Description: The Islamic Republic of Iran permits, and even partially subsidizes, sex reassignment surgery. Based on historical and ethnographic research, Afsaneh Najmabadi examines what transsexuality means in postrevolutionary Iran.
Review Quotes: "Professing Selves is one of the best recent works on contemporary Iran. Arguing that transsexuals' legal and psychiatric negotiations reveal more general processes of proceduralism, negotiation of legal categories, and state formation, Afsaneh Najmabadi challenges the lumping of transsexuals and homosexuals as identical human rights issues, and argues that poorly targeted universalistic campaigns can damage the conditions of life for the people they are intended to help. She works refreshingly at the level of real lives, jurists, and psychiatrists."--Michael M. J. Fischer, author of Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry