Staging Masculinity in Iran–Iraq War Movies

Abstract

This chapter focuses on post-Iran–Iraq War films as a spectacle and masculinity and as an emphasized signifier of war movies. Most war movies are made with state funding and in the context of the state’s promotion of “sacred defense.” These movies have to do with war, national memory, and gender identities. The emphasized meanings and characters of these films stage masculinity more often, but they also produce femininity, easing the changing significance of gender in post-revolutionary Iran. In this chapter, I show how post-Iran–Iraq war movies use mediatic technologies and the melodramatic staging of family and gender to depict war, to defend it, or to interrogate it. I argue that while war movies are sites of reproduction for gender identities and ideologies, they also open up space for rupture, performativity, and discontinuity in normative notions of masculinity and femininity. In other words, filmic intervention is not arbitrary since Iranian war movies also create space for the interrogation of gender identities as well as the meaning of war.