3 - The Volatile Sigheh/Sex Workers’ Bodies in Jamalzadeh’s Ma’sumeh Shirazi

Summary

The focus of Chapter 3 is Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh’s Ma’sumeh Shirazi (Ma’sumeh from Shiraz), in which he pits an ill-reputed sigheh/sex worker against an evil high-ranking cleric, highlighting the relationship between sigheh and the clerics. Ma’sumeh is a victim of the existing sociopolitical system that pushes her to marginalization, abuse, and violence. However, even though Ma’sumeh is stigmatized, she also takes up an important sexual position in the social imaginary of the novel’s world. Here once again, the sociocultural, political, and religious corruption of society is mapped out on the female body; and female sexuality is politicized through the interwoven network between sigheh/sex work and sociocultural and political institutions. These are the various sociopolitical and religious institutions that reduce women to the biological and corporeal, instrumentalizing the female body to political and religious advantage without viewing individual women as autonomous subjects. Nonetheless, by the end of the novel, Jamalzadeh desubjugates Ma’sumeh by giving her a voice to defend her rights and complain about the hypocrisy of the religious cleric to the Divine. Only within the realm of the divine court can she find justice. To have a voice, Ma’sumeh must rewrite the normative sociocultural, religious, and political scripts.