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During the 2005 MESA meeting in Washington, D.C., a panel on gender and borders in Iran and the region included an unexpected digression on the difficulties of doing research in Iran since the revolution. A member of the audience raised the issue during the discussion period, and panelists and audience members alike suddenly found themselves venting their frustrations over visas, minders, and other bureaucratic obstacles. The discussion quickly returned to the more specific topics of the presented papers, but the digression itself was illuminating. It is hard for scholars based outside to manage the research context in Iran, whether for fieldwork or archival studies. Writing on modern and contemporary Iran involves an extra handicap, and thus also requires an extra push in order to achieve the normal scholarly goal of a well-conceptualized study substantiated with careful empirical detail.
The two books being reviewed here both reflect this difficulty with research and writing on Iran. Minoo Moallem's Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister is a sophisticated analysis of the competing discourses of Islamic fundamentalism and feminism, but it lacks equivalently developed empirical grounding. With regard to a contemporary social polity with a notorious split between officially sanctioned religious/political discourse and popular perceptions and behavior, this is a problem. Afsaneh Najmabadi's Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards displays the opposite tendency: it provides a wealth of historical social and cultural detail about 19th and early 20th century gender and sexual roles, but lacks almost any theoretical conception of social power. In a book attempting to present an argument about the changing roles of the genders within the development of a modern national identity and related social movements, this is also a problem. Moallem's book places the Iranian case within the theoretical context of postcolonial and postmodern gender studies. Najmabadi's book brings sexuality studies and queer theory...