Mariam Rahmani

'Queerness in Translation, from Persian to English and Back' aims to reframe how we think of subjectivity by approaching queerness from the context of the Islamic world, which historically embraced rather than eschewed homoerotics in practice and poetry. While much of queer theory takes the opposition of “hetero” and “homo” for granted and, after Foucault, treats sexuality as the privileged site of identity as defined by the state and individual, the current study builds upon recent work that “provincializes” Western queerness to interrogate such foundational assumptions. Analyzing women’s homoerotics and gender play in a multilingual corpus of Iranian feminist literature and film from 1966 to present, it theorizes queerness as deviance, as female masculinity, and as anti-respectability politics.