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The CMES Director's Series is pleased to present
Familial Undercurrents:
Untold Stories of Love and Marriage in Modern Iran
with
Afsaneh Najmabadi
Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University
Not long after her father died, Afsaneh Najmabadi discovered that her father had a secret second family and that she had a sister she never knew about. In Familial Undercurrents, Najmabadi uncovers her family’s complex experiences of polygamous marriage to tell a larger story of the transformations of notions of love, marriage, and family life in mid-twentieth-century Iran. She traces how the idea of “marrying for love” and the desire for companionate, monogamous marriage acquired dominance in Tehran’s emerging urban middle class. Considering the role played in that process by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century romance novels, reformist newspapers, plays, and other literature, Najmabadi outlines the rituals and objects---such as wedding outfits, letter writing, and family portraits---that came to characterize the ideal companionate marriage. She reveals how in the course of one generation men’s polygamy had evolved from an acceptable open practice to a taboo best kept secret. At the same time, she chronicles the urban transformations of Tehran and how its architecture and neighborhood social networks both influenced and became emblematic of the myriad forms of modern Iranian family life.
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 book, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2014) was a finalist for Lambda Literary Award in 2014, received the 2014 Joan Kelly prize from the American Historical Association for best book in women’s history and feminist theory, and was a co-winner of 2015 John Boswell prize, LBGT History, American Historical Association. A recent book conversation on New Books in Islamic Studies features this book: http://newbooksinislamicstudies.com/2015/12/30/afaneh-najmabadi-professing-selves-transsexuality-and-same-sex-desire-in-contemporary-iran-duke-up-2013/. Most recently, she published Familial Undercurrents: Untold Stories of Love and Marriage in Modern Iran (Duke University Press, 2022).
Najmabadi leads a digital archive and website, Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran (www.qajarwomen.org). The project has been awarded four two-year grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was recognized by the White House Office of Public Engagement in May of 2012.
For info, contact: Liz Flanagan