ABSTRACT

Feminist scholarship on the Middle East has often critiqued binaristic framings of gender rights which draw on Western-centric tropes of cosmopolitan modernity versus local backwardness. What I argue, through examining visual mediations of Covid-19 on Iranian social media, is that gender is reconfigured in this context as part of a nationalism that is both modernising and conservative. I particularly focus on how montage—a modernist visual genre—is utilised in the production of an Iranian national security imaginary which combines a rhetoric of modern, mixed-gender medical care with haunting resonances of male martyrdom and sacrifice during the Iran–Iraq war. While much has been written recently about Covid and national security, what is less discussed is how particularistic narratives of crisis can produce innovative reconfigurations of gender and modernity. Yet while Benjamin envisaged montage as a weapon in the destruction of aura, here, I argue, the deployment of aura supports the state’s “capture” of haunting affects as it seeks to re-shape national memory. What this suggests is that crisis permits a conditional shifting of gender roles, but this move is legitimated through the invocation of a redemptive history, wherein the nation re-emerges triumphant out of disaster.

摘要

中东的女权主义学术经常批评性别权利的二元框架，这些框架借鉴了以西方为中心的世界性现代性与地方落后的比喻。通过检查伊朗社交媒体上 Covid-19 的视觉媒介，我认为性别在这种情况下被重新配置为既现代化又保守的民族主义的一部分。我特别关注蒙太奇——一种现代主义的视觉类型——如何被用于伊朗国家安全想象的制作，该想象结合了现代、混合性别医疗的修辞与两伊战争期间男性殉道和牺牲的令人难以忘怀的共鸣。虽然最近有很多关于 Covid 和国家安全的文章，较少讨论的是危机的特殊叙述如何产生对性别和现代性的创新重构。然而，尽管本杰明将蒙太奇设想为破坏灵气的武器，但我认为，在此，灵气的部署支持了国家在寻求重塑国家记忆时“捕获”令人难以忘怀的影响。这表明危机允许有条件地改变性别角色，但这一举动是通过援引救赎历史而合法化的，在该历史中，国家从灾难中胜利地重新崛起。