Staci Gem Scheiwiller – författare

This study argues that photographs from Qajar Iran (1785–1925) of harem women, royal women, and public women, such as sex workers, musicians, singers, and dancers, make profound statements on the institution of the harem in a time of flux and modernization.

Depictions of the harem in photographs shifted the scopic regime of power and made visible an Iranian “Sultanate of Women,” which produced a short succession of formidable, driven women. These photographs became instrumental as a “mirror for princesses,” in which women consolidated their political control by fashioning their images, constructing pictures of female rule, leaving a legacy and blueprint for future heads of harem, and bolstering their positions within the harem, the court, the state, and the global arena. Thus, photography played a major role as an ontic condition that would further reformulate perceptions of harem women’s ontological Being in the world, resulting in photographic evidence of their perceived agency. By the late nineteenth century, however, the institution of the harem began to wane, and women’s search for political influence had to shift to photographs that were marked distinctly and visibly as “anti-harem.”

This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, gender studies, and Iranian studies.

This study argues that photographs from Qajar Iran (1785–1925) of harem women, royal women, and public women, such as sex workers, musicians, singers, and dancers, make profound statements on the institution of the harem in a time of flux and modernization.

Depictions of the harem in photographs shifted the scopic regime of power and made visible an Iranian “Sultanate of Women,” which produced a short succession of formidable, driven women. These photographs became instrumental as a “mirror for princesses,” in which women consolidated their political control by fashioning their images, constructing pictures of female rule, leaving a legacy and blueprint for future heads of harem, and bolstering their positions within the harem, the court, the state, and the global arena. Thus, photography played a major role as an ontic condition that would further reformulate perceptions of harem women’s ontological Being in the world, resulting in photographic evidence of their perceived agency. By the late nineteenth century, however, the institution of the harem began to wane, and women’s search for political influence had to shift to photographs that were marked distinctly and visibly as “anti-harem.”

This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, gender studies, and Iranian studies.

Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen, and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spaces—public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden—thus mapping, graphing, and even transgressing those spaces, especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender, sexuality, and desire, becoming strategies of empowerment, of domination, of expression, and of being seen. Hence, the photograph became a vehicle to traverse multiple locations that various gendered physical bodies could not, and it was also the social and political relations that had preceded the photograph that determined those ideological spaces of (im)mobility. In identifying these notions in photographs, one may glean information about how modern Iran metamorphosed throughout its own long durée or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.

Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen, and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spaces—public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden—thus mapping, graphing, and even transgressing those spaces, especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender, sexuality, and desire, becoming strategies of empowerment, of domination, of expression, and of being seen. Hence, the photograph became a vehicle to traverse multiple locations that various gendered physical bodies could not, and it was also the social and political relations that had preceded the photograph that determined those ideological spaces of (im)mobility. In identifying these notions in photographs, one may glean information about how modern Iran metamorphosed throughout its own long durée or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.