İRAN İSLAM RESPUBLİKASININ GENDER İQTİSADİYYATI: PLANLI UŞAQ DÜNYAYA GƏTİRMƏ, QADININ CİNSİ YETİŞKƏNLİK DÖVRÜ, HOMOSEKSUALLARIN HƏYAT TƏRZİ

In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault argues that beneath a variety of sexual prohibitions of seventeenth-century European societies a “veritable discursive explosion” around sexuality could be discerned. At the end of the eighteenth century, sexual regulations had become ingrained in legislative discourse, and state intervention addressed numerous issues concerning sexual conduct, among them the legal age of marriage, the birth rate, fertility, and the frequency of sexual relations. Through its economic, legal, medical, and health policies, the modern state influenced the sexual conduct of its populations in new ways, resulting in dramatic demographic changes. By the nineteenth century, a broader discourse on sexuality was taking shape beneath the blanket of Victorian morality. It was nothing less than “an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of functioning and taking effect in its very economy.” Foucault‟s interpretation of course contradicted the common assumption of an absence of discussion of sexuality in the nineteenth century, followed by greater sexual freedom in the twentieth century. Considered alongside trends concerning gender and sexuality in post-revolutionary Iran, Foucault’s portrait of sexuality in the Victorian era offers valuable insights into the contemporary situation in Iran. Foucault can shed light on the repercussions of the new sexual austerities that were imposed after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In the 1980s the Islamist government instituted a dramatic reversal in human rights, especially regarding women’s rights. The state revived pre-modern social conventions (repudiation, veiling, flogging) but enforced them through modern means and institutions, which meant a wider application. In its system of distributive justice, Muslims and non-Muslims, men and women received different treatment before the law. Defunct and repressive Shi’i rituals of purity and penance were brought back, while polygamy and sex with underage girls were newly sanctioned. Openly gay men were severely punished, and a few were even executed.