foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

142 Foucault's Writings on the Iranian Revolution
Foucault expressed a similar sentiment during a 1976 conversation in
Paris with his friends Claude Mauriac and Catherine von Bulow. Mauriac
and Foucault began by joking about the "satin beauty" of a young Arab acquaintance
they had seen at a Paris demonstration against the expulsion of
Pakistani immigrants. As recorded in Mauriac's diary, von Bulow complained
at this point about the sexism of Middle Eastern men at the march. She stated
that she had been "flabbergasted" by an Arab man who had told her to separate
herself from the men at the demonstration (Mauriac 1986, 235). Foucault
responded very forcefully. He shifted the issue from the treatment she
had received to one of sympathy for a culture marked by an underlying homoeroticism.
His remarks seemed to stun Mauriac, who recorded them at
some length, perhaps with Foucault's later Iran episode in mind:
They live among men. As men, they are made for men, with the fleeting
bedazzlement, the brief reward of women. One has succeeded in denying, in
breaking that fundamental bond that was, for a long time, that of the Spanish
army: groups of ten men who never left one another, depended upon and
responded to each other, fought and defended themselves together, and took
responsibility for the families of those who were killed. To be sure, those
fraternal cells were based on a subtle mixture of friendship and sensuality.
And sexuality (later denied and rejected so constantly) had its place there.
(235)
Expressed only two years before his 1978 visits to Iran, Foucault's remarks exemplified
what from Said's perspective could be termed a Romantic Orientalism.
Here, Foucault may have merged homoeroticism with gender-segregated
customs in Muslim societies and a different sense of cultural taboos, as in the
case of men commonly holding hands or kissing.
In his Iran writings, Foucault reacted in a similar manner to criticisms of
gender roles in a future Islamist-run Iranian society. As we saw earlier, in his
visits in 1978 and even after the revolution, Foucault made little criticism of
the "separate but equal" doctrine on women's rights of Iran's religious authorities.
He also accused "Atoussa H.," an Iranian feminist who attacked his
stance on Iran, of harboring Orientalist sentiments.
When he arrived in Iran in 1978, Foucault seemed to believe that Iranian
Islamism would also display a greater acceptance of homosexuality than the
modem West. Two decades later, the sociologist Ehsan Naraghi, who had met
with Foucault during one of his visits to Iran, recalled their conversation in
an interview with the well-known journalist Ibrahim Nabavi: