Mirror Mirror on the Wall

During a graduate school seminar, my professor asked questions - not about my takeaways from the text or theory, but to check her own. I was almost guest lecturing the seminar with her. Some student was always reciting a reiteration of Foucault or Butler. Theory was invoked to replace thought. In the West, discourse always precedes practice. That night class, I fell into what has since become a two-year love affair with a painting - an imbrication of art, politics, and culture.

My professor introduced me to one of my favorite pieces of art: Amorous Couple, early nineteenth century. Two androgynous figures are framed with a rich palette of oil strokes that refuses governable gender. It’s an insurgency against the taxonomies of gender, sexuality, and nation. The painting doesn’t beg for inclusion in the queer archive; it exposes the limits of the archive itself.

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Being proud to be Iranian is often thought to be antithetical to queer liberation – the way being a patriotic American is deemed antithetical to queer liberation today. I’ve often felt that these parts of me sit like oil and acrylic paints on a canvas – handled as an impossible pairing, even as they blend. The work – and by “work” I mean our lives – does not plead with, or seek permission from, Whiteness. Art takes us places we would otherwise not be able to access with only words.

Art historian Najmabadi, once self-described as art-blind, went to the Brooklyn Museum in 1995, where she “realized doing history only with texts…had actually deprived me of an enormous resource for study, especially for issues of gender and sexuality.” I took in the painting, watching it metamorphose into a mirror. Words have never been able to paint me the way this did.

Pieces like Amorous Couple (early 19th century) and A Couple Embracing are not just historical artifacts of queerness, but also a political intervention: an assertion of legitimacy within both art and politics. It takes the allegorical into documentarian. In Qajar era Iran (1789-1925), femininity and masculinity were not attached to gender or sexuality. Qajar Era Iranians didn’t need to “perform” gender in the way Judith Butler wrote about, because gender performance presupposes repeated cultural practices. Those cultural practices weren’t part of Qajar Iran because gender expression or sexual partners did not imply a rigid sexuality. Many paintings make it impossible to tell who is of which gender, or whether their relationship is heterosexual.

What was freedom in Iran became a means of oppression in the West. Both Westerners and Iranians were anxious about how their culture would appear to one another. However, Western politicians misread Iranian culture through their own homophobia and influenced how sexuality in Iran is understood. As Michel Foucault might say, the concept of sexuality was not repressed - it was talked about more, politicized, and defined into homosexuality and heterosexuality. Creating these cultural categories expanded the governments reach of power. People have always had sex with the same gender. It wasn’t until the 19th century that they were called “homosexuals,” and put into that category with sociopolitical effects.

Political art simply cannot address tasks that exist entirely outside of the scope of art. Writer Maggie Nelson has said that, “Neither politics nor art is served if and when the distinctions between them are unwillingly or unthinkingly smeared out.” However, art is not apolitical - the archive of cultural production is held by branches tethered to state sponsored social engineering. Curation is an arm of control. It upholds the manufactured illusion that art and cultural institutions are liberal while ensuring compliance with capitalism and censorship. Art takes the allegorical into documentarian. It records, resists, ruptures. When it cannot influence the law, it increases literacy. When it cannot free people, it frees perception. If art cannot legislate freedom but can expand perception, then it is implicated in how freedom itself is imagined. The history of gender in Iran shows that perception is produced by cultural institutions. Najmabadi once wrote that “to be modern was to be gendered.”

This production necessitated a “cultural labor” of gendering. This modernization required a labor of gendering – work that constructed and upheld the binary itself. What Najmabadi reveals is that gender was not simply “discovered” or “expressed” but produced. Gender queerness was actively removed from literature and the arts. Heteronormalization was also integrated through laws the state enacted. The education system also promoted binary gender through curriculum and school segregation, teaching children the “right” way to be a man or woman. This labor continues in art institutions today, where censorship begins with aesthetics, visually reinforcing the gender binary and censoring cultural institutions.

Art and politics have a reciprocal dynamic: art is always one of the first cultural institutions to be censored and defunded. The change in gender aesthetic aligns with the timeline of Iran’s deepening politics with the West. Paintings, like Lovers, began to have one person topless with exposed breasts and another with facial hair. Despite wanting to reject Western influence, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) came to depend on a concept of sexuality corresponding to that of the West more than its own. Along with the art, cultural attitudes began to change, and did so definitively with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Just as Western influence politicized queerness in Iran, the US’s invasion of itself is rewriting the laws, culture, and curricula it once claimed as part of its freedom.

In March 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order to “Restore Truth and Sanity to American History” by banning art exhibitions involving queerness or gender identities that do not align with the administration’s gender ideology. Trump’s order reads like a decree from the Ministry of Culture – ironically, the kind of censorship the U.S. once condemned abroad. The national gender policy is also transphobic, recognizing only “male” and “female” according to another of Trump’s executive orders. The administration will also pull funding from schools with queer inclusive education.

The policies have reverberated through the politicization of art and queerness. In both countries, queerness continues to come up in unquestionably national terms while contemporary politics makes queerness a national threat. There’s a quiet kind of grief that washes over you when you begin to think about the queer/trans families and adults fleeing the country – a country your family fled an authoritarian state for.

Trump’s presidency is not a prior condition so much as a confirmation of what has always been. If we lived in a culture that was less homophobic and anxious about the genderqueer experience, then queerness would be less troublesome - since part of what it’s doing is troubling the assumptions around the construction of sexuality. The US is not yet a gender apartheid, but Qajar era art functions as both witness and warning to countries that claim freedom in the name of patriotism yet repress queerness in the same terms.

America is not just a country; it poses a mission: the “free” world. Many queer/trans adults and families are having to choose safety over a sentiment. To be queer in the United States is to be patriotic - because it demands the country invest in its own promise. And criminalizing queerness is not very patriotic when the basis of this country is (supposedly) the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Qajar era art paints a time when queerness was not politicized – destabilizing both the Islamic Republic’s homophobic dismissal of queer history and the West’s hold over queer identities.

In both the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran, censorship of queer artists is justified through nationalism. The US is a museum of the “free” world, its galleries and libraries where the nation performs itself. Like Iran’s Ministry of Culture, US cultural institutions are curators and librarians, deciding what belongs on the walls and shelves. To have US laws be like that of the IRI’s makes me think of art like Amorous Couple not as subverting the IRI – that’s part of it – but as primarily revealing Islamophobia. The irony is that the Iran being called upon to address homophobia wasn’t even homophobic. Putting queer liberation in terms of only freeing them from the IRI disregards the actual cause: the US. To address the oppressive politics of transphobia and homophobia includes - no, necessitates - taking apart the Western empire. Addressing the politics of transphobia and homophobia doesn’t stop at critique - it necessitates dismantling the Western empire itself.

What happens when art can hold queerness in a way that politics cannot? Does it only succeed as art – or can it enact political and cultural change? If political and cultural change cannot be attributed to the piece, is that a failure on any part of the artist or a failure of broader politics? The paintings may not answer these questions, but it pursues them, deepening possibilities. Qajar era Iran can teach the US about the role of art at a historical juncture where the construction of freedom is positioned against self-determination.

There is a Western hold on queerness that once made me feel like I wasn’t as Iranian for being queer and not as queer for being Iranian.

The artwork reimagined queerness not as a site of fragmentation but as a continuity – testimony to Western efforts that were never entirely successful. Many have so little concern for how an artwork has been politically, culturally, and artistically conceived that they accept art devoid of politics. When art is treated like a luxury, it’s because a culture doesn’t want it to be a tool for liberation. As show cancellations increase in the United States, uncertainty deepens about whether the supposedly liberal politics of the art world are confined to the walls of exhibitions.

Ultimately, Amorous Couple confirms that art is not merely archival - it is a political intervention beyond the reach of culture and law.