Najmabadi, Afsaneh 1946-

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Najmabadi, Afsaneh 1946-

PERSONAL:

Born December 29, 1946, in Iran. Education: Attended Tehran University, 1966; Radcliffe College, B.A., 1968; Harvard University, M.A., 1970; University of Manchester, England, Ph.D., 1984.

ADDRESSES:

Office—History Department, Robinson Hall, 35 Quincy St., Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Barnard College, New York, NY, member of the faculty of the department of women's studies for nine years; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, professor, 2001—, chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Nemazee Fellow, Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1984-85; also recipient of fellowships from the Brown University Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, 1988-89, Harvard Divinity School, Women's Studies in Religion Program, 1988-89, and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1994-95.

WRITINGS:

Land Reform and Social Change in Iran, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 1987.

Ma'ayib al-rijal: dar pasukh bih Ta'dib al-nisvan, Midland Press (Chicago, IL), 1992.

Hikayat-i dukhtaran-i Quchan: az yadraftah'ha-yi Inqilab-i Mashrutah, Rawshangaran (Tehran, Iran), 1995.

Bibi Khanum Astarabadi va Khanum-i Afz al Vaziri: Madar va dukhtari az pishgaman-i ma'arif va huquq-i zanan, Nigarish va Nigarish-i Zan (Chicago, IL), 1996.

The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1998.

(Associate editor) Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, Brill (Boston, MA), 2003.

Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2005.

Nahzat-i nisvan-i sharq, Shirazah (Tehran, Iran), 2005.

(Editor, with Kathryn Babayan) Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire, Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University: Distributed by Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2008.

Associate editor for the multivolume Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures.

SIDELIGHTS:

Born in Iran on December 29, 1946, Afsaneh Najmabadi came to Radcliff College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Tehran University in 1966 and received her B.A. in physics there in 1968. She earned an M.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1970 and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Manchester in Manchester, England, in 1984. She is a professor of Middle Eastern studies and the chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Najmabadi researches issues pertaining to women, Islam, and the Middle East. She is an associate editor for the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, a multivolume publication that explores many issues surrounding the history and role of women within the Muslim community.

In Iran, there is a traditional story dating back to 1905 about a group of women and girls who were taken captive by invading Turkomen or sold into slavery by impoverished fathers to pay their taxes. These Quchani women came to symbolize all Iranian daughters, and the shame and grief of the fathers became that of the nation. The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History retells that story and its evolution, as well as its effect on national policy.

In 1906 there was an attempt by a new government, the National Consultative Assembly, or Majlis, to return the lost women and punish officials responsible for their loss. Although it was realistically impossible to retrieve the women, the resulting trial laid the groundwork for the workings of the new government. At the time it occurred, the loss of the daughters of Quchan was an important event and an influential episode in the organization of the government, but the incident has been passed over in histories written about the revolution. Najmabadi's book asks why this is so and attempts to correct the oversight.

Tina Davidson and Ruth Roach Pierson, in their review of The Story of the Daughters of Quchan for the Journal of Women's History, believed that Najmabadi has made her point well: "Najmabadi has convincingly demonstrated that the story of the daughters of Quchan was of critical significance to contemporaries and to early developments in Iran's constitutional history, but that their exclusion from the subsequent historical record is based on a fundamental flaw in the way that Iranian history has been conceived and written."

When Najmabadi began working on Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity she intended to write a modern history of Iran that included women as more than a sidelight. In the course of her research, however, she came to realize that in Iran gender separation is a relatively new concept. She posits that in the early nineteenth century the standards of beauty for males and females were the same and that maleness was different from manhood. Many ideas about male love and beauty that were at the time considered social norms, and included homoeroticism and homosexuality within the spectrum of maleness, began, by the end of the century, to be classified as effeminate and unnatural. Beauty became feminized, and heterosexual love became a condition of normalcy. At the same time, women were coming out of the home and into public life, being educated (albeit for raising educated sons), and finding their family dynamic transformed.

Reviewing Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards for the Middle East Journal, Azadeh Kian-Thiebaut praised it as an important work: "This book is a rich, original, and groundbreaking work and a major contribution to the understanding of Iranian modern culture." Howard Hsueh-Hao Chiang's review for the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide called the book a "provocative piece of scholarship." In his review for the Historian, Jonathan G. Katz wrote: "This richly textured study makes an important and original contribution to the literature on Iran."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, October 1, 2006, Mary Elaine Hegland, review of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, p. 1287.

American Journal of Sociology, September 1, 1989, Said Amir Arjomand, review of Land Reform and Social Change in Iran, p. 516.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 1, 1999, A. Mahdi, review of The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History, p. 1848; June 1, 2004, S.M. Holmer-Estelle, review of Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, p. 1863; July 1, 2005, S.M. Estelle-Holmer, review of Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures; January 1, 2006, L. Beck, review of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, p. 939.

Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources, June 22, 2006, "Islamic Women," p. 14.

Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, January 1, 2007, Howard Hsueh-Hao Chiang, review of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards.

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, June 1, 2006, "Appropriating Anxieties," p. 329.

Historian, March 22, 2007, Jonathan G. Katz, review of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, p. 89.

History: The Journal of the Historical Association, January 1, 2001, Oliver Bast, review of The Story of the Daughters of Quchan, p. 89.

International Journal of Middle East Studies, November 1, 1991, Thomas M. Ricks, review of Land Reform and Social Change in Iran, p. 694; February 1, 2007, "Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran," p. 128.

Journal of Intercultural Studies, August 1, 2006, Peyman Vahabzadeh, review of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, p. 358.

Journal of Women's History, June 22, 2001, Tina Davidson, review of The Story of the Daughters of Quchan, p. 169.

Middle East Journal, June 22, 1990, review of Land Reform and Social Change in Iran, p. 535; January 1, 2000, Mary Elaine Hegland, review of The Story of the Daughters of Quchan, p. 152; January 1, 2006, Azadeh Kian-Thiebaut, review of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, p. 165.

Reference & Research Book News, May 1, 1999, review of The Story of the Daughters of Quchan, p. 113.