CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Abdi, Mohammad Ali |
|---|---|
| Title | Gender Outlaws Between Earth and Sky: Iranian Transgender Asylum Seekers Trapped Within (Inter)National Heteronormative Frameworks |
| Summary | While same-sex relationships are criminalized in Iran, sex-change operations are allowed and partially funded by Islamic Republic. Nevertheless, a number of Iranian transgender people leave the country to Turkey to seek asylum through UNHCR. The thesis aims at understanding Islamic Republic recognition of sex-change operations and UNHCR acceptance of transgender people as potential refugees, by looking through the dominant politics of gender and sexuality in Islamic Republic throughout the last two hundred years and on international level along the line of continuous mutual constitution and interaction between Iranian and western modernities. I argue that the discourse informing transsexuality in today Iran is a confluence of western scientific discourse on truth of sex, and the Classical Islamic discourse on true sex, which provides knowledge and regime of truth for IR’s heteronormalizing politics. Yet, I claim that the heteronormalizing and disciplining tendencies are not limited to IR’s politics of gender and sexuality, but is deeply embedded in the international asylum law, UNHCR immigration judges’ prejudices, and NGOs working on the ground. Invoking deep interviews I conducted in Turkey with Iranian transgender asylum seekers, I show that disciplining trends on national and international levels, which inform and are informed by each other, work at discriminating against those transgender people who do not fit within the dominant definition of discreet transgender citizens along the binary lines of male/female and man/woman. I draw on post-colonial theories, Butler’s discussion of performativity, Foucauldian understandings of power, and theories of transgenderism and citizenship debates in different chapters. The recognition of intertwined modernities and the continuous friction between local and global processes within hierarchical power relations shape the broader framework of my thesis. |
| Supervisor | Renkin, Hadley |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/abdi_ali.pdf |
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