An all-female Carmen for an all-female audience; Verdi’s Lady Macbeth as a puppet; the Queen of The Night sung by five singers; these are some of the work-arounds Iranians have devised as they navigate official taboos on women’s public performance, exploiting loopholes left by the shifting government guidelines.

From its introduction to Iran in the late 19^th century, opera has been caught between Royal fascination with the West and religious conservatism. Khomeini’s 1979 ruling on music as an opium for youth should have resulted in the disappearance of operas; instead it gave rise to a new ‘opera’ (an umbrella term that resists Western translation), which, compared to pre-Revolutionary practice, is arguably more indigenous than Western, more democratic than elitist, and more accessible than exclusive. From pushing the boundaries of gender politics to operatic setting of the Shiite martyrdom, opera in Iran continues to offer a prism through which to examine ideological tensions, and evolution of gender politics in the face of women’s continuous resistance.

This paper draws on historical sources, archives, interviews and oral history, as well as literary (Doyle, 2020) and historicising studies (Abrahamian, 1993), to place the phenomenon of Iranian ‘opera’ within its politico-historical context: from 1960s ‘inter-imperiality’ through to the contested populism of post-‘Khomeinism’ in present-day Iran. Considering such influences as Middle eastern modernity and Islamic/Iranian traditions, I argue that rather than ruptures and disjunctions, the story of opera in Iran is one of concealed continuity and paradox, and a testament to the resourcefulness of Iranian women.

Chaharbeiti is a non-metric sung poetry performed by amateur and professional male and female singers/dotar players. It holds significance in eastern Khorasan, Iran, and all Persian-speaking areas of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. With roots in the Iranian Sassanid era (224-651 CE), Chaharbeiti serves as a medium where poets and bards of the region expressed oral poetry through music. Recognizing it as a form of lay literature reflecting the life and culture of its people, this study explores the cultural concepts embedded in these songs. Despite various works in Farsi categorizing Chaharbeitis from Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, a focused analysis on Chaharbeiti as a cultural bearer is lacking. Addressing the gender inequalities in the region, especially since the arrival of Islam in the mid-seventh century, highlights the inevitable cultural disparities between males and females, requiring specific attention to each. Inspired by Veronica Doubleday's insights on female Chaharbeiti singers in Afghanistan and informed by my research, I will investigate what women have been expressing through this literary form across centuries: the shared beliefs and values forming their identities, the social norms and range of acceptable/intolerable behaviors in interpersonal interactions, and their roles in traditions and rituals, social organization and hierarchies. The focus will be on the city of Torbat-e Jam and its rural areas, the most culturally influential part of eastern Khorasan, where I lived for almost a year doing my fieldwork.

Ambiguity is one of the most important characteristics of revolutionary regimes. In the construction of the revolutionary state, one of the primary battles would be to specify the meaning of ambiguous concepts in a way that they can be the subject of interpretation according to the revolutionary ideology. In the Iranian revolution, one of these important concepts is the definition and relation between public and private places that have characterized much of the recent history of music in Iran. The tension between the boundary of these two concepts becomes clearer in the case of solo female singing and its prohibition in public since the 1979 revolution. “Female presence” on the predominantly all-male public stage of Naqqali– traditionally a one-man show, using heightened speech, gestures, and body movements to portray stories of Shahnameh, Iran’s iconic Book of Kings– can be seen as one of the examples of “agency which disturbing and confusing these boundaries” (Born 2013:59). In order to interrogate representations of "female presence" in these solo productions on the public stage in Iran in this paper, I will try to understand the ways in which female Naqqals deployed to transcend boundaries without disguising their female body and voice. Also, I will explore the best way of approaching this cultural and political ambiguity of theorization of the spatial, particularly following the work of Asef Bayat (2013) on the social production of space.