Abstract

This thesis explores the cultural and spiritual significance of Iran’s premodern culture of homoeroticism and traces the role of European epistemological hegemony in the erasure of these once accepted and celebrated practices from Iran’s cultural memory as part of a broader project modernization during the nineteenth century. I examine travelogues of both Europeans and Iranians travelling between these two societies and their reflections on gender and sexual differences, from intrigue and enchantment to alienation and disgust, tracing the emergent dialogue between these societies and its impact on the discourse of Iranian modernity. Extant studies of gender and sexuality in Iran have drawn connections between the scrutiny of the European gaze and its influence on Iranian notions of modernity, however many stop short in their interrogation of how this process of forgetting contributed to the erasure of same-sex desire both historically and historiographically. Drawing on queer and postcolonial theory, I examine the epistemological power dynamics that influenced this transformation to demonstrate that Iran’s process of heteronormalization marked more than a mere shift in erotic sensibilities, but rather was part of a larger project of regulating gender and sexuality to further modernizing aims. This research bears implications both for understanding how this historical erasure impacts contemporary discourse about queerness in Iran as well as methodological considerations regarding how scholarship inadvertently reproduces hegemonic heteronormative epistemologies in the study of gender and sexuality in non-Western contexts.