Rethinking the Deprivation Thesis: Same-Sex Intimacy in Iran's Segregated Schools

Adolescence is an uncomfortable time for everyone. Hormones are going haywire and you think you know everything, you fall in love with fictional characters, idolize people you have never met or know nothing about, and in the midst of all the change and existential crisis, you have to keep your grades up and plan for the future, AKA college, which involves only four years of your life, but, according to your mother, it will determine how the rest of it will go. These may be universal challenges that teenagers face, but some experiences are more region-specific. I am going to start this article by making claims based on personal experience and observations, some of which I cannot verify. However, I will provide citations to support broader claims later on.

I attended an all-girls visual arts high school from 2013 to 2017. In Iran, we choose a major in the second year of high school, and if it is an arts major, we attend a specific type of school. All educational institutions in Iran are segregated, except for kindergartens and universities. There is a strict uniform code for both boys and girls, although some private boys’ schools have loosened the rules and the students get to choose their outfits. Girls, on the other hand, must wear long pants, a loose, long manteau (must be under the knees) with long sleeves and a headdress resembling a wimple. This is the rule with no exception, regardless of whether you believe in Islam and the veil or not.

 

School girls at the Jameh Mosque- Yazd, Iran. Photo by Stefano Vigorelli, 2014.

As a schoolgirl in Iran, you are not allowed to pluck your eyebrows or shave your face or have long/painted nails. They will check and they will give you detention if you do. You are not allowed to have makeup on at school, and you are taught nothing about puberty, sexual health, and other related subjects. I could go on, but you get the picture.

One phenomena that has always fascinated me about the educational institutions in Iran is the amount of same-sex sexual experimentation and emotional affection in high schools, both among girls and boys. Unfortunately, there is not much written on the subject, due to the obvious animosity of the Islamic state toward any behavior other than the norm – meaning heterosexuality (example of this animosity seen recently when two LGBTQ activists were sentenced to death). I always assumed this tendency to “experiment” with the same sex, specifically during adolescence, came from a lack of interaction with the opposite one, but after reading Evelyn Blackwood’s piece on women’s sexuality and intimate friendships, something clicked in my head.

After providing the case study of Lesotho’s mummy-baby relationships, she explains how “this deprivation thesis assumes that an underlying sexual urge must be satisfied… But the cultural context of Lesotho makes better sense of women’s intimate friendships.” Essentially, she rejects the idea that women’s same-sex intimacy is just a substitute for the normal outlet. She rejects it for two reasons: First, it assumes a universal, fixed sexual drive that exists prior to and outside of culture (the “essential, core attribute of identity”). Second, empirically it does not fit her own evidence from the mummy-baby and motsoalle relationships.

Iran's education system offers a case that, on its surface, looks like a modern parallel to the Minangkabau segregation Blackwood describes, though the social system underneath it is organized differently. Gender segregation in Iranian schools is official state policy grounded in a religious ideology about the fundamentally different natures and roles of men and women. In recent years, the Iranian government has moved to extend that segregation even further, into textbooks and university spaces (as reported by RFE/RL and discussed in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs).

As with the Minangkabau, this is tied to a broader system of family honor, marriage expectations, and control over women's sexuality before marriage, all of which the state has a direct stake in preserving. Where Blackwood writes that Minangkabau tomboi identity is "negotiated and produced in a cultural context in which Minangkabau kinship and community, as well as Islam and the Indonesian state, all have a voice", a similar triad is at work in Iran: family and kinship expectations, Shi'a religious authority, and an explicitly Islamic state legal apparatus that criminalizes homosexuality outright.

A protestor in Tehran holds a rainbow flag. Anonymous, 2022.

Given that structure, the question worth asking isn't whether segregated schools cause same-sex experimentation among teenagers, because that framing repeats the deprivation thesis Blackwood rejects. But it is worth asking what any same-sex intimacy that does occur in that environment would mean to the people involved, and how it would be understood, named, or hidden within a system that has no legitimate cultural category for it the way Lesotho's mummy-baby relationships or Minangkabau tomboi identity do.

This last point connects to a broader concept in the sociology of single-sex institutions sometimes called "situational homosexuality;" the observation that settings which segregate people by sex, such as prisons or single-sex boarding schools, correlate with same-sex sexual contact among people who may not identify as gay or bisexual outside that setting (see, for instance, this overview or this analysis of sexuality in prison). It's worth being honest, though, that a lot of this literature explains the phenomenon in the exact compensatory terms Blackwood argues against, treating the behavior as a stand-in for heterosexual desire rather than as something with its own social meaning.

Applied to Iran, that framework is useful mainly for identifying a comparable institutional form. Following in Blackwood’s footsteps, I would like to ask what gender ideology, family pressure, religious meaning, and legal risk combine to produce there, the same way she asks it of Lesotho or West Sumatra. What makes the Iranian case especially hard to study, though, is something Blackwood also flags in her conclusion: "the availability of adequate information is one problem" and "in some societies same-sex relations may be culturally unintelligible... but the evidence to back up such a statement with certainty is lacking."

Caption from the original tweet accompanying the photo (translated from Persian to English): “… The stark reality of the street involves more than just these beautiful photos of a kiss […]. Standing up to boundless violence and savage, unbridled brutes requires mental preparedness.” (Link to tweet)

In Lesotho, mummy-baby relationships could be openly documented, discussed by the women themselves, and celebrated with gift exchange and feasts. In Iran, the same category of behavior would carry real legal danger, which means the silence regarding the matter is a structural effect of criminalization itself. So, I'd like to hear classmates weigh in on: how do we responsibly study or even talk about sexual behavior in a context where the risk of documentation is borne entirely by the people being studied, and does that risk change what kinds of claims we're allowed to make at all?

References:

BBC News. (2022, September 6). Iran sentences two LGBT activists to death. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-62793573

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs — Moinipour, S. (2022, April 4). Iran's educational system and the institutionalization of gender inequality. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. https://gjia.georgetown.edu/human-rights-development/irans-educational-system-and-the-institutionalization-of-gender-inequality/

Gibson, L. E., & Hensley, C. (2013). The social construction of sexuality in prison. The Prison Journal, 93(3), 355–370. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032885513490503

[Bigli_Bowski]. (2022, November 19). واقعیت عریان خیابان چیزی بیشتر از این عکس‌های زیبا از بوسه و ایستادن بر سطل زباله را هم شامل می‌شود. ایستادن جلوی خشونت بی‌مرز و وحوش افساردریده آمادگی ذهنی می‌طلبد [Tweet]. X. https://x.com/Bigli_Bowski/status/1593864971972411392

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (2012, January 17). Iran to extend gender segregation to school textbooks. RFE/RL. https://www.rferl.org/a/iran_gender_segregation_school_textbooks/24455032.html

The Sexperts. (2017, February 27). Situational homosexuality. SexInfo Online, University of California, Santa Barbara. https://sexinfoonline.com/situational-homosexuality/