Looking at sex and marriage across a cultural divide: Iranian and British women commentators on nineteenth century Iran

Twenty years ago Billie Melman challenged Saidian ‘orientalism’, using nineteenth century  British women’s travel writing on the Middle East, and opening up a fruitful area of gendered cross-cultural analysis. Since then work on ‘western’ perceptions of the domestic lives, spaces  and social interactions of elite Middle Eastern women has been paralleled by important social and cultural studies of such women and their ideas by area specialists. This paper will address and develop some less considered implications of this scholarship. Firstly it will offer an explicitly comparative treatment of texts discussing the politics and practices of marriage by both nineteenth century Iranian and European commentators, including Iranian comments on European marriage practices. Secondly, it will focus on the specific dynamics of marital intimacy and power relations, rather than on general domestic or family dynamics. Thirdly, it will ask whether Iranian and European commentaries run in parallel or engage with one another, opening up fresh perspectives on the interactions of power, knowledge, and cultural imperialism.

The argument will be based on varied writings produced by Iranian and by European authors during the nineteenth century. This extends the study of perceptions of Middle Eastern marriage, which has used Ottoman or Egyptian rather than Iranian sources and responses to encounters with Europeans. It explores distinctive Iranian debates challenging conventional assumptions about the interplay of indigenous and external influences on such debates. This will enable a more nuanced feminist critique of Edward Said’s ‘orientalist’ paradigm than either its enthusiasts or Melman’s problematic discussion have offered.