Guest Lecture with Mostafa Abedinifard

On September 1, 2016, Mostafa Abedinifard of McEwan University in Canada, gave a guest lecture via skype on the topic of “Masculinities and Male Privilege in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation” for Claudia Yaghoobi’s “Gender and Sexuality in the Middle East” class. To provide students with the theoretical background, Abedinifard began with a discussion of the late 1960s Men’s Rights Movement and moved to the 1990s Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and highlighted the claims made by these movements about the crisis in masculinity. Abedinifard also provided students with an understanding of the various waves of masculinity studies in the west and how these waves were anti- or pro-feminism. All the while, Abedinifard interacted with students, asking challenging questions and gradually more students interacted with him. This was very impressive as many students are generally reluctant to participate in discussions with a guest lecturer, and Abedinifard acknowledged to the students their “very good” efforts and “intelligent” questions.