Najmabadi, Afsaneh - Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran

Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted, and partially subsidized, sex reassignment surgery. In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran.  Read more...

Afsaneh Najmabadi Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality   Afsaneh Najmabadi is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her book, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), received the 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. With Kathryn Babayan, she co-edited Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Middle Eastern Monographs, 2008). Her latest book, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2013) was a finalist for Lambda Literary Award in 2014 and received the 2014 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from American Historical Association. Read more...