Ambivalence of Hostility and Modification:
Patriarchy's Ideological Negotiation With Women, Modernity and Cinema in Iran

by Elnaz Nasehi

About: Iranian cinema as a modern art has always been influenced by political, cultural and social changes. While in the Pahlavi era, Iranian cinema was encouraged to turn into an ideological tool to promote modernity and westernization, the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema through the project of Islamisation was inscribed to function as the religious ideological tool to promote Islamic values and life style, which were defined in contrast to its Western counterparts. Through these ideological changes, however, the Iranian womens sexuality and body has been constantly the site of struggle. Being rooted in chronic surveillance over female sexuality within normative patriarchal values and desire, the image of women has been centralized to the national identity in modern Iran. Despite this centrality, however, women have ambivalently encountered hostility through the mechanism of modification while in Pahlavi era unveiling of women was one of the most controversial manifestation of modernity, under the Islamic regime the Iranian womens veiled images turn into the/a battle against the westernization and modernity. This research addresses the persistence of ideological negotiation between women, modernity and cinema in modern Iran. Therefore, chronological accounts of the way women, modernity and cinema have been through the ideological negotiation in Iranian society is discussed from pre to post-revolutionary eras.