Queering Fashion in Hajji Baba: James Morier, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, and the Crisis of Imperial Masculinity

James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) shaped orientalist stereotypes until the early twentieth century. Scholars have examined the novel’s racism separately from gender and class anxieties in the often-neglected sequel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828). Reading these two novels jointly reveals a British imperial masculinity in crisis during a precarious period in Anglo-Persian relations: the embassy of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan Shirazi Ilchi from Qajar Iran to late Georgian Britain in 1809–10 and 1819–20. This essay argues that Abul Hassan’s celebrity status in the tabloid news media inspired Londoners to adopt Persian fashions queerly, their gender deviancy informing Morier’s fiction about a foppish cross-dressed upstart from Ispahan. I argue that Abul Hassan’s mediatized body drove Morier to satirize fashionable Englishmen as a foreign race, allowing him to claim British gentility. Less concerned with Persians than with their effeminate admirers in England, his satire suggests that the “Orient” was constituted by intersectional gender, class, and racial identities in flux.

Moabite women, Transjordanian women, and incest and exogamy: The gendered dimensions of boundaries in the Hebrew Bible

Building on the work of David Jobling (who suggests there is a structural coding of the Cisjordan as male and the Transjordan as female) and Rachel Havrelock (who suggests the Transjordan and Moab are places of gender deviancy), this article explores issues of geographical, ethnic, and gender identity in stories of Moabite and Transjordanian women. Particular attention is given to the twin tropes of incest and exogamy and how this relates to the pattern of anxiety and lost identity in the Transjordan. Analysis begins with the story of Lot’s daughters, who serve as archetypal and paradigmatic Moabite women, and moves on to include the Moabite women in Numbers 25, Zelophehad’s daughters, Jephthah’s daughter, and Ruth.

Gendering the American Enemy in Early Cold War Soviet Films (1946–1953)

Analyzing Soviet films and film criticism from the late Stalin period, this article shows how Soviet cinematographers exploited gender discourse to produce Otherness. Cinematic representations of U.S. femininity, masculinity, love, sexuality, and marriage played an important role in constructing external and internal Enemies. Cinematography depicted the U.S. gender order as resulting from the unnatural social system in the United States and as contrary to both the Soviet order and human nature. In line with the notion of “two different Americas,” the films also created images of “good Americans” who aspired to satisfy gender norms of the Soviet way of life. The image of the American Other helped shape Soviet gender and political orders. Internal enemies’ “groveling before the West” on political matters was depicted as causing gender deviancy, and the breaking of Soviet gender norms was shown to lead to political crimes.