“I Don’t Want to Grow Old and Weak Like You!”: Conceptions of Idealized Masculinity in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema

Abstract

Iranian women are often at the forefront of feminist discourse on gender roles in the Middle East. There can be no question that this is important work and there are many questions about feminine gender roles in the Middle East and Iran that remain unanswered. However, gender norms in this family-centered society are often shaped by their relation to the opposite sex. As such, social scientists must understand both men’s and women’s roles in order to gain an appreciation for the complexity of social dynamics in a predominantly gender-segregated country like Iran. While most literature on the subject of gender in Iranian cinema focuses on women, little has been written explicitly about men and masculinity. This paper will attempt to close some of the gaps in this research by contrasting the category of the “ideal Iranian man” in popular films from two major periods in Iranian cinema—the highly Westernized era of the 1960s and 70s and the politically Islamist era of the 1980s and early 90s. Just as the nature of the Iranian national consciousness underwent a drastic change following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, so too did the nature of Iranian gender norms. By analyzing two films each from the pre- and post-revolutionary eras using three important variables—class conflict and religious piety, male-female sexual dynamics, and age differences among men—I will trace the path of these changes and suggest reasons for the similarities and differences one can observe between pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian films.