“More Champion than the Champions”: Female Masculinity in Lālehzari Music and Filmfarsi

ABSTRACT This paper examines how female Lālehzari performers of the 1950s–70s rejected conventional femininity through their performances of female masculinity in their music and in some of the song-and-dance scenes of the commercial cinema. It argues that by performing eshgh ast, a kind of camp, these artists lampooned the dominant culture’s binary gender system and their fans’ claims over masculinity, ultimately making gender more capacious and women’s performative possibilities more diverse in the Lālehzari music scene. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that these gender outlaws and their audiences developed their own homegrown, urban modernity beyond state discourses of Westernization.