080080 SE Seminar: Sex, Gender and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Iranian and Ottoman Photography (nst./au.K.) (2014W)

This seminar explores how beauty, gender, and desire were constructed and represented in nineteenth-century Iranian and Ottoman photography. We examine indigenous photographs from the nineteenth century that depict Iranian and Ottoman men and women of different social strata, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds and explore their aesthetics, disentangling the sociological functions of photography in changing, creating, or perpetuating notions of gender, beauty, desire, and sexuality. Besides the differing social standards of beauty, these photographs also show how the cultural and colonial negations between Europe and dynastic rulership were reflected in the bodies of men and women through their beauty, dress, and desirability. Notions of beauty and desire changed through increased European contact and the invention of the camera, resulting in diverse modern representations of both Iranian and Ottoman manhood and womanhood.