The Female Almās: A Post-Feminist Approach to the Appearance of Women in the Role of the Black Character after the Iran Islamic Revolution

Abstract

In the history of Iranian traditional performances (especially the Siyāh-Bāzi), the presence and action of women has been extremely limited. In some cases, the performances are totally get away from the fact. Due to the lack of archival resources, there are very few documents available to reflect the presence of women in this field. However, there has recently been an upsurge in the presence of women during the post-revolutionary years, especially in the field of Siyāh-Bāzi and performing the role of Almās (Siyāh) as the leading character. The present article deals with the presence of women as Siyāh, which was not noticed in the pre-revolutinary Iran. The theoretical framework of this article is based on the postmodern feminist ideas, with reference to Judith Butler's ideas on "Gender identity" and "Cross dressing". We seek to show why women were not present in the Siyāh-Bāzi performances before the revolution, and how they have developed a new discourse in this field in the recent years. The results of this study showed that being an "other" results in a sort of deconstruction and the emergence of a new phenomenon referred to as the emergence of a female Almās in a feminine discourse: A new discourse which is the result of turning into a new "other", together with the deformation of the traditional approaches. In other words, the cross dressing of Almās is the result of a challenge for gender equality.

Keywords

• feminism
• siyāh character
• siyāh bāzi
• iranian traditional performance
• postmodernism