Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography

Staci Gem Scheiwiller is Assistant Professor of Modern Art History at California State University, Stanislaus. Her publications include a co-edited volume with Markus Ritter entitled The Indigenous Lens: Early Photography in the Near and Middle East (2017) and the edited volume Performing the Iranian State: Visual Culture and Representations of Iranian Identity (2013).

• Introduction: Locations of Desire A Language of Its Own: Depictions of Women in Iranian Art Before and Shortly After the Arrival of Photography Corporeal Politics: Constructions of Gender and Power in the Royal Nasiri Photograph Albums and the Photography of the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11) Collecting Women The Erotic Spaces of Qajar Photography For the Male Gaze: Depictions of Masculinity and Sexuality Enslaved Bodies of Desire: Photographs of Black African Slaves Conclusion: The Inevitable Witness

"The subject is fascinating and the book is rewarding. ... [Scheiwiller's] careful and detailed descriptions of the illustrations and the copious and thoroughly documented captions admirably place the examples within the history of Iranian stylistic deveopments, political history, religion, and literature."--Woman's Art Journal"Scheiwiller provides a significant intervention into the field of Qajar photographic history and serves as a timely and substantial addition to the growing corpus of analyses of gender and sexuality in modern Iran....Reading this book and its images is both edifying and thought provoking; the questions it forces us to confront carry resonances far beyond the area of Iranian studies, with repercussions for how we understand gender and sexuality and the postcolonial more fundamentally."--Art and Vernacular Photographies in Asia