifts are interrelated
as the fluidity and looseness of belonging create a sense of individuality (the individual has to continuously reconnect to new groups
and networks) with possibilities for remaking the self each time. In
these analyses, a tendency can be observed towards an interpretation of contemporary identities as consciously malleable. The self is
here presented as an autonomous agent capable of planning a life
according to one’s wishes and desires. Weeks imagines the postmodern individual as someone who “constructs the self as a creative self”
(Weeks 1995: 45). My approach in this project, though, differs in
the sense that I will seek to analyze the relation between a claim to
autonomy in sexual self-realization and practices of self-fashioning
as two processes that co-create and re-enforce one another. Rather
than investigating the extent of autonomy in sexuality of the research participants, in other words, I am interested in the broader
sociocultural meaning of presenting oneself as autonomous via notions of sexuality. The parallel is to be found in the importance that
Weeks ascribes to sexuality in many people’s lives through which
they try to make sense of profound, yet extremely fragile and fluid
notions of identity (1998: 39).
The previous discussions indicate an increasing autonomy in regulating sexuality based on personal desires and consideration and a
rejection of loyalty to anything everlasting. These are presented as
characteristic for what has been called “late modern or postmodern
sexualities.” The self is here concerned with experimenting and personal fulfillment, but also longs for pure love and democratic mutuality through constant negotiation. Criticizing this rather celebrative
approach to contemporary sexual cultures, some scholars emphasize
other relevant axes of difference, including gender, ethnicity, and
class (Jónasdóttir and Ferguson 2014). Ethnographic studies of postmodern transgressive sexualities, they argue, seem to be limited to
white Westerners. In this chapter, instead of offering a qualification

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of the Iranian Dutch research participants as postmodern, the aim
is to analyze the participants’ articulations of sexual transgression
as practices of self-fashioning. Focusing on the contested fields of
virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation respectively,
the next sections will explicate how sexuality before marriage, sexual orientation as a base for identification, and ideal relationships
are discussed by a group of young Iranian Dutch. First, however, I
will provide a general impression of what I came across in my fieldwork which could be defined as claims to transgressive sexuality
and selves.

Transgressive Sexualities and Selves
In a summer afternoon in 2011, I was invited to Shahin’s wedding,
a middle-aged biology teacher who I came to know during my visits
to Mezrab. After living together for a few years, he and his boyfriend
had decided to celebrate their relationship in the form of a wedding
in Rotterdam in a small church. Neither Shahin, nor his partner
were Christian. In fact, Shahin did not believe in monotheistic religions and his partner was an atheist. However, during an afternoon walk, as Shahin described, “We heard people singing, went in
and fell in love with this beautiful place [the church].” Later they
asked the priest whether he was willing to carry out blessing ceremonies for an Iranian homosexual non-Christian couple and the
priest agreed. On the wedding day, a group of approximately thirty
people attended the ceremony, which was filled with moments of
silence. The event was entirely arranged by Shahin and his partner.
Shahin recited classical Persian poetry while classical Persian music
was played in the background. They both wore light-colored cotton
tunics and trousers. After the ceremony, we went to their house to
enjoy some homemade Iranian food. This experience was nothing
like Iranian weddings I had attended before, which usually involved
loud Westernized popular Iranian music, stylish men and women
occupying the dance floor throughout the night, and lots of food
and drinks.
When, months later, Shahin and I reflected on this ceremony, he
mentioned that initially he had many doubts about the wedding.
He explained that having faced many difficulties as an Iranian gay
man in relation to all kinds of institutions, he felt uncomfortable to
subject himself to marriage, “one of the most confining nahad-haye
rasmi [official institutions] in the history.” However, he added, while

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laughing, “I think that our wedding didn’t fit any institution’s rules.
. . . We simply wanted to celebrate our love in a place where we
felt at home.” Never before or since had they spent so much time
in that church as during their wedding ceremony. Shahin furthermore confessed that he had “a thing” for Mary, the mother of Jesus, in those years, “but now it’s over.” At that particular moment
of time, it meant a lot to Shahin and his partner to celebrate their
relationship in this way. “I don’t believe in ‘happily ever after’ [said
in English],” Shahin said. “We are together as long as we love each
other.” By mentioning this, Shahin ensured me that they did not
blindly give in to institutional confinement in the form of a permanent marriage, but in a way played with some institutional rules to
fulfill their temporary wishes.
Both long-lasting and monogamous relationships were questioned by another research participant, Sina, a highly educated,
young Iranian man. We met at a reading club, of which the members came together a few times to discuss Iranian poetry and novels.
When he was a teenager, he had migrated with his parents and two
sisters to the Netherlands, about fifteen years ago. Sina was finishing
his MA in architecture at the time of our conversation, which took
place after one of the reading club meetings at a café in Amsterdam. Based on his previous relationships and observations among
friends, Sina was convinced that couples in a relationship should
avoid living together. He said he would prefer living with a group of
friends, “so that I don’t feel lonely. My partner, of course, can come
and visit me for a few days. . . . I think we can even have children,
without living together. That way we can have other relationships
as well.” When I asked him where he imagined their child would
live, he said: “That doesn’t really matter, for instance, with me and
my friends. Why should children necessarily live with their mother
and father? Living with more people can in fact be more stable, safe,
and joyful.” He also mentioned other household formations to make
clear that such arrangements could always be made depending on
the specific situation. However, he said, “This is of course a hypothetical situation. No one probably wants to live like this except me
with my fekrhaye ajib-gharibam [crazy thoughts].”
When I asked him to elaborate on those “crazy thoughts,” he
mentioned a documentary that he had recently read about a young
woman who worked as a prostitute providing sexual services to
physically disabled men. “She could be a top model, but instead she
wanted these men to get the sexual attention that they otherwise
would probably never get.” Inspired by this, he had started thinking

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about sexual needs of physically disabled women and whether he
could help them by becoming a prostitute for a while. “Ideas like
this make my parents crazy, but they know me. Well, not just my
parents [he laughs].” Explaining this further he said that working as
a female prostitute is already taboo: “How do you think people react
to hear this about a man who wants to help disabled women?” To
consider becoming a prostitute, one concerned with the well-being
of a vulnerable group of women, Sina would be unconventional due
to the disconnection between romance and sex, but also because of
dissociating the general idea of prostitution from the desperate female sex worker depending on the money of her male clients.
Imagining an “open relationship” as a more realistic alternative
than monogamy was also mentioned by a few other research participants. Mohsen, a man in his thirties who was cohabiting with his
female partner, said: “Probably everyone feels the need to have sex
with someone other than their partner, from time to time. These
feelings cannot be denied. I just don’t see any good reason why
people shouldn’t allow themselves to act upon those emotions.”
Mohsen connected what he assumed as a shared desire for having
multiple sexual partners to mutual understanding and trust. “If we
really trust and understand each other, it shouldn’t be such a big issue for her [his partner] to sleep with another person for one night.”
Elaborating on his ideas about an open relationship, he emphasized
that enjoying azadi (freedom) was an important part of his hoviyat
(identity), which he though could be realized by fulfilling sexual
desire outside the relationship under the condition of mutual trust
and transparency.
Such articulations of non-normative sexuality and the self also
characterized the conversation that I had with Tara, a female journalist in her thirties. A mutual friend told me she would be interested in an interview as sexuality was a topic that she would openly
discuss with other people. Before the interview, we had dinner together near her workplace in Amsterdam in order to get to know
each other. Of all interviewees, Tara was the one with the shortest period of residence in the Netherlands. She had left Iran after
her mother and brother were arrested during the Iranian Green
Movement uprising in the summer of 2009. When she was a child,
her father was executed for political reasons. After her own recent
oppositional political activities on social media, she had decided to
leave the country. About life in the Netherlands, she said “I never
felt I was in a new environment. . . . I have heard that for some people it is strange to see a couple kissing in public. Not for me.” She

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then explained that her life was never “normal” and that she was
not easily shocked. Already in Iran, she was a yaghi (rebel). To illustrate this, she said:
Once, when I was seventeen and the whole family was invited to our
house, I had an appointment with a hairdresser to depilate my eyebrows. I went there and this woman made my eyebrows very thin.
Then she asked me if wanted some highlights in my hair. I said “yes.”
When my mother saw me coming, she almost had a stroke. Imagine
that the whole family and friends and relatives were coming. This
was clearly not acceptable. They didn’t know how to deal with me,
as I was a yaghi.

In the Netherlands, Tara would continue acting as a yaghi. Her previous relationship with someone who was “neither a woman, nor
a man” had led to confusion and gossip among family, friends, and
colleagues. Her partner was born as a woman, but felt, dressed, and
behaved more like a man. “They don’t understand me. I could use
the term ‘queer’ to describe myself, but that is too difficult for them
to understand.” However, Tara in fact appreciated such conflicts:
I had to fight hard for this relationship. One of the things that I loved
about this relationship was that after a long time, there was something that I had to fight for. It’s difficult to explain this feeling. There
is something rebellious about it, anarchism. I love anarchism.

She explained that in her view gender of the partner should not
matter in a relationship and that she saw it as her task to try to break
this taboo: “I believe that everybody should try to break taboos in
society. . . . But that requires a courageous person. You need jor’at
[the courage] to do that. . . . I think I’m a bit divooneh [crazy]. I don’t
know the reason, but I know that in my life I have never accepted
any norm.” Tara, as these statements illustrate, presented herself
as someone with the personal tendency but also a societal duty to
transgress gender and sexuality norms.
Unlike Tara, Shadi, a recently divorced young woman in her thirties, saw the context of the Netherlands as fundamentally different
from Iran. One of her first, most vivid impressions of Dutch society
was when she and her ex-husband were invited to a Dutch friend’s
house for dinner: “At some point the father excused himself and
told us he had to bring their child to bed. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
I thought that men would never do such things. My perceptions
completely changed here.” It was in the Netherlands that she realized why she was unhappy in her marriage and decided to separate

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from her husband. After the divorce, Shadi promised herself not to
have a serious relationship for the time being to protect her freedom
and to gain new experiences. “I can easily move on, I don’t become
dependent emotionally. I might feel sad for a few days [after a break
up], but that’s all. I just move on.” The Dutch context had provided
Shadi with the opportunity to see things radically different and to
choose a way of living that suited her newly discovered needs.
Neda, a young single woman who came to the Netherlands at the
age of four, had more difficulty in making such a clear distinction
between Dutch and Iranian context in terms of feelings of belonging. Apart from a phase during which she became very interested in
Iranian culture and music to find out “who I was,” she felt neither
particularly Dutch nor Iranian. In fact, as a student her professor
had to convince her about conducting her research in Iran, whereas
she was more interested in Spain and had learned Spanish to prepare herself for her research project. “So just because I was born
in Iran and my parents are Iranian, I was supposed to find Iran interesting.” Instead, she preferred living in different countries in order to maintain her autonomie (Dutch for autonomy). The number
of her Iranian friends, however, is slowly growing. “I have found
out that there are interesting people among Iranians as well [she
laughs]. No seriously, some of them are very intelligent and openminded. Others aren’t.” Talking about Iranians and sexuality more
specifically, she said:
Look, as I said, the Iranian community is very diverse. . . . For example, I have an Iranian female friend, who works at Shell. . . . She
calls me a whore, as a joke. For her, my way of dealing with sexuality
is very strange. I have too many boyfriends, she thinks. I don’t have
to be in love to have sex with someone. She doesn’t get that. Still,
this doesn’t affect our friendship, because she is a mature person. Of
course, I don’t know whether she judges me or not. But, I don’t care
about that.

In narratives of sexuality and the self in which transgression was
claimed and celebrated, references to religiosity or religion were remarkably absent—either as something to embrace or to oppose. In
the few instances when Islam was mentioned, a different position
was taken than the negative approach to religiosity as discussed in
Chapters 2 and 3. For example, on the Facebook page of one of the
interviewees, a discussion took place about a young Arab woman
who presented herself as “Muslim, queer, and feminist,” posting
pictures of herself both with and without hijab. This was accompa-

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nied by a text in which she describes how she had managed to develop her own religiosity in which there was room for ambiguous,
seemingly paradoxical aspects of her identity. Her story as well as
the mainly appreciative comments in her blog consisted of many
anti-authority elements, especially regarding Islam as preached by
powerful men in the family and in broader society. Although the
research participant (a young unmarried man) who posted this
woman’s story on Facebook did not introduce it as a specific way
to conceptualize religion, the discussions went beyond the widespread Iranian Dutch understandings of Islam as merely oppressive.
He presented the story as “an interesting read.” At the same time,
other than his other posts, this one was only “liked” by a few people
and no comments were left, suggesting the controversial nature of
framing religion as potentially in accordance with queer concerns.2
In the narratives by a group of relatively young Iranian Dutch
participants outlined in this section a longing for and idealization of
transgression in relation to sexuality and the self can be identified.
I will further explore this narrative framing of sexuality and the self
in the next three sections by focusing on the three fields of virginity,
homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation respectively. Simultaneously, I will discuss how their accounts of a transgressive self,
despite carrying the promise of contingency, depend on the very discourses which they set to deconstruct. Moreover, in illustrating this
ambiguous and paradoxical character of such narrative accounts of
transgression, I will discuss the accompanying reconstructions of
gender.

Undoing Virginity
I interviewed Katy, a highly educated woman in her early thirties,
at a café in Amsterdam. We knew each other quite well from various social and cultural occasions such as Iranian film festivals and
conferences as well as more private gatherings, for example, the
wedding of a mutual friend. This made both of us feel comfortable
during the conversation. Talking about her first sexual experience,
she said:
The first time that I had sex, everything was so strange. I was lying
down thinking about what was going to happen. I didn’t have an
emotional connection with him and just lay down thinking about
what was happening and focused on what I felt. Curiosity was the

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main issue for me at that moment, . . . whether I felt something special or not. I had read about it a lot. I knew a lot about it theoretically.
I entered that situation very consciously.

Being both conscious and curious about sexual intercourse, Katy
had decided she had to get rid of her virginity: “I was twenty years
old and determined to lose my virginity before going back to Iran for
holidays.” She further explained that virginity, a term she “hated,”
was something that prevented her from “interesting experiences.”
I felt that because of my lack of sexual experience, I wasn’t able to
take part in certain relationships. It was difficult to have a normal
friendship and emotional connection with men that I liked and could
be having sex with. I didn’t have a good feeling about being a virgin
at the age of twenty. . . . I felt bad about it, as if I was lagging behind.
I thought that ideally, I should have had sex at the age of sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen. I didn’t want to start a relationship with someone that I liked without having any sexual experience before him. . . .
I didn’t want to have a serious relationship with the first person that
I had sex with. . . . That’s why I was consciously looking for someone
suitable. I wanted to lose my virginity . . . I really hate this word. . . .
I wanted to pass that phase. It was like a phase. I found an Iranian
man. The very first moment that I saw him, I knew that he was the
one. He was a typical womanizer. Someone who sleeps with a lot of
women, talks very smoothly, and gives you a good feeling. It wasn’t
the type of guy that I wanted in my life permanently. We lived in
separate worlds.

The reference to “lagging behind” also assumes that Katy had a sort
of schedule in her mind according to which someone’s sexual activity is supposed to evolve. Moreover, the age range that she mentions resonates with a Dutch “model,” a range that in the US for
instance might be perceived as less obvious concerning first sexual
intercourse (Doan and Williams 2008). At the age of seventeen, 50
percent of the Dutch youth have had their first sexual intercourse
or oral sex (De Graaf et al. 2012: 175). While losing virginity at this
age seems to correspond with Dutch norms, in the Iranian context
it might have a different meaning, which is confirmed by pointing
to travel to Iran as an important moment. In Iran, being a single
woman and not a virgin is perceived as far more sensitive, allowing
Katy to appropriate a transgressive attitude. In the context of the
Iranian Dutch community, what makes Katy’s expressions controversial is the dissociation of sex from romance and the fact that she
consciously and deliberately chose this arrangement. The implicit

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ideal model underlying Katy’s notion of virginity became clearer
when she replied to my question about why she hated it:
I see a virgin woman as someone modest and naïve, someone who
doesn’t have the guts to do something significant in life just for herself, someone who doesn’t do or say much and awaits her destiny
patiently, someone who does what is expected of her by tradition
and hides those feelings that don’t correspond with it, an introvert
and shy person. That’s what I imagine when I hear the word virgin.
It’s about being passive. I feel like this person has acquired this personality because of all the pressure from her repressive environment.
This makes me feel uneasy. Virginity reminds me of a calm sphere in
which nothing exiting happens. It’s passive. . . . The guy that I slept
with for the first time was actually quite confused to see how urgently
I wanted to have sex with him. I didn’t feel much. . . . I didn’t care
about the foreplay. That changed later, but at that moment losing my
virginity was the only goal. . . . This is how I started my sexual life.

Katy connects a sense of excitement, strength, and truthfulness to
one’s feelings, and regards virginity as a sign of passivity, naiveté,
and cowardice. By explicitly mentioning the “confused” reaction
of the man she had sex with, Katy emphasizes the opposition between herself and other women. Analyses of the conceptualizations
of premarital sexuality in Chapter 2 showed that while accepted, sex
before marriage was simultaneously subjected to moral limitations
that demanded romantic commitment from such a relationship.
This seems to be deliberately lacking in Katy’s articulations, through
which she contrasts herself to other (Iranian Dutch) women. The
dissociation between sex and romance is a transgressive act particularly when it concerns a woman’s attitude. For a man, these
statements would have a less controversial connotation. Furthermore, Katy relates having sexual feelings to a “truth” that presumably everyone has to deal with and perceives the regulation of such
desire by “traditional norms” as an act of hiding and thus hypocritical. Acting upon one’s desire, then, stands for truthfulness to the
real self. Undoing virginity at the discursive level, in short, provides
Katy with the opportunity to transgress Iranian as well as Iranian
Dutch norms. She calls upon an age-related Dutch norm of premarital sexuality and an Iranian Dutch moral condition of romantic
commitment. The gendered transgressive self based on the dissociation between sex and romance relies on a notion of truthfulness.
The ideal of transgression thus seems to be of temporary nature and
ends at the construction of a truthful self.

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The dissociation between romance and sex is not limited to Katy’s
first sexual encounter. Although she has a romantic, durable relationship with an Iranian Dutch man, she occasionally has consensual, “purely sexual relationships” with other people. “I don’t want
to leave a place wondering how it might have been to have sex with
a certain person. In case I have the opportunity, I rather act upon
those feelings of curiosity and attraction instead of walking home
fantasizing about them.” Even though Katy does not perceive herself to be a “jealous type,” she and her partner have agreed not to
have sexual relationships with others in times of crisis. “Whenever
we have a quarrel, we have decided not to get engaged sexually
with anyone else until our problem is solved. We are very open
about that. We keep discussing every specific situation that we encounter. Of course, it’s not always easy, but in general, we are happy
with our agreement.” Contrary to the non-romantic relationships,
the one with her permanent partner involves mutuality, reflection,
and extensive negotiation. Managing all of this contains difficulties
as well as openness and trust.
Nasser, a man in his twenties, presented a somewhat less heroic
account of his first sexual encounter. Nasser has been living in the
Netherlands for more than fifteen years and is also highly educated,
like Katy. He came to the Netherlands as a teenager due to his father’s political activities. He hardly has any contacts with other Iranian Dutch and almost all his friends come from other countries.
He does sometimes accompany his father to Iranian cultural and
intellectual gatherings. “Actually, I don’t really know why I go to
those gatherings. I don’t really like going there. One of the main
reasons is tarof.” Tarof is Persian for civility. Tarof refers to a typically Iranian cultural custom, which according to the online Urban
Dictionary means “a way of denying your will to please your counterpart.”3 Both a connotation of respect and insincerity is attached
to tarof.4 “What they [the Iranian Dutch] are actually after during
those meetings,” Nasser further explained, “is seeing each other,
rather than talking about political and cultural issues. They miss the
Iranian atmosphere.” Discussing politics and culture is, according
to Nasser, an excuse for Iranian intellectuals to come together. He
added that there was nothing wrong with wanting to create an Iranian atmosphere, “but why not just call it that and be honest?” Lack
of honesty is not only what Nasser ascribes to these Iranian intellectuals but also what he implicitly dissociates himself from, despite
socializing with them from time to time due to tarof.

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Nasser presented himself as a highly reflective person, without
conceiving of it as a positive quality. In fact, the combination of being
reflective and articulate about his feelings, he said, made it difficult
for him to be successful in relationships with women. “I mostly live
in my own head, because I need to do everything very consciously.
Everything has to be thought through and reflected upon. Sometimes, this makes me feel very insecure. At other times, it makes me
too honest, and I end up hurting people.” Elaborating on his reluctance to act, he said his first sexual encounter happened “quite late,”
at the age of twenty-two:
It was with an older Dutch married woman. She and her husband had
an open relationship. I wanted to finally have sex and she showed interest. Because of my lack of experience, I was very nervous. Virginity
was at that point something that I wanted to get rid of. It wasn’t really
that I thought about it as “virginity.” I just wanted to start having sex.
Concerning my partners, I actually preferred experienced women. I
didn’t want both of us to be clumsy in bed. In the meantime, I have
discovered that I’m actually very assertive and the opposite of shy in
bed, contrary to how I behave and the way I am perceived in everyday life.

Male virginity is here neither a sign of repression, nor is its “undoing” understood as an act of emancipation. It rather seems to represent a necessary rite of passage towards a more masculine self.
Having sex with an experienced woman, Nasser has come to know
himself as “assertive and the opposite of shy in bed,” qualities that
are traditionally associated with masculinity.
However, at the same time, Nasser’s expressions about the first
sexual experience also implied a sense of experimentation. “I try not
to have any expectation or plan when I meet someone. My feelings,
which might change in the process, determine how the relationship
evolves: whether we have sex and keep having sex and whether we
have sex with other people or not.” The processual and therefore
changeability as well as the importance of one’s feelings are here
emphasized as important factors in a relationship. This allows Nasser
to imagine contingency and to reject normativity. Both a goaloriented masculine self and an open-ended, honest transgressive
self are as such constructed through an experimental and assertive
attitude in (sexual) relationships with women.
Mohsen, a highly educated man and the oldest participant with
transgressive views whom I met during participant observation in
Mezrab, said he found it very difficult to describe his feelings and

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experiences about his cultural identity. He came to the Netherlands
in his early twenties. He has an extended group of Iranian friends,
his partner is Iranian Dutch, and he is highly interested in Persian
literature, as attested by the many books on his shelves.
My Irani-boodan (Iranianness) is always there. Lots of things that I am
interested in have to do with that: the news, the cultural happenings,
literature, cinema, in short, life in Iran. Yet I don’t feel Iranian, neither do I feel Dutch. I don’t mean that I don’t participate in Dutch society. I actually think that the Netherlands has a more dominant role
in how I live my life, because I live here, I work here, and I feel good
about it. I especially enjoy the freedom here. That is an important part
of my identity.

Mohsen embraces both his Iranian background and Dutch culture,
without necessarily “feeling” either Iranian or Dutch. What makes
him feel good about living in the Netherlands is “freedom,” a concept that repeatedly came up, among others, in relation to premarital sexuality. “Like many Iranian men in Iran my first sexual
experience was with a prostitute. I didn’t like it and I still have a
bad feeling about it. Obviously if she had the choice, she would not
have slept with me, I suppose.” I asked what he thought a first sexual encounter would ideally look like, and he answered the question by using as an example his teenage stepdaughter, with whom
he regularly talked about boyfriends and relationships. “I tell her
about different options: that she can be in love and have sex with
that person, but also that she might be just interested in him physically and have a short-term sexual relationship.” He emphasized
that his stepdaughter should be able to make her own decisions
freely.
Elaborating on the distinction between sex and romance, he said
that his partner did not agree with him on the matter. “I believe we
can have sex with other people just like we can have lunch with
them and go to movies, without being in love with them. I like living and being with my partner, but I think we should be free to decide about the nature of our relationship with others.” Except for his
first sexual encounter, Mohsen has not experienced sex with someone without romantic commitment. However, he did imagine it to
be part of a free and thus ideal life. To Mohsen, a transgressive self
becomes explicit in relation to his stepdaughter by having an open
discussion about the distinction between sexual and romantic relationships. Interestingly, it is through discussions about her sexuality
that Mohsen is enable to construct a transgressive self.

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In the interviews discussed in this section, premarital sexuality,
as a contested sexual domain that is deployed for transgression,
appears to be a highly gendered construction. The dissociation of
sex and romance is a meaningful act of transgression when it concerns women. Katy crossed an Iranian and Dutch cultural boundary through her decision to have sex with someone she considered
an unsuitable partner. In the case of Nasser, rather than the act of
having sex without romance, it was the construction of an assertive sexuality that enabled a transgressive self. Mohsen relies completely on discussions about his stepdaughter’s sexuality to move
beyond a previous, more confined version of himself. Furthermore,
in these narratives, transgression is imagined in relation to an Iranian background that regards unromantic sex as problematic. This
enabled the fashioning of a transgressive self by decoupling sex from
romance as a gendered process.

Unsignifying Homosexual Encounters
Neda is a woman in her mid-twenties with a degree in Art History. A
mutual friend introduced her to me as a very open-minded person.
During our conversation, it soon became clear that she regarded
“autonomy” as a prominent aspect of her life. She used this term
and others several times in relation to her family. In contrast to her
older sister who still lives with their mother, she moved out of her
parental house at the age of nineteen.
I feel a strong urge for autonomy in my relationship with my family.
However, as a family we are very close and loving. . . . My sister is not
so worried about her autonomy. She easily adjusts herself to different situations. She still lives with my mother. . . . That is something
I would never do. I moved out when I was nineteen. For four years
I lived in The Hague and then I moved to Amsterdam. In between, I
lived in Paris and also took a long trip to Cuba.

In this quote, Neda defines autonomy as literally taking distance
from the familiar, represented by a loving family. Furthermore, she
emphasizes the importance of remaining loyal to her needs and
principles. The latter is articulated in how Neda places herself in
the opposite position of her sister, who has no trouble adapting herself to new situations. Here, adaptation connotes sacrificing one’s
own needs and principles. By moving out and experiencing living
in different, unfamiliar places, Neda claims her own space, through

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which she manifests herself as an autonomous person. A similar
approach characterized her story about sexual relationships. In particular, Neda disconnected homoerotic experiences from homosexuality and questioned the coherence of the latter as an identity
category.
I have kissed girls in the past. I once kissed a female friend. It meant
more to her than to me. She was very mad. Sometimes after having
kissed girls, they kept talking about what it meant. But for me it was
just a moment of excitement and pleasure, while they kept analyzing it over and over again. . . . I have lost two friends because of that.
They had real homosexual feelings. They saw me in a different way
than I saw them. As a consequence, they were confused. . . . Whenever I kiss a girl, I don’t have to ask myself the next day whether I’m
in love with her or not, or whether I’m a lesbian. No, it’s not like that.

In these acts of self-positioning, homoerotic experiences are dissociated from a necessarily sexuality-based identification, rejecting
an automatic translation of certain sexual behaviors to a coherent
identity. The significance of her desire to kiss a girl is derived from
the desire itself and nothing else. However, this did not exclude romance from same-sex relationships:
Once, I fell in love with a girl in my class. I accepted it. There was no
inner conflict. . . . Nothing happened between us. We still see each
other, but I have forgotten about the past and my feelings for her.

Neda seems to have no difficulties in reconciling her homoerotic
and homoromantic experiences with a lack of identification as lesbian or bisexual. When I asked her about how she dealt with the
fact that this approach to sexuality had cost her two friends and had
presented other kinds of misunderstanding in her relationships with
others, she replied:
I think it has to do with a strong urge for autonomy. It is a sort of
defense mechanism. . . . I think that it’s part of my personality. . . . A
lot of people can’t see that. It creates various misunderstandings, yes,
unfortunately. I’m aware of that. . . . It’s my way of preserving my
autonomy, I guess.

Erotic or romantic same-sex experience co-constitute articulations
of autonomy, with misunderstandings as an acceptable price. Alongside the fluidity in Neda’s articulations of homosexuality, a coherent
self is crystalized through autonomy. Autonomy as a concept carries
in itself the quality of independence, of not belonging to anything.

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Simultaneously, autonomy provides signification and coherence in
defining one’s identity in relation to those who are assumed to be
less autonomous.
This link between autonomy and the self came back in how
Neda related herself to the Iranian Dutch community. At the age
of eighteen, Neda who came to the Netherlands as a child, started
to broaden her knowledge about the Iranian culture. “I decided to
listen to the same music my mother listened to and accompanied
her to Iranian gatherings and private festivities. I guess I wanted
to know who I was. I had a sort of identity crisis.” However, these
experiences left her disillusioned. “I found the excessive attention
to appearance among Iranian women very benauwend (suffocating).
I have never been so conscious about my clothing and eyebrows
in my life as in that period (she laughs). . . . I was an alien among
them, because I wasn’t used to that kind of behavior. It took away
my sense of autonomy. I had to constantly take other’s opinion into
account.” The Dutch expression benauwend refers to being hemmed
in. “Iranianness” is here associated with taking away one’s autonomy as a result of excessive self-consciousness regarding a feminine
appearance.
However, Neda sometimes employed her Iranian background in
a playful and strategic manner. Describing her negative experiences
with a former Iranian-German boyfriend, she said:
He had this awful tendency to make so-called cultural jokes. A joke
like, “make me breakfast like a neat Iranian woman.” For me, it was
as if a bomb went off. . . . I didn’t let him know about my feelings and
made a joke in return and said: “No, I can’t. I’m a real Persian princess.” This role-playing, the patriarchal dimension, even if it comes as
a joke, it makes me feel very uncomfortable.

Despite feeling uncomfortable about playing along with the “patriarchal” division of male-female roles, Neda actually calls upon a
stereotypical Iranian female cultural attribute herself. She playfully
appropriates this femininity to push back against what she perceives
as an act of male dominance framed as a joke. This example illustrates Neda’s ambiguous relationship with an Iranian background,
which is sometimes rejected and sometimes used strategically, depending on the specific context.
Hamed, a young artist in his thirties, placed his curiosity for homosexual encounters within a broader societal Iranian context. According to him sexuality is a huge taboo in the Iranian community,
causing gender inequality and dishonesty. Women are not supposed

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to recognize their sexual needs, whereas men boast about their (fictive) sexual experiences. Consequently, people lie to each other
about their true sexual desires and experiences and as such construct an unhealthy cultural environment: “We can’t have a healthy
society in this way. I want Iranians to become more open-minded.”
Attributing a lack of healthy, open-minded attitudes to the Iranian
culture based on sexual taboos enables Hamed to claim an opposite
position. Breaking those sexual taboos in public and private spheres
would provide the alternative that Hamed had in mind:
I have never had sex with a man, but I can’t say that I never will.
At this moment I don’t feel the need, but in the past it did cross my
mind a few times. . . . I don’t find it difficult to say that I see this as a
possibility.

Perceiving homosexuality as a contested issue among Iranians,
Hamed is able to transgress this assumed taboo by imagining having
a homosexual experience. In Chapter 2 we saw that the acceptance
of homosexuality as a sign of celebrated modernity partly relied
on the assumption that homosexuality is biologically determined
rather than a matter of choice. The suggestion of having sex with a
man without being truly inclined to it then becomes a transgressive
act. It attributes open-mindedness to him, a quality that he feels is
lacking in the Iranian sexual culture and Iranian culture in general. Like Neda, he rejects the assumed link between homosexual
acts and identifying as gay or bisexual. Though, contrary to Neda,
Hamed’s imagined sexual transgressions serve—or at least are directly connected to—sociocultural purposes, which becomes possible because of the symbolic value of homosexuality in the Iranian
Dutch context. Exploring homoeroticism functions as a contribution
to a more “healthy” and “equal” Iranian community. The self that
seeks to emancipate the Iranian sexual culture via breaking a taboo,
is both transgressive and dependent on the specific Iranian Dutch
norms regarding homosexuality. This norm, rather than being disrupted, clearly resonates through and enables the construction of a
transgressive self.
Shadi, a woman in her mid-thirties, also explicitly rejected categorizations like homo-, hetero-, or bisexual. After moving to the
Netherlands eight years ago, she said, she realized that she needed
to change her life:
I learned a lot of things here in the Netherlands. . . . My perceptions
changed. In Iran I studied mathematics and here I chose social sci-

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ences. That also changed me. In Iran I thought that gays and lesbians
were sick. Here one of my classmates was gay. I had to deal with that.
I experienced so many of these things. I read a lot about these issues. I
realized how I actually want to live my life. I wasn’t happy, but I didn’t
know why. We had a good, normal life in the sense that we earned
enough money and my husband was a good man. He didn’t smoke,
he didn’t cheat, and he wasn’t an alcoholic. Still, I wasn’t happy. I felt
restrained. Later I knew that I wanted a different life. My life wasn’t
bad, but it was not what I wanted. I wanted something else.

The Iranian context is here perceived as limiting and constraining,
whereas the Dutch context is portrayed as open and enlightening.
This way of conceptualizing the process of migration was also predominant in the narrations discussed in Chapter 2. After two years
of living in the Netherlands, Shadi and her husband divorced. Explaining the cause of her unhappiness she emphasized that her desire
for change was not fulfilled within her married life. “I like change.
My husband didn’t like that at all. I wanted to change our house or
even the country we lived in from time to time, but he didn’t.” However, whereas the ideal of change discussed in Chapter 2 conveyed
the specific goal of “modernity,” here change is valued in itself and
regardless of its direction. Moreover, to Shadi, change is not necessarily rewarding and is valued only by the individual embracing it:
Since our divorce, I haven’t had any serious relationship. I tell the
people that I meet: “This is fun, but there is no relationship whatsoever.” I try to be clear about that. I also say that they are not the
only people in my life. Some of them accepted it and actually liked it.
Others didn’t.

This feeling of independence gained through an absence of romantic commitment was also reflected in how Shadi conceptualized her
same-sex sexual encounters. She explained that because of having an impassionate sex life in the last years of her marriage, she
thought that she might be a lesbian. “So, I only had sex with women
after my divorce.” However, meanwhile she has come to the conclusion that her erotic life is too contingent to be reduced to homo- or
heterosexuality:
It depends on my mood and the place, whether I’m mostly surrounded by men or women. . . . I don’t like the terms “bisexual,”
“homosexual,” etc. I don’t like categorizations. When something happens, I don’ t feel the need to define it. It just happens. Sometimes
when I’m with a man and the sex is very passionate, for just a second,
I might ask myself what it would be like if he was a she. I wonder

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what a woman would do at that moment, and vice versa. But sometimes it’s just perfect.

By allowing contingency in her sexual experiences and rejecting
categorizations based on sexual orientation and emphasizing contextuality, Shadi creates a space for “playful polymorphous perversity,” to borrow a term from Rosi Braidotti (2011: 290). This space
enables her to satisfy her continuous quest for change. Opposed to
who she was before the divorce, she is now free to experiment and
to “discover” new aspects of her sexual desire. Self-fulfillment enables both transgression in relation to a restraining past/marriage
and provides a steady framework to define and position oneself as
free in the now. This self-fulfillment and the rejection to be pinned
down co-constitute a transgressive self.
Sahar, a woman in her early twenties, expressed the same kind of
dynamic notion of sexual orientation, when reflecting upon her life.
“When I was seventeen or eighteen, I kept trying to define myself.
Am I homosexual? Bisexual? Now, I don’t even try. I wake up every
day as a different person. I want to be all these persons.” This multiplicity of gendered and sexual subjectivities that Sahar recognized in
herself, was something that she also ascribed to others. “I don’t see
just a woman or a man because of certain bodily characteristics. I often see both femininity and masculinity in the same person. Therefore, I can fall in love with men, women, or something in between.”
What does determine her “choices” regarding her relationships are
“madness” and “love”:
I think that only madness and love are the right motivations to do
things. That makes it beautiful. Being in love should be out of madness. I strongly believe that things like marriage, relationships, men,
women, homosexual, bisexual . . . none of these have an intrinsic
meaning.

According to Sahar, the meaning of romantic relationships and
sexual attraction are continuously to be discovered in dynamic relationships, rather than being predefined through sociocultural
gender and sexuality norms and values. “Love” and “madness” are
concepts that allow for such contingency, unpredictability, and particularity. Romance, conceptualized as “love” and “madness,” is not
rejected as it was by some of the other research participants in this
chapter. However, it is disconnected from commitment and, in fact,
celebrated as part of a contingent yet profound feeling between people, while transgressing normative categorizations of sexual orientation and gender.

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Sexuality and gender, moreover, played an important role in expressing feelings of belonging. Sahar said she generally did not feel
comfortable at either Iranian or Dutch gatherings, unless they were
among “queer” friends regardless of their cultural or ethnic background. Talking about mainstream (Iranian) Dutch culture, she said:
“My way of thinking is completely strange to them. I think I only
feel comfortable among my queer friends.” Sharing the same transgressive values, this network of queer friends has an affirmative
and empowering effect for how Sahar fashions a transgressive self.
Queerness is where the self inserts itself, while it simultaneously
provides the tools to radically take distance from others.
In previous ethnographic chapters, homosexuality was conceptualized as part of human sexual behavior that was either accepted
and tolerated as a vehicle to claim modernity or rejected and condemned as a lack of moral strength and a form of promiscuity. In
this chapter, we have seen that homosexuality can also be appropriated as a personal experience that one can choose to engage in.
Bisexuality, as was discussed in Chapter 2, provoked harsh criticism
as it undermined the perception of homosexuality as genetically determined and thus inevitable. On the contrary, having a choice with
respect to homosexual encounters as a way to experiment and to
avoid predefined categories of sexual orientation was celebrated in
narratives about sexuality in this chapter. This choice came to represent self-fulfillment and helped the research participants to constitute a transgressive attitude towards sexuality within a particular
Iranian Dutch context. Furthermore, whereas earlier articulations
of homosexuality seemed to implicitly be limited to men, in this
case female homosexuality is presented as part of the broader notion
of freedom of sexual experimentation and polymorphous human
nature. Assuming that male homosexuality has a more contested
and charged symbolic connotation among the Iranian Dutch, the
very willingness to engage in such relationships suggests transgression. At the same time a sense of coherence is expressed through a
construction of autonomy, open-mindedness, self-fulfillment, and
queerness.

Exploring the Labyrinth of Cohabitation
Shadi, whom I introduced in the previous section, has decided to
never cohabit with a partner now that she has “released” herself
from the load of conventions that her previous marriage laid on her.

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“There is no guarantee for staying together for ever. It’s a matter of
now. I don’t like the expression of ‘I love you and I can’t live without you.’ I can live without anybody if necessary. And the other person should be able to do the same.” However, she added that at the
moment she was living with a man, but the rules were clear: they
did not “belong” to each other.
Right now, I live together with a man. This is the first time since my
divorce that I’m not alone. Two or three weeks ago, I met this man.
I like him very much. We are great together, both intellectually and
sexually. The third time that we dated, I asked him to come and live
with me. He was surprised. He didn’t expect me to do that. I told him
that I didn’t want a relationship and that I would keep meeting other
people. He is not my boyfriend. I wouldn’t call it a relationship. We
sometimes eat together. We have a big house with a lot of rooms.
We have decided to inform each other before inviting someone for a
night. We both have our own lives.

Nonmarital cohabitation is only acceptable to Shadi as long as it
excludes commitment, Later in the conversation, Shadi expressed a
strong desire to have a child on her own. Although she would prefer to live in an English-speaking country and had plans to move
to one, because of her wish to become a mother she had decided
to wait for a few years and to make use of the strong network of
friends that she had built up in the Netherlands. “I probably will
have to rely on my friends during pregnancy and the first months
after childbirth.” At the time of our conversation, she was looking
for a suitable sperm donor. “It’s very difficult to find someone. It’s
a difficult process. I need someone who doesn’t want to claim the
child later on. Of course, he should be allowed to see the child, but I
am not looking for a father for my child in the traditional sense, but
I realize how unconventional this is.” However, Shadi did not plan
on avoiding a romantic relationship with the donor.
I want to get to know the donor. I want the child to be the result of
a passionate, loving encounter between two people. Conceiving the
baby in this way is very important to me. It’s a big moment in my life
too. I don’t want it to happen in a cold, ugly room. I don’t have to be
madly in love with the donor either. I just want to feel comfortable
and to really like him.

Shadi’s perception on how to conceive a child is based on an understanding of “family” and “home” outside mutual parental commitment. In the previous chapters, commitment, especially when

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children were involved, entailed a stable marital relationship in
the perception of the research participants. Compared to that ideal,
Shadi presents a transgressive understanding of parenthood, claiming a transgressive self that prioritizes individual sexual desire and
autonomy above the norm of nuclear family and stability. However, an appreciation of stability is not absent from Shadi’s statements about “home.” While the sexual and romantic encounters
with others will continue, she and her child embody family stability. “I won’t bring a man to our home every night, of course,
but I won’t become monogamous either.” By not bringing a man
to “their” home, she protects the family consisting of herself and
the child. While the rejection of the nuclear family for the sake
of sexual freedom and pleasure underpins the configuration of a
transgressive self, parenthood simultaneously provides Shadi with
a sense of stability.
Compared to Shadi, Nasser had a far less thought-out opinion on
the issue of nonmarital cohabitation. It mostly made him question a
number of assumptions that he associated it with:
When I think of living together with someone, the first thoughts, or
rather, uncertainties that occur to me are whether I would remain
nice and interesting enough for my partner for a long period of time.
And vice versa: I wonder whether I can find all those nice and interesting things in one person, like having good conversations, a healthy
sexual life, cooking together, hosting guests together, things like that.
For example, I can do all these things that I just mentioned with a
good male friend, except for the sexual part. Aren’t he and I actually
perfect candidates for cohabitation? We always have fun. So maybe I
can have something like that and have a sexual and emotional intimate relationship with another person next to it. It’s like a labyrinth
that I will have to explore gradually together with other people in
my life.

A same-sex friendship is here perceived as potentially more durable
than a romantic and sexual relationship with a woman. In a similar
way, Mohsen, another participant, used the argument of “decreasing attraction” when he reflected on his relationship. “To be honest,
although I generally enjoy living with my partner, I think, in retrospect, that I probably would decide to keep my own place if I had
the chance to do it all over again. Everyone that has a relationship
knows that after a while the attraction decreases. At that moment
you will sometimes experience the presence of your partner as limiting.” By seeing sexual attraction as frail, both Nasser and Mohsen

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express reservations about cohabitation. They decouple companionship from romantic and sexual relations.
To Katy, nonmarital cohabitation was something to be celebrated
as an option next to marriage, which in her words allows for “reflection and negotiation between the partners about how to arrange
their relationship. For me and my partner it’s a great option as we
don’t believe in marriage.” When I asked her about the possibility of
having children in the future, she said:
Actually, this is a sensitive issue. At the moment my partner wants
to have a child with me, but I’m not ready yet. I think that I will be
ready for it in the near future, like in three or four years from now.
Right now, I am probably also afraid of the kind of commitment that
having a child brings with itself. I completely trust him as a father,
but I don’t think I have reached the necessary peaceful phase myself in order to accompany a child through life. . . . There is a lesbian
friend of us who wants to have a child and she once told me that she
would very much like my partner to be the father of her child. I have
thought about this option a lot and think that it would work for me.
But when I discussed it with him, he didn’t like the idea at all. He really wants to have a child with me.

For the moment, Katy can imagine a rather unconventional parental arrangement for herself, her partner, and a lesbian friend.
However, she does assume a permanent, non-negotiable settlement
ascribed to biological motherhood in the future. Imagining a shared
parenthood with two other people in her current phase of life helps
Katy to construct a self that transgresses norms of biological parenthood, exclusive partnerhood, and asexual friendship. However,
a reference to a future biological motherhood at a more “peaceful”
moment represents a postponed normative notion of parental commitment. This suggests that the imagined transgressive shared parenthood is not ideal and of temporary nature.
In this section’s narratives, again, gender seems to play an important role in the conceptualizations of ideal relationships and parenthood. To both female research participants, biological motherhood
is associated with settling down and commitment. The male participants referred to decreasing sexual attraction as their main reason
to question the likelihood of pleasurable nonmarital cohabitation.
Moreover, compared to previous chapters, nonmarital cohabitation was in most cases rejected as a form of limitation of sexual
freedom, which enabled the participants in this chapter to imagine
a transgressive self. The ideal relationship was disconnected from

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commitment and instead evaluated in terms of sexual fulfilment. In
this way, more than in other chapters, nonmarital cohabitation here
functioned as a contested field providing possibilities for the constructions of a transgressive self.

Conclusion
Decoupling romance from sex, questioning the nuclear family, and
rejecting sexuality-based identifications characterize a narrative
framing of sexuality and the self as “transgressive” by a group of
young Iranian Dutch participants. Explicit appreciation of fulfilling
sexual desire and understanding love as contingent and temporal
made the sexual narratives of this group controversial in relation
to the rest of the Iranian Dutch community. In their narratives of
sexuality, they reflected critically on what they perceived as the conventional sexual norms against which they positioned themselves
as open-minded, autonomous, and queer. Notions of transgression
thus went hand in hand with constructions of goal-oriented coherent selves.
Moreover, the discussed sexual boundary crossings constituting
these transgressive selves depended on social norms (Rival et al.
1999), with gender as one of the main elements. The decoupling of
(premarital) sex from romance could rely on a transgressive connotation when practiced by women. Engaging in homoerotic activities
was particularly controversial when embraced by a man who did
identify as gay. Moreover, biological motherhood was perceived as
the reason for settling down eventually. Furthermore, the broader
sociocultural norms with respect to sexuality and gender such as
heteronormativity, female sexual modesty, and relational and parental commitment, while being rejected to a certain degree and in
different ways, in fact simultaneously made the transgressive selves
claimed by the research participants intelligible. Rather than disruptive, the relation between those norms and the transgressive selves
is one of codependence. This enabling role of normative frameworks
in processes of transgressive self-fashioning illustrates the embeddedness and contextuality of sexual boundary crossings among this
group of young Iranian Dutch.

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Notes
1. https://mezrab.nl/, accessed 15 April 2021. Mezrab is Persian for “plectrum,” which is a small flat tool used to pluck or strum a stringed
instrument.
2. The situation described here should be seen as specifically related to the
Iranian Dutch context. In case of non-Iranian Islamic migrants in Western societies more generally, various ethnographic studies show that
queer Muslims are increasingly struggling for recognition within and
outside their religious communities by claiming hybrid identities (Abraham 2009; Yip 2004, 2005, 2008; Bereket and Adam 2006; Siraj 2006;
Minwalla et al. 2005).
3. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tarof, accessed on
15 April 2021.
4. For instance, you might insist on having someone visiting you, whereas
that might not be what you actually wish for. Tarof is a complicated,
multilayered cultural custom and has various meanings, however, in the
case of Nasser it mainly refers to insincerity and evasiveness.

Conclusion

SEXUALITY AS A SOCIOCULTURAL
ARGUMENT AMONG THE IRANIAN DUTCH

I

n this book, I have studied sexual storytelling as narratives about
the self among the Iranian Dutch. The farther the research proceeded, the more significant the positioning of the self appeared to
me in how the Iranian Dutch talked about sexuality. Not only were
many respondents eager to participate in my research due to the importance they attributed to the topic of sexuality, but I also noticed a
growing attention to sexuality in Iranian communities, especially in
various online media. These observations motivated me to look further than the content of their accounts and to try to interpret what
those accounts stood for. In particular, I focused on the conceptualizations of virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation
as three contemporary sexual fields of contestation through which
self-fashioning took place.
In contemporary public debates on “integration” of Islamic minorities in Western societies, attitudes towards sexuality often
function as a measure of citizenship and cultural belonging. The tolerance and acceptance of sexual diversity and sexual autonomy are
assumed to resemble modernity as a quality of “the West.” Sexuality has as such become a tool in drawing the boundary between a
Western modern “us” and a backward, traditional Muslim “other.”
Underlying this logic is the assumption that “sexuality” is a neutral,
coherent concept that can be deployed for analyses of people’s convictions and behavior. This book has chosen a different approach by
looking for the sociocultural meanings of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch rather than regarding their conceptions of sexuality as

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a measuring tool for “integration.” Furthermore, these sociocultural
meanings of sexuality were explored for their deployment in practices of self-fashioning, by asking the following main question: how
do the Iranian Dutch deploy discourses on virginity, homosexuality,
and nonmarital cohabitation in processes of self-fashioning? To answer this question, the main points of cultural contestation, notions
of change and development, and conceptual interactions between
sexuality and the self in the articulations of the research participants
were taken into account.
Ethnographic accounts of the Iranian Dutch seem to be lacking
in discussions of integration more generally and of sexuality in particular. In the public discourse, immigrants from the Middle East
and North Africa are often ascribed an Islamic identity with fixed
characteristics. In this book, I deliberately chose the reference Iranian Dutch to avoid such presuppositions. Expressions of religiosity are then, instead of taken for granted, included in the analyses.
As another aspect of the same debate, “modernity” seems to be a
tenacious and self-evident concept in qualifications of sexual cultures. Rather than assuming to know what modernity means, this
book approached modernity as a device based on which identity
claims can be made. Another contribution concerns the concept
of agency. In the few existing studies on constructions of sexuality
in the Iranian Diaspora in Western countries, agency is often limited to subversive practices. This book, however, provides a broader
range and a more complex understanding of agency as a condition for subject-formation, which includes compliance as well as
subversion.
Various valuable critical reviews of multicultural debates on sexuality and integration of Islamic migrants have dealt with civilizational
tendencies whereby sexuality is instrumentalized in the constructions of the nation. In these accounts, however, the position of the
migrants themselves remains marginal. This book investigates how
the Iranian Dutch as a group of immigrants with an Islamic background are more than mere objects of civilizational approaches to
sexuality. Without denying the reality of such hegemonic exclusionary discourses about “us” and “them,” this book contributes to
a more complex picture that includes subjective experiences. The
overall goal has been to provide a more diverse and complex picture
of configurations of sexuality in the sociocultural intersections in
multicultural contexts, such as the Netherlands.
In the following, a recapitulation of the most important findings
and the main argument of the book will be presented by going back

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to the central sub-questions of the research. In the next section, I
will reflect on these findings and the main premises of this project.

Research Findings
Conditionally Modern, Authenticated, and Transgressive Selves
In individual stories about sexuality among the Iranian Dutch research
participants, three processes of self-fashioning were identified: a conditional modern self, a religion- and tradition-oriented authenticated
self, and a transgressive self. By distinguishing between these three
types of self, I am not assuming that every Iranian Dutch individual
is to be categorized in one of them. These selves emerge from collective narrative framings of sexuality, meaning that the same individual might contribute to the construction of different selves. The
distinction, in fact, is meant to illustrate the multiplicity and heterogeneity in how the Iranian Dutch deploy sexuality as the means to
position themselves in a broader sociocultural context. Each narrative framing of sexuality, furthermore, consisted of internal complexities at various levels. However, making this distinction was
revealing for sexuality’s role in practices of self-fashioning. Rather
than static boxes from which the participants could not escape, they
serve as reflections of various ways in which the participants apply
meanings to issues of sexuality as a vehicle to self-fashioning. The
construction of each of these selves was discussed in Chapters 2, 3,
and 4 respectively.
In Chapter 2, I introduced the most dominant story about sexuality which I encountered during my research. I illustrated how
a strong quest for “modernity” among many of the Iranian Dutch
research participants is entangled with expecting themselves to tolerate and accept premarital sex, homosexuality, and nonmarital
cohabitation. To them, becoming modern equated with a liberal position towards these contested fields of sexuality in the multicultural context of the Netherlands. A closer look, however, revealed
that they employed rhetorical strategies in order to guarantee some
sense of control over the assumed modernity’s demand for liberal
sexuality. Using the theoretical perspective of the dialogical self, it
became clear how participants negotiated between different cultural spaces, between certain voices and counter-voices. On the one
hand, they perceived tolerance and acceptance of sexual practices as
a necessary step towards becoming free and modern. On the other
hand, they made efforts to limit this liberation and to avoid pro-

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miscuity, using a vocabulary of endogenous morality by referring
to commitment, rationality, stability, modesty, child protection, and
spirituality. Instead of calling upon a higher authority, they comprehended morality as internally motivated. For instance, we saw that
whereas many of them accepted premarital (female) sexuality as
part of individual sexual autonomy, they simultaneously demanded
strong mutual commitment and serious intentions to preserve modesty and purity. Almost all of these rhetorical strategies were explicitly gendered, as it was mainly through female sexuality that the
participants both defined modernity as well as imagined different
ways to limit what they perceived as modernity’s potential for sexual promiscuity. While a liberal attitude towards sexuality enabled
the participants to claim modernity, a gendered endogenous moral
framework allowed these Iranian Dutch to set limits to an otherwise too open sexual culture. A constant dialogue marked the self
when negotiating between a celebrated modernity and an endogenous morality. Through this, I have argued, “a conditional modern
self” was fashioned.
Chapter 3 dealt with a far less popular collective narrative about
sexuality and the self. Here, I discussed the constructions of an “authenticated” self by a smaller group of research participants through
the rejection of sexualities associated with modernity. Rather than
placing religiosity in the past, these Iranian Dutch mobilized and
transformed Islam in processes of fashioning a strong, disciplined,
and informed self in the present, which they perceived as true, pure,
and determined. They conceptualized sex before marriage, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation in such a way that what I
have called “self-authentication” became realized. I chose the concept of self-authentication in order to emphasize the processual constructions of an authentic self, whereby the main focus was on the
subject’s agency and strategic efforts in fashioning the self. Rather
than understanding (religious) authenticity as the appropriation of
an externally enforced norm, self-authentication underlined the
productive and constitutive aspects of these subjectivities. Premarital
sex, as the participants assumed, implied moral weakness of those
who engage in such relationships, whereas remaining a virgin until
marriage represented a strong religious devotion in those who refrain from premarital sex. To these self-identified religious participants, homosexuality symbolized moral looseness and the inability
to control the carnal self. They saw ignoring or resisting homosexual desire therefore as a sign of moral strength. However, tolerating
homosexuality was by some of the participants understood as part

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of a religious person’s respect towards all God’s creatures, including homosexuals. Some of them believed that nonmarital cohabitation was an excuse for the lack of real commitment and loyalty
which could be achieved only within the institution of marriage.
These conceptualizations resulted in the authentication of the self
as a process of becoming—rather than a matter of being—through
sexuality. While they made an appeal to the past symbolized by a
religious background and tradition, in their constructions of the authenticated self, they re-appropriated religion and tradition in a way
to meet their current concerns.
In Chapter 4, I presented a narrative framing of sexuality and
the self in which a transgressive attitude is claimed and idealized.
Here, I provided an ethnographic discursive analysis of crossing sexual boundaries by a small group of participants in their twenties and
thirties. They celebrated various sexual attitudes and practices that
could be seen as controversial in relation to other Iranian Dutch accounts of appropriate sexuality I encountered during my research:
having open sexual relationships, disconnecting sex from romance,
prioritizing sexual desire above relational and parental commitment, and questioning fixed sexual and gender identities. Through
these notions of transgressive sexualities, they idealized a contingent, open, and incoherent self. However, at the same time, this
ideal non-normative self was made possible by incorporating part of
the normativity that it intended to transgress. We saw, for instance,
that a norm of female chastity with respect to (premarital) sexual
commitment while being overstepped, enabled the act of having sex
outside romantic relationships to be perceived as transgressive. A
transgressive self, paradoxically, became imaginable by being embedded in a “normative sociality.” Even though claimed otherwise
by some of the participants, I argued, the fashioning of the transgressive self relied upon certain normative understandings of sexuality. Despite idealizing contingency in the participants’ narrations
of the self, the in-depth analyses showed a simultaneous construction of coherence through, for instance, notions of autonomy, openmindedness, assertive masculinity, and queerness.
The Contested Fields of Virginity, Homosexuality,
and Nonmarital Cohabitation
The first sub-question of this research was: what are the main points
of cultural contestation in the participants’ stories about virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation? Conceptualizing
virginity and sex before marriage often involved highly gendered

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notions and various ambiguities directed at women’s roles. A conditional celebration of female premarital sexuality (Chapter 2), an
explicit promotion of female chastity (Chapter 3), and an idealized
deconstruction of the norm of virginity (Chapter 4) were articulated
by the participants. In all these accounts, change was conceptualized
through female sexuality. The participants praised and claimed modernization, authenticity, and transgression through constructions
of female virginity and sexual activities before marriage. In other
words, female sexuality enabled them to re-evaluate, establish, and
shift boundaries of collective identifications. However, these constructions were by no means unambiguous or uncontested.
While some of the participants perceived opening up and liberation as desirable, limitations of female premarital sexual liberty were
called upon to guarantee order and a sense of control (Chapter 2).
For instance, sex before marriage was celebrated as a sign of modernity, while the concept of rationality was used as a tool to limit premarital sexual freedom. In this way a modern self was claimed and
conditions were simultaneously put into place to rule out female
sexual promiscuity.
When self-authentication was constructed through tradition and
religion, rejection of female premarital sexuality was connected to
degrees of moral strength rather than predetermined ideas about,
for instance, sinful behavior (Chapter 3). In one of the narratives,
a self-proclaimed religious female participant spoke in terms of true
love as the most important reason to have sex, instead of firmly
rejecting premarital sexual encounter. In another case, a young
woman used the strategy of “playing hard to get” as a way to preserve her modesty without avoiding premarital sex all together.
Lastly, a transgressive attitude was claimed through the rejection
of and, therefore, depended on perceived sociocultural norms regarding virginity and female premarital sexuality (Chapter 3). In
one of the individual sexual stories, a young woman chose to have
her first sexual intercourse with someone she did not consider a
suitable partner for a serious relationship. She was able to claim
transgression in reference to a norm of (premarital) sexual and romantic commitment as discussed in Chapter 2. In another case, a
young man presented himself as transgressive by decoupling sex
from romance when discussing his teenage stepdaughter’s sexuality.
In short, female sexuality was utilized and reconstructed while
serving notions of progressive change. These ambiguities and contestations with respect to female sexuality, I suggest, mirrors the ongoing fluidity of collective belonging. Female sexuality might represent

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a bridge to ideal selves—modern, authentic, or transgressive—at the
same time it contains competing collective representations of femininity which cause contestation. This contestation is in fact the condition for agency and the production of subjectivity.
Most of the participants’ rhetorical efforts went into their positioning towards homosexuality, especially male homosexuality. In
Chapter 2, I presented a narrative in which homosexuality was tolerated under strict conditions rather than accepted. While, for example, some participants recognized homosexuality as a human
right that needed to be protected, they appeared to accept homosexuality only as an inescapable biological fact. The discussions on bisexuality showed that when a matter of choice, homosexuality was
perceived as incomprehensible. According to the narrative framing
of sexuality as the means to authentication of the self (Chapter 3),
homosexuality represented moral degradation. For instance, it was
compared to excessive eating and the lack of a strong will. The relatively young group of participants celebrating non-normative sexual
behavior and attitude (Chapter 4), saw the appropriation of homosexuality as the utmost symbol of transgression. They went beyond
an unconditional acceptance of homosexuality by disconnecting it
from identity.
The least contested topic was nonmarital cohabitation. It symbolized an honest choice and did not provoke much anxiety in how the
participants perceived this phenomenon in Chapter 2, except when
it concerned parental commitment and stability offered to children. As a temporal phase until marriage or until having children,
compared to uncommitted sexual relationships, heterosexual nonmarital cohabitation remained within a relatively “safe” territory.
In Chapter 3 we witnessed how some of the participants perceived
nonmarital cohabitation as a refusal of true commitment and a sign
of unclear intentions, even if no children were involved. In Chapter 4, some of the participants thought that cohabitation with the
romantic partner would limit their sexual freedom and questioned
the importance attributed to the nuclear household as the only way
to ensure the well-being of the child.
The more pragmatic approach to nonmarital cohabitation can be
explained by the relatively high rate of divorce among Iranians both
living inside and outside Iran. In these arrangements, the couple is
offered the opportunity to test their relationship before getting seriously involved through marriage. Even though it might not be ideal
in the long run, nonmarital cohabitation could help prevent divorce.
Furthermore, the mutual, conscious choice for partnership in non-

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marital cohabitation was welcomed by all participants, as opposed
to engaging in uncommitted relationships. Whereas a positioning
towards virginity and homosexuality required acts of thorough reflection when negotiating cultural change, the topic of nonmarital
cohabitation entailed a less reflective attitude in the participants’
stories about sexuality.
Notions of Cultural Transformation
In order to understand how the context of migration is perceived
by the Iranian Dutch in their articulations of sexuality, the second
sub-question chosen for this research was: what subjective notions
of change and development are reflected in how the participants
talk about virginity, homosexuality, and nonmarital cohabitation?
As apparent in all three empirical chapters, a discourse of modernity
is insistently intertwined with understandings of sexuality among
the Iranian Dutch to define one’s current position in a process of
cultural change. Whether eagerly greeted, explicitly rejected, or
strategically transcended, specific notions of modernity continuously played a central role in the participants’ constructions of sexuality and subjectivity. Modernity functioned as an important point
of orientation in Iranian Dutch processes of identification and articulations of past and present cultural positionality. The present
was implicitly or explicitly associated with modernity, which for
those who adhered to modernity included the rejection of a norm
of virginity and the acceptance of homosexuality and nonmarital
cohabitation. A liberal sexual attitude was presented as a demand
of modern times in Western societies, which was subsequently conditionally welcomed (Chapter 2), morally problematized (Chapter
3), or employed as a stepping stone to imagine even further sexual
liberation (Chapter 4).
In studies on Iranian immigrants in Sweden and Canada, especially, but not exclusively, men have been presented as experiencing more difficulties in adapting to their new Western environment
(Shahidian 1999) or as facing discrimination and racism (Farahani
2012; Khosravi 2009; Maghbouleh 2017). It is indeed remarkable
that the Iranian Dutch men and women did not articulate such negative experiences in this research and that the notion of “a change
for the better” upon migration was shared almost unanimously. Except for contextual differences between the countries of residence—
the position of Iranian Dutch differs from that of Iranian Swedish or
Iranian Canadian immigrants depending on the particularity of the
migration discourses in those countries—another explanation is worth

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considering. It could be that the respondents in this research implicitly rejected the position of being discriminated or racialized which is
normally associated with minority groups that “fail” to appropriate
the Western cultural norms and values. Admitting to discrimination
and racism would contradict a claim to successful inclusion in Dutch
society through modernity. Through self-orientalization, some of
the research participants embraced the narrative of “the successful
migrant.”
Modernity, Authenticity, and Transgression
The concern of the third sub-question was the conceptual intersections between sexuality and subjectivity: what are the main sociocultural intersections between perceptions of virginity, homosexuality,
and nonmarital cohabitation on the one hand and articulations of
the self on the other hand? As discussed previously, we saw that the
notions of modernity, authenticity, and transgression functioned as
crucial points of intersection where idealized selves and sexualities
crossed. The concept of modernity was perceived as the ability to
catch up with current developments as encountered in Dutch society and to let go of one’s old habits and perceptions often associated
with an Iranian background (Chapter 2). Recognizing a contemporary highly dynamic “modern” setting, the concept of authenticity
as used by a minority group represented the desire to create stability
and conclusiveness via moral clarity (Chapter 3). Transgression, a
concept associated with crossing normative sexual boundaries, represented the questioning and deliberate deconstruction of societal
taboos (Chapter 4).
Especially in the context of migration, in which notions of the
self are increasingly entangled with continuous contestation and reconstruction, a focus on the relation between sexuality and subjectivity has provided further insight into the symbolic meaning of
these two entities, their strategic employment, and their cultural
deployment. From a deconstructionist perspective, categorizations
are suspected of being simplistic and inadequate representations of
the complexities of sociocultural phenomena. Taking this criticism
to the extremes might have the paralyzing effect of rejecting any
kind of categorization. However, categorizations remain crucial and
seem inevitable in how people tend to conceptualize the world,
which also appears from this study’s findings. To understand sexuality through subjectivity and vice versa as done in this project,
this potential paralyzing effect of deconstructionism can be avoided.
While categories of sexuality and identity are not taken as cohesive,

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fixed, or natural, their effects or working through each other as perceived by the participants could still be analyzed. A focus on the mutual constitution between subjectivity and sexuality, therefore, has
proven insightful in a context where people are constantly creating
and recreating boundaries between “us” and “them.”
The data in this book shows that for the Iranian Dutch telling
certain sexual stories is an effective tool in order to make a sociocultural argument about who they are and where they stand. With
modernity as a main point of orientation, they deploy discourses
of sexuality as a vehicle to fashion a self in relation to the past and
the present, to recreate boundaries between what is appropriate and
inappropriate, and to negotiate with perceived cultural frameworks
and construct new ones. Given the importance of sexuality in the
constructions of “us” in the recent Iranian history (Chapter 1) and
the still increasing number of contested public discussions on sexuality in various Iranian communities, more research will be needed
to provide a better understanding of the broader transformations
among Iranians more generally. At the same time, comparative research among different Iranian migrant groups would shed light on
the particularity of the locale in the constructions of sexuality and
provide insight into those host countries’ social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Furthermore, more specified analyzes of the
notion of modernity as embedded in ideas about sexuality from a
gender perspective would be insightful. Modernity is often assumed
to be beneficial for all individuals, especially women, an assumption
that is contradicted by some of the findings in this book. Research
on the specific definitions of modernity and its utilization might unravel interesting, gendered constructions which would otherwise
remain unnoticed.

Multiculturalism and Sexuality
Constructions of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch involve more
negotiations and are far more heterogeneous than it is usually implied in debates on sexuality and the integration of the Islamic minority groups in Western countries. The individual self among the
Iranian Dutch appears to be constantly in dialogue with itself, its own
community, and broader Dutch society. Through these dialogues
boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable sexual behavior
are continuously evaluated, stipulated, and crossed. By putting the
role of sexuality in Iranian collective self-reflections into a historical

174

Sexual Self-Fashioning

perspective (Chapter 1), the situatedness of the current concerns of
the Iranian Dutch regarding issues of sexuality and identity become
more tangible. A consideration of such specificities is lacking in debates on multiculturalism and sexuality in which Muslims are seen
as a homogenous group and assumed to share certain cultural characteristics. Among the Iranian Dutch, sexuality is a terrain within
which a self becomes fashioned in relation to a broader sociocultural
context, instead of an object of static, unchangeable norms and values. Comparable approaches to sexuality in other (Islamic) minority
groups as well as white Dutch people might bring to light new insights, enabling us to go beyond a simplistic us-versus-them rhetoric.

GLOSSARY

Persian
Ab-khordan—drinking water
Aberou—social image
Agha’ed-e sonnati—traditional beliefs
Amanatdar—depository
Amrad—adolescent boy
Amrad-khaneha—prosititution houses for homosexuals
Anjomans—councils
Aramesh—peace
Az lahaz-e akhlaghi—in the moral sense
Barabari-ye jensi—gender equality
Bavafa’I—faithfulness
Besoozi-o-besazi—to suffer and endure
Bibandobari—unrestrainedness
Blogistan—Iranian blogosphere
Bolough—maturity
Chand-hamsari—polygamy
Degarbash—queer
Edalat-khaneh—house of justice
Ensaniyat—humanity
Esteghlal-e jensi—sexual autonomy
Fardiyat—individuality
Farhang-e Irani—Iranian culture
Ghahbah-khaneha—houses of prostitution

176

Glossary

Gharaez’e mohtaramaneh—honorable intentions
Gharbzadegi—Westoxication
Gheyrati—protective of one’s honor
Gholam-bacheh—page boy
Hamjensbazi—homosexual playing
Hamjensgera’i—homosexuality
Hamjenskhahi—hemophilia
Hoghoogh-e bashar—human rights
Iman—devotion
Irani-boodan—Iranianness
Jelf—cheap (figuratively)
Khahar-khandegi—sister vows
Khareji—foreign/Western
Ma’ayeb al-Rejal—vices of men
Maddiyaat—materiality
Ma’naviyat—spirituality
Mantegh—logic/rationality
Mardom—people
Mellat—nation
Mut’a—temporary marriage
Namahram—one with whom marriage is not prohibited and therefore rules of modesty should be applied in the relationship
Nejabat—modesty
No-andishi-e dini—religious reformism
Nobate shoma—your turn
Orf—custom
Paak—clean
Rabete-ye azaad—open sexual relationship
Roshan-fekri—open-mindedness
Shenakht—knowledge
Sigheh—temporary marriage (see also Mut’a)
Sofreh—tablecloth
Sonnat—tradition
Ta’ahod—commitment
Ta’ahode vaghe’i—real commitment

177

Glossary

Ta’dib al-Nesvan—education of women
Taraghi-ye ma’koos—reverse progress
Tarbiyat-e azad—open upbringing
Tarof—an Iranian form of civility
Urf—Islamic custom
Ulema—religious authorities
Zaat—true nature

Dutch
Benauwend—suffocating
Randstad—urban area
Samenwonen—living together/nonmarital cohabitation

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INDEX

4daagse, 4–65
Afary, Janet, 33–34, 37, 39, 41, 44,
46, 59
Ahmadi, Nader, 8–9, 11
Agency, 30, 52, 59, 104, 165, 167,
170
Akhundzadeh, Fat Ali, 45
Amir-Ebrahimi, Masserat, 57
Amsterdam, 16–17, 84, 107, 133,
137, 142–43, 146, 152
Astarabadi, Bibi Khanom, 42–43
Authenticity, 96–97, 101, 103,
105–6, 115, 117, 130, 167,
169, 172
Authentication, 96–97, 101, 114,
116, 123, 126, 167–70
Authenticated self, 96–97, 104,
110, 114, 116–18, 120, 123,
125, 128–20, 166–68
Autonomy
sexual, 56–57, 129, 133, 140,
160, 167
and the self, 140, 145, 152–54,
158
Bauer, Janet, 8, 48–49
Bauman, Zygmunt, 137–38
Belonging, 6, 14, 18, 82, 95, 104,
117, 130, 137, 140, 145, 153,
158, 164, 169
Bisexuality, 81–82, 158, 170
Butler, Judith, 30–31

Cohabitation. See Nonmarital
cohabitation
Commitment
ideological, 55
and nonmarital cohabitation, 86–
88, 91–92, 124, 126, 129, 159,
170
and premarital sex, 78–79, 85,
90, 148, 151, 168–69
and queerness, 156–57
relational, 13, 27, 107, 128, 161–
62, 167–68
religious, 118
Constitutional Revolution, 31–35,
42–43, 45–46, 60
Cooper, Frederick, 31, 60, 66, 118
Dialogical self, 66–68, 166
Divorce, 9, 34, 36, 50, 59, 87, 105,
107, 111, 118–20, 128, 144–
45, 156–57, 159, 170
Edelman, Lee, 84–85
Farahani, Fataneh, 8–9, 11, 19, 57–
58, 80, 106, 171
Farrer, James, 20–22, 67
Family
Dutch policy, 5, 13
expectation, 75–76
homosexual, 84
honor, 69
in Iranian diaspora, 8, 11, 13

192

in Iranian modern history, 27–28,
32, 38, 40, 48–51, 53, 60
loyalty, 152
Muslim, 108
nuclear, 111
stability, 88–89
unconventional, 135, 159–60,
162
Floor, Willem, 32–33, 40–41
Foucault, Michel, 29, 97, 117
Freedom
and homosexuality, 80, 84
and Iranian nation-building, 46,
56, 70, 73
and the self, 143
and the West, 7, 107, 121, 125–
26, 137, 151
of religion, 5
sexual, 4, 7, 79, 85, 88–89, 113,
136, 145, 158, 160–61, 169
Garmrudi, Mirza Fattah, 44
Gender
and authenticity, 129
and Dutch discourses of
integration, 4–5, 14, 16, 36
diversities, 138
and homosexuality, 45–47
and Iranian diaspora, 8–10
and Iranian modern history, 32,
34, 36–37, 39–40, 52–53, 57,
60–61
and Islam, 8
and modernity, 28, 30, 32, 53–
54, 92, 139–40, 173
and religiosity, 130
reform (legal), 49–50
taboos, 73
traditional roles, 103, 139, 154,
161
transgressive, 134–35, 136–37,
144, 46, 157–58, 162, 168
and virginity, 11–13
Ghorashi, Halleh, 7, 14, 98
Göle, Nilufer, 102, 113, 120
Haeri, Shahla, 39, 113

Index

Homonationalism, 6
Homosexuality
and the authenticated self, 97,
118–23, 129–30, 167
and the conditional modern self,
66–67, 70–74, 80–86, 89–91,
166
and integration, 6–7, 100
and Iranian modern history, 27–
30, 40–48, 51, 61
and self-fashioning, 10–13, 164–
65, 170–72
and the transgressive self, 134,
141, 153, 155, 158
Integration (Dutch immigration
policy), 4–7, 20, 89, 100, 122,
164–65, 173
Iraj Mirza, 45–46
Islamic Revolution, 28, 32, 37–38,
40, 48, 50, 54, 60
Jansen, Willy, 17, 29, 103–104,
Kermani, Mirza Agha Khan, 45
Khosravi, Shahram, 55, 171
Love
and authenticity, 78, 109, 119,
126, 169
before marriage, 115
and homosexuality, 142
and marriage, 13
and modernity, 43, 46, 138, 140
and parenthood, 159
and queerness, 153, 157, 162
and sex, 134, 145, 151
Maghbouleh, Neda, 8, 36, 171
Mahdavi, Pardis, 56, 59
Mahmood, Saba, 7, 103–104
Marashi, Afshin, 35
Marriage
arranged, 34, 70
and cohabitation, 86–89, 91,
123–24, 161, 170
forced, 4–5, 13

193

Index

and gendered negotiation, 9
and homosexuality, 81
institution, 168
intermarriage, 19
and love, 13, 43, 115
mock, 13
reflection on, 11, 58, 69, 70, 73,
118, 144, 157–58
reforms (legal), 36, 39, 42–43
ritual, 107, 141–142
sex before, 55–56, 68, 77, 79, 90,
113, 115–17, 141, 167–69 (see
also Sexuality: premarital)
sex in, 112
sex outside, 27
temporary, 38–39, 59, 73, 113,
130 (see also Sigheh)
Massad, Joseph, 35, 45
Meijl, van Toon, 66–67
Mezrab, 17, 84, 132–135, 137, 141,
150
Moallem, Minoo, 30, 37, 52, 60, 98
Modernity, 8, 18, 23–24
claim-making device, 31
conditional, 80, 91–92
and gender, 79
and homosexuality, 82–85
the ideal of, 66, 68–75, 89–90, 99
inauthenticity, 95–96, 107, 127
and Iranian nation-building, 29,
30–32, 34–36, 40, 43, 46–47,
52–61 (see also modernization)
in the Netherlands, 71
and nonmarital cohabitation,
87–88
and premarital sex, 78
and religion, 101–3, 118–19
transgressing, 155–56
Modernization (Iranian), 28, 35–
36, 38, 40, 43, 46–47, 49, 51–
53, 65, 79, 85, 91, 100, 169
Modesty (women’s), 52, 54, 56–57,
60, 86, 91, 106, 111–14, 117–
18, 124–25, 128–30, 162, 167,
169
Morality
endogenous, 90–92, 133, 167

and homosexuality, 120, 122
immorality, 42, 44, 67, 91
personal, 115–116
religious, 24, 51–52, 99, 110,
123, 129
sexual, 97
and spirituality, 119
Multiculturalism, 4, 64, 173–74
Multicultural, 3, 5–6, 63–64, 66–67,
90, 92, 101–4, 126, 137, 165,
166
Nagel, Joane, 29
Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 10, 27–29, 37,
41, 43–46, 53
New Realism, 5–6
Nijmegen, 16, 63–64
Nonmarital cohabitation
and the authenticated self, 97,
100, 123–29, 167–68
and the conditional modern self,
66–67, 86–89, 91–92, 166
and Iranian diaspora, 13, 24
and Iranian modern history, 27
and marriage, 73, 170
and self-fashioning, 10–11, 164–
65, 171–72
and the transgressive self, 141,
146, 158–62
Orientalism, 29
orientalist representation, 7, 30,
44–45, 47
self-orientalization, 172
Pahlavi, 35, 38, 48–54
Patriarchy, 11, 49, 59, 103, 130
Plummer, Kenneth, 20, 67
Prins, Baukje, 5–6, 20
Puar, Jasbir, 6
Qajar (dynasty), 32–34, 40–41,
44–46
Queer
and Iranian diaspora, 12
and the nation, 6, 82, 136
and religion, 146

194

Index

Rationality, 77–79, 85, 90, 118,
167, 169
Religion
absence of, 145–146
anti- (Islam), 8, 15–16, 35, 82,
114
and authenticity, 94–97, 108–10,
118–19, 129, 166
custom, 117
heritage, 107, 127, 129
and homosexuality, 30, 83, 92,
121–23, 129–30
and modernity, 100–4, 116, 168
and modesty (women’s), 106, 169
and nafs, 118–120, 130
skepticism (see also anti- (Islam)),
97–100
Religiosity
absence of, 145–46
and attachment, 111–12
and authenticity, 106, 108–9,
122, 126, 130
condemnation of, 15–16, 66, 73–
74, 89, 96–100, 106, 124, 134,
167
and homosexuality, 122–23
and Iranian modern history, 92
and modernity, 96, 100–4, 117,
129–30
and modesty (women’s), 110,
114
as resistance, 118, 130
and sofreh 94
Roy, Olivier, 102, 116,

Self-fashioning
and the authenticated self, 100–
3, 106, 118, 120, 128
and homosexuality, 48
Iranian collective process, 18, 26
process (via sexuality), 3, 8, 10,
15, 24, 165–66
and the transgressive self, 135,
139–41, 162
Sexuality
and identification, 136, 144–46,
153–58, 162
and integration, 4–6, 8, 16, 36,
164–65, 166–74
and Iranian diaspora, 9–10, 11–14
and Iranian nation-building, 26–
32, 37, 39–41, 44, 46–47, 49,
53, 55–61
and modern self, 65–68, 72–74,
78–79, 86, 89–91
premarital (see also virginity),
1–2, 69, 75, 77–78, 82–83, 85,
91, 114–16, 148, 151–52
and religious self, 95–106, 108–
110, 118, 120, 124, 128–29
and self-fashioning, 3, 10–11, 15,
18–24, 164–65
sensitive research topic, 23
and transgressive self, 134–41,
143–46, 162, 170
Sexual storytelling, 19–20, 67, 165
Shahidian, Hammed, 8, 11, 13, 37,
49, 54, 136, 171
Shakhsari, Sima, 6, 8, 12, 85
Sigheh, 39, 73, 112–13, 130
Sofreh, 94–95
Storytelling. See Sexual storytelling

Sadeghi, Fatemeh, 55–57
Said, Edward, 29, 44
Scott, Joan Wallach, 4, 7, 28–29, 31
Secular
and anti-religiosity, 22
and Iranian nation-building, 33,
37, 45, 49, 52, 96
and modernity, 109, 103–4, 113
and sexuality, 16

Taghizadeh, Hasan, 46
Tancoigne, J. M., 43–44
Tarof, 149
Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, 29, 35,
37, 46
Taylor, Charles, 99, 100–1, 104
Tehran, 34, 48, 51, 55–56
Tradition(al)
category, 30–31

and the self, 72, 144–45, 158,
162, 168

195

Index

in Dutch immigration policy, 4,
13, 164
discursive context, 8
embracing of, 94–97, 99, 102–3,
105, 108, 110, 113, 116, 118,
129–30, 166, 168–69
and Iranian diaspora, 9, 13
and Iranian nation-building,
33–34, 37–38, 40, 43, 50–51,
54–61
in modernity, 140
rejection of, 65–66, 69, 71, 74–
77, 82, 89–90, 92, 148, 150,
159
sexuality, 1–2
Transgression
gendered, 152, 169
and homosexuality, 158, 170
performance of modernity, 57
and the self, 146, 148, 157, 162
sexual, 134–35, 141, 155, 172

and sexual autonomy (women’s),
133, 145
Transgressive
gender, 134
and homosexuality, 155
and normativity, 139
self, 24, 135, 146–48, 150–52,
157–58, 160, 162
sexuality, 135–37, 140
and parenthood, 160–61
Virginity
artificial, 23, 28, 32, 40, 54–55,
57–60
and mental hymen 75–80, 90
and self-fashioning, 5, 9–13, 27
Weeks, Jeffrey, 101, 115, 139–140
Zamaneh, 17, 71, 78, 82, 122