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This study offers an exploration of masculinity in both Iraqi and Iranian fiction which holds the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) as its major theme. Representations of masculinities in Iran-Iraq War fiction present a deep, and at times, confounding paradox. Whilst this corpus of war fiction at times deeply challenges hegemony and completely reformulates its own definitions of normative codes of manliness, at other times it strictly conforms to chauvinistic and often profoundly oppressive patterns of male behaviour. By relating these works of fiction to their wider social and political context, the aim of this study is to recognise and nuance the relationship between representations of masculinities, and literary depictions of the nation at war. Theoretically grounded in reformulations of the concept of hegemonic masculinity, the study also reflects the work of Joseph Massad, as it attempts to contextualise a body of fiction which employs representations of masculinities as part of wider socio-political allegories. As such this study treats masculinity as a complex phenomenon fraught with ambivalence, operating within particular historical and political contexts, whose subjects are often empowered and oppressed in equal measure. By relating these representations to wider social and political contexts, this study seeks to recognise and nuance the relationship between representations of masculinities and the role which the nation plays in literature, in particularly, when war is the over-arching theme. It is within the context of war, when masculinity is often proposed to be at its most simple, that it is proven to be at its most complex as age, class and political affiliations become defining factors in the pursuit of hegemony and therefore what constitutes hegemonic masculinity. By comparing two national literatures participating in the same conflict, this study reveals the close socio-political dynamic which exists between gender, literature and the so-called constructed “reality” of nation which they purport to represent. Accordingly this study showcases a corpus of work which speaks to a larger literary canon systematically ignored in studies of Persian and Arabic literature. Through in-depth readings of eight works of fiction, published between 1982 and 2003, this study investigates representations of masculinity in both an Iranian and Iraqi context. This thesis is a riposte to common assumptions that literary canon which constitutes Iran-Iraq War is purely associated with state-sponsored narratives, and instead sheds light on a subtle body of fiction which offers a complex account of war and its effect on society.

Iranians who were marginalized by Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamicization of the 1979 Iranian Revolution nevertheless fought for Iran in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). This has been ignored in popular discourse and academic scholarship. But leaving out the historical willingness of people from across the political and religious spectrums to die in the “Sacred Defense” has left us misunderstanding Iranian nationalism. In this dissertation, I argue that the willingness of “secular” Iranians to sacrifice for Iran results from internal conflicts over the sacred Iran, and the concomitant sacrifices, that occurred in the four preceding decades. I demonstrate that during this period religion and sacrificial rhetoric and imagery were intrinsic to groups across the political spectrum and not just to the political right (e.g., Khomeini), as existing research has it. Civil society engaged in a transformative discourse about Iran not just as a country or homeland (vatan) but as the sacred (moqadas) necessitating sacrifice (feda kardan). The deployment of writings, speeches, and images of Iran as sacred at the time of the Allied Forces Invasion in 1941 became politically ubiquitous by 1953. The battle between the Shah and the Liberal-Left being waged at this time was an ideological and physical contestation of each’s vision for their distinct, future, sacred Iran. By re-contextualizing both sides as utopian ideologues, I change the historical narrative to show an entrenched, continuous confrontation in the subsequent decades before the Iran-Iraq War over divergent, idealized notions of the nation-state. This period of “sacrificial creationism,” as I describe it, over contending visions of the sacred produced “the nation” and identified its people as “nationals” beyond the conceptualization of social and political elites who advanced an official state nationalism. This sacrificial creationism generated the charged sentiment and popular participation that united Iranians against the Iraqi invasion, a unity that crossed political and religious affiliations to include Christians, Zoroastrians, and the Fedayeen-e Khalq. Now, just like other nation-states, Iran became the higher, meaning-making entity—the sacred—that transcends individual interests.

Thesis--School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., 1991-92. / Title from title screen (viewed Oct. 28, 2003). "June 1993." Includes bibliographical references.

Many photographs of women published in the Iranian press during the Iran-Iraq War emphasized their roles as supportive and mourning mothers and sisters. By contrast, the often gruesome images that depicted women’s deaths in the war proved more difficult to categorize. The difficulty reflected ambivalence towards attaching the label of shahid, or martyr, to dead women’s images. These photographs, whether gruesomely depicting their bodies or portraits taken prior to death, oscillated between evoking shahadat (martyrdom), consistently applied to men, and depicting their deaths merely as national tragedy. The ambiguous approach to gendered depictions of martyrdom reflected attempts by the Iranian press to negotiate women’s roles during the war in newspaper photographs from the newly-established Islamic Republic. However, in the context of the 2009 Green Movement, Neda Agha-Soltan’s widely viewed death revealed a change in the ambiguity of women’s possible martyr status. In this project, I trace the depictions of women as possible martyrs during the Iran-Iraq War and pose it against the visual experiences during the Green Movement. I argue that while earlier representations reflected tenuousness and ambiguity on the part of Iranian periodicals, such as Ettela’at, Jomhuri-e eslami, and Imposed War, as they sought to grapple with the turmoil of war and a still emergent political system, the Iranian press’s clear denial of female martyrdom during the Green Movement side-by-side with reproductions of Agha-Soltan’s death images reflected a shift in the application of shahid. Although the Iranian press rejected her shahid status, agencies like Fars News attached photographs from Neda’s death video to articles thereby presenting an unclear message about Agha-Soltan’s potential for shahadat. This complicated viewing along with the multitude of examples of her “death” images made her agency in the frame possible, unlike women during the war. Agha-Soltan’s death images presented a possible shift in ownership of shahadat from the state-sponsored press’s hands to that of the people. Thus while the official press had solidified its approach to (not) applying the label of martyr to women, it did so at a moment in which it had lost its monopoly over the declaration and depiction of martyrdom. / text

This thesis considers the transformation of Iranian-Israeli ties following the 1979 Iranian Revolution from a Western-allied relationship to a covert, scandalous relationship, specifically in the context of the Iran-Iraq War. I also look at the Iranian and Israeli narratives and compare the religious, historical, ideological and psycho-political underpinnings that reveal significant similarities between these two superficially diametrically opposed states, and ultimately shaped the complex and misunderstood relationship between the two countries. / text

Thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universität, Berlin, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-248).

Thesis (doctoral) - Freie Universität, Berlin, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-248).

<p dir="ltr">Violent death that violates the ontological dignity of the body and the disappeared corpse often results in a crisis of mourning for those left behind, with the matter made all the more complicated when it comes to instances of politically motivated violence in the context of war. What follows such death/disappearance are issues of identification, collection of remains and, ultimately, an inability to enact necessary death rituals such as washing, shrouding and burial, leading to a separation between the dislocated soul and the corporeal form on part of the dead and the issue of incomplete mourning on part of the bereaved. Both the living and the dead, thus, come to occupy a liminal space (<i>barzakh</i>) where the boundaries between past/present, human/non-human, and dead/alive fall away. This paper argues that this in-between state helps the mourner gain access to a radical state of bearing witness outside of the oppressive binaries of the modern world. This work makes use of Middle Eastern (Iraq, Palestine, Egypt) and South Asian (Kashmir) literatures dealing with dehumanization and violent death in the context of what Achille Mbembe refers to as “death-worlds,” inhabitants of which are deemed “living-dead.”</p>