Shirin Fathi

Heart Throbs, 2015 مردان محبوب

Heart Throbs explores masculine beauty in 19th-century Iranian Qajar paintings, looking at representations of gender and beauty shaped by cultural exchange between Iran and Europe.

Masculine beauty was fashionable for women and so having facial hair was considered beautiful. Women had mustaches. They would even stick strips of hair on each side of their face to create the illusion of having a sideburn. Men on the other hand, were very feminine. They would wear make-up and were often dressed in feminine attire.

Instead of the binary category of male, Iranian’s associated with archetypes: Amrad (the adolescent male) and Amradnuma (the adult male) and Fukuli (the male who mimics the look of the European dandy). These gender archetypes gradually disappeared from paintings and from public representation as a necessary step for the modernist heteronormalization of gender in a quest to diminish same sex practices among men.

Through a series of photographic images, this work explores representations of Iranian and in some cases European male beauty in early to mid 19th century Iranian paintings.