ABSTRACT
In the introduction, a photograph of two women posing as a heterosexual couple was presented, but this photograph is only one of many that depicts this motif (Figure 1.1). For example, in the catalogue sheets discussed in chapter four and in the Firouz Firouz Album, there are other photographs of women dressed as men (Figures 5.1-5.2). These types of photographs were erotic, produced mainly for an Iranian male gaze that desired both the female body and the young male body. Historian Afsaneh Najmabadi has argued that early Qajar paintings of young lovers-male and female-were created with a similar intention: both to please the male gaze. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, these paintings displayed attractive men as boyish without beards with hourglass figures, but by the end of the century these images of desirable male youths subscribed to more Victorian ideals of masculinity and heteronormativity due to increased contact with European powers, thus codifying a more rigid sexuality. Partly because of European writers, such as James Morier (1780-1849) and J. M. Tancoigne, criticizing homosexual relations between grown men and amrads (adolescent males with little to no facial hair), this reputation of Iran in Europe, to some degree, inspired Iranian intellectuals, scholars, and clerics to admonish any type of homosexual practice existing in Iran.1 Yet the photographs above are from circa the 1890s or even the early 1900s. If the amrad had disappeared from official Qajar painting, then where did he go? How do the photographs above then speak to the changing, liminal desires that were still present in Qajar Iran by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
