Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities

Living in Suspension: Repairing Gender Identity at the Intersection of Embodiment, Kinship, and Law — with a study of transgender individuals in Isfahan

Document Type : Original Research Paper

Authors

Seyed Mahdi Etemadifard 1
Ala Najmi 2

1 Associate Professor of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran,

2 PhD Candidate in Theoretical-Cultural Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22035/isih.2025.5515.5134
Abstract
This article examines the experiences of transgender individuals in Isfahan and argues that gender reassignment is not a linear or complete process, but rather an unfinished and suspended condition that is continuously negotiated at the intersections of family, religion, law, and medicine. The study draws on more than eighty hours of in-depth interviews with fifteen transgender participants and participatory ethnography conducted in group therapy sessions, collective camps, and everyday contexts. These lived experiences are analyzed in dialogue with the perspective of legal and psychological professionals to illuminate their institutional context. The methodology combines thematic and narrative analysis: basic themes were derived from participants’ narratives and subsequently reframed conceptually in dialogue with sociology of law, social psychology, and gender studies. This interpretive process was refined through months of reflexive engagement with the field. Findings suggest that “suspension” does not signify the absence of identity, but rather an institutional and social condition in which individuals must navigate contradictory procedures to secure recognition of their stabilized selves. The process of gender reassignment in Isfahan is shaped both by the city’s particular socio-cultural environment and by the broader medico-legal discourse at the national level. By bridging Foucauldian analyses of power/knowledge with George Herbert Mead’s interpretive account of the self-in-interaction, this study extends the theoretical project of scholars such as Afsaneh Najmabadi. It demonstrates how transgender subjects, through “micropolitics of survival” and everyday strategies, reclaim agency within these intersecting structures of regulation and continually reconstitute their identities.

Keywords

embodiment
gender reassignment
legal order
participatory ethnography
transgender subjectivity

Subjects

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  • Receive Date 13 May 2024
  • Revise Date 22 May 2025
  • Accept Date 11 June 2025

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