On the evening of April 12, 1962, US President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy hosted Mohammad Reza Shah and Empress Farah Pahlavi of Iran at the White House for a glamorous dinner and reception. The visit constituted the first meeting between the president and the shah, who had single-handedly held the reins of Iran since the US-sponsored coup of 1953. Much was at stake. Although Iran was a staunch US ally, the president and the shah disagreed sharply on the road the country should take. JFK had come to power through idealistic rhetoric that considered human rights and democratization a significant part of modernization and a practical way of averting radical left-wing revolutions.Footnote ¹ The shah, the autocratic leader of an increasingly oil-rich nation, believed socioeconomic development had to precede democratization in Iran to prevent destabilization. Stability before democracy had long been standard US policy. President Dwight Eisenhower, after all, had greenlit the 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on the claim that the oil nationalization stand off with Great Britain had made Iran too unstable to withstand Communism.Footnote ² Now, the shah, secure in his role as an active monarch, sought to convince the new president and the US public that Iran’s progress meant steadfast royal leadership – not a precarious switch to liberal democracy.

When the royal couple entered the White House reception room, it became clear that their point would be made via appearances first and foremost. The shah’s crisp military uniform spoke of modern manly authority. Still, it was the dazzling, crowned, and bejeweled appearance of Empress Farah by his side that drew audible gasps.Footnote ³ In his popular book on the late Pahlavi era, Andrew Scott Cooper uses powerful military metaphors to describe the empress’s sartorial message and its impact: “Wheeled into place, Farah’s soft power was illuminated with all the subtlety of a Krupp cannon facing a French cavalry charge.”Footnote ⁴ The elegant, gold-threaded gown and the large diamonds on her crown signified the stability, potency, and permanence of an Old-World empire, in contrast to the shifting winds of presidential elections – Republican one term, Democratic the next – in the US empire that had set out to direct the fates of other nations in the postwar era. With their appearance, the shah and the empress seemed to signify that only this kind of stability could properly modernize Iran.

On that day in 1962, the popular press had a field day comparing Empress Farah to the famously chic first lady of the United States, who, it seemed, had been aesthetically outshined “for the first time in her public life.”Footnote ⁵ The Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire claimed that, after reporting on Mrs. Kennedy’s “prettiness,” the journalists were at a loss, “groping for adjectives superlative enough” to describe Farah Pahlavi’s ensemble.Footnote ⁶ Paralleling the empress’s aesthetic coup, the two leaders’ disagreement ultimately resolved to the shah’s advantage. Approximately three months after the White House visit, in July 1962, the shah accepted the resignation of liberal politician Ali Amini – whom the shah believed JFK had foisted on him – from the position of Prime Minister.Footnote ⁷ He replaced Amini with his close friend and confidante, Asadollah Alam. The Kennedy administration eased talk of liberalization and endorsed the shah’s own reform program labeled “the White Revolution.”Footnote ⁸ An ambitious royal project intended to “modernize” Iran via measures ranging from land reform to literacy corps, the White Revolution was partially based on reforms initiated during Amini’s premiership. However, it did not involve democratization and, instead, entrenched the shah’s authoritarian rule further. Beauty, it appears, could be advanced weaponry in international relations. But how powerful was this weapon, and which conditions allowed it to operate?

Since beauty is proverbially known to be “in the eye of the beholder,” fixed verdicts on it require agreed-upon criteria – what Michel Foucault has called “the comparison of measurement” – and fodder for comparison, ordered into rankings.Footnote ⁹ In the introduction to this book, I reviewed how Western imperialism came to prioritize proof by comparison as a tool of knowledge production, and discussed how politics of comparativism depend upon the establishment of similitude, the selection of analytical categories, and the strategic emphasis placed along the axes of difference and similarity. Chapter 1 examined the transnational histories of comparing Türkiye and Iran with a focus on the mechanism of personification. I demonstrated how scholars could judge authoritarian modernization in a simplified manner through comparative evaluations of the two countries’ “founding fathers,” Türkiye’s Atatürk and Iran’s Reza Shah. This chapter, in turn, examines an era that is broadly considered the “golden age of comparative politics”: the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰ During this period, social scientists used modernization theory to rank countries against each other using US-oriented rubrics. At the same time, mainstream media compared the famous women of the world, such as Empress Farah and Jacqueline Kennedy, in terms of beauty and style. While seemingly distinct, capitalist ideologies of modernization and beauty both used comparison to generate models for emulation, mobilizing civilizational ideas at the intersection of race, class, and gender. Empress Farah served as an agent and symbol of both beauty and modernization (and their intersections) for Iran in those same decades, participating in and bearing the brunt of countless international comparisons.

Building on research into US government archives, Pahlavi propaganda texts, Islamist sermons, and print media from US allies, including Iran’s common comparand, Türkiye, this chapter demonstrates how State Department officials, CIA researchers, and public intellectuals used representations of Empress Farah to link beauty to modernization theory and mobilized comparative critiques of both on aesthetic grounds.Footnote ¹¹ I use the term “aesthetic” broadly here and throughout the chapter to refer to the realm of appearances and judgments on beauty and taste, which are often taken to be objective, or at least apolitical, but intersect with questions of power.Footnote ¹² Empress Farah’s personal beauty and style remain the focus of my analysis. However, it is important to note that comparative judgments on Iranian modernization regularly combined commentary on Farah Pahlavi’s embodied aesthetics with references to developments in other arenas associated with feminized aesthetics, such as fine arts and design. As a serious patron of the arts with college-level architectural training, the empress was highly active in these fields. Therefore, her appearance and actions could signify the intersections of beauty and modernization in multiple overlapping ways.

While there have been laudable scholarly and journalistic attempts to unearth the empress’s political agency from underneath an image-dominated archive, this chapter has a different goal: examining how and why the empress lost control over her image – and the Pahlavis over the country’s brand – in the late 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ¹³ Two key terms are relevant to this discussion. The first is “nation-branding,” that is, the generation of a coherent, positive, and “useful” national identity for international consumption.Footnote ¹⁴ Modern nation-states seek legitimacy and security by avoiding negative press and improving their global reputation. Jackie Kennedy’s youthful and stylish image, for example, constituted an important part of the US Cold War public diplomacy arsenal.Footnote ¹⁵ Given the racist legacy of the standard of civilization and vast power balances in the world system, however, non-Western and postcolonial states often have higher barriers and stakes to securing state legibility and sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁶

The second relevant term is “soft power,” which, in the words of its foremost theorizer, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., involves the ability to achieve policy objectives without coercion and instead through persuasion and “attraction.”Footnote ¹⁷ Under the shah’s one-man rule, the Iranian state linked nation-branding to the global reputation of the royal family. Empress Farah, specifically, was believed to play a deeply gendered soft power role, attracting policy dividends by representing Iran as a modern, progressing nation under righteous rule.

Past scholarship has connected women’s participation in comparative international events focused on embodied aesthetics, such as beauty contests, to cultural performances of nationalism, authenticity, and modernization.Footnote ¹⁸ Empress Farah’s elegant image did bolster positive political arguments about Iran, especially before the tumultuous late 1960s and in the sympathetic corporate media. Overwhelmingly, however, politics was the lens through which beauty was viewed and not vice versa. Not only were Empress Farah and Iranian modernization compared and ranked in tandem through aesthetic criteria, but both were also eventually condemned due to their associations with feminized aesthetics. These critiques then fed into a dismissal of Pahlavi nation-branding as a superficial ruse. Comparison as a tool of knowledge-formation, whether about modernization, beauty, or their intersections, operated in favor of the rising political tides. Examining these depictions alongside the empress’s own views on her appearance and political role offers new insights into the gendered limits of nation-branding and soft power.

Beauty and Modernization: The Stakes of Comparativism

Farah Diba was born in Tehran in 1938 as the only child of an upper-class family. She is of Gilak origin on her mother’s side; her father, whom she lost at a young age, came from an Azeri–Turkic-speaking family. In fact, she reports having first become aware of her beauty when she overheard two women in the bathhouse commenting on it in Azeri Turkic.Footnote ¹⁹ A successful student, Diba also became involved with sports, especially basketball and scouting, in high school. She was only twenty-one years old and still a college student at École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris when she got engaged to the twice divorced shah of Iran in 1959. Thus, quite suddenly, she entered the world of politics and was pulled into the international sphere of gendered, image-focused, high-stakes, mass media comparativism.

Marital unions of monarchs, of course, have always been explicitly political. The shifting representations of Mohammad Reza Shah’s three consorts map onto changes in the global media landscape and dominant ideologies. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s first marriage occurred while he was the crown prince in 1939. His marriage to Princess Fowzieh of Egypt was arranged at the initiative of Reza Shah, who sought to strengthen his new dynasty’s legitimacy through ties to a long-standing ruling family with roots in the Ottoman era. Iranian propaganda represented the prince’s union as an example of a modern, companionate marriage that would improve relations between the two countries.Footnote ²⁰ Princess Fowzieh, however, was reportedly homesick for cosmopolitan Cairo and initiated the 1945 separation that led to divorce in 1948.Footnote ²¹

The shah’s second marriage, to Princess Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, lasted from 1951 to 1958. This queen’s time in the spotlight came during a boom decade for television and illustrated magazines like LIFE across the capitalist world. Such media operated on an international ideological formation Christina Klein has labeled “Cold War cosmopolitanism.”Footnote ²² Deeply connected to rising US hegemony in the political, economic, military, and cultural realms, Cold War cosmopolitanism envisaged a world of interlinked, modern, capitalist nation-states sharing liberal internationalist values and interacting as peers. In practice, equality was aspirational for US allies, especially for those with postcolonial histories. However, the magazines’ content and style promoted “the lifestyles that capitalist democracy promised to make possible” for all.Footnote ²³

Queen Soraya was of mixed German and Iranian origin. Her Iranian lineage on her father’s side connected her to the powerful Bakhtiary clan, making her a fitting match for the shah. Her mixed-race status, on the other hand, intensified popular discussions of her beauty. Her “emerald green eyes” appeared near daily in the illustrated German press, which earned the nickname “die Soraya Presse” for its obsession with the shah’s consort.Footnote ²⁴ The queen’s glamorous appearance and her ability to transition easily between East and West seemed to make her the ideal cosmopolitan woman. Yet when infertility led to divorce from the shah, the press continued to make money, this time by reporting on her “sad green eyes.” This was, after all, the 1950s. The capitalist press took for granted that, no matter how beautiful, rich, and famous a woman was, she could not be truly happy without experiencing motherhood.

The compelling and profit-generating backstory of the shah’s ex-wife all but guaranteed that the new queen’s everyday life would become a beauty pageant of sorts as well. Immediately, Farah Diba’s likeness began to appear in feature sections of tabloids and magazines, which encouraged readers to compare the famous women of the era: “Which beauty are you?” “Ask your husband which one of these famous women he prefers!” “Who is the best-dressed woman of the year? Vote now.” Farah’s and Soraya’s photos would thus appear alongside others, often as the only non-Western women featured, urging the readers to form their personal rankings from the comfort of their couches (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Hayat, the Turkish version of LIFE Magazine, asks its readers to pick one of these famous women to decipher their own personality traits in its November 1962 issue. The Shah’s second and third wives were often the only non-Western women to appear in such features.

Rosalind Krauss has called the grid format, which became ubiquitous in twentieth-century Western art and visual culture, “emblematic of modernist ambition.”Footnote ²⁵ The grid flattens its subjects and prioritizes their “relationships in the aesthetic field,” eclipsing history and context.Footnote ²⁶ Mid-century magazines’ grid layouts established the principle of similitude with their equal assignment of photographic and print space to each woman, implying that the featured individuals shared common characteristics that made them “comparable.” Residing in “the Free World,” young, wealthy, stylish, and globally famous, these women were models for properly modern feminine styles and identities worldwide.

As noted, comparative scholarship often marks differences identified under presuppositions of similitude as significant and telling. Operating on the same logic, the magazines promised edification based on selected differences: the readers could gain insight into their personality traits, confirm their cultural capital, and get ideas on self-styling by observing, comparing, and ranking the dozen or so internationally known women featured regularly on the global tabloid circuit. Here was a practical, leisurely application of the newly invented psychological principle of “upward comparison,” which linked motivation for self-improvement to the willingness to compare oneself to higher-status individuals.Footnote ²⁷

The fact that Soraya Esfandiary and Farah Pahlavi were often the only non-Western women in such grids implied they belonged among the world’s (white) elites. Esfandiary likely had gained this status due to her part-German roots; in line with international mass media, the Turkish minister of foreign affairs İhsan Sabri Çağlayangil credited the former queen’s beauty to her mixed-race (melez) heritage.Footnote ²⁸ Empress Farah’s beauty, however, appeared entirely Iranian.

Although the new empress’s mixed linguistic ancestry could have stood for the complications inherent in separating nation-state boundaries, her position as a diplomatic icon worked to construct a Persian-language-centered Iranian identity apart from Turkishness, however friendly the relations. Unlike Reza Shah, who famously spoke Azeri Turkic with Atatürk, the Queen-to-be emphasized difference and argued that the language she knows is “very different from Istanbul Turkish.”Footnote ²⁹ As a result, she did not conduct any interviews in Turkish.Footnote ³⁰ Her education in Paris, France, on the other hand, deeply colored perceptions, conferring civilizational benefits and connecting her chicness to Europe by proxy. Either way, the fact that Iran’s Tehran-born empress could be ranked alongside European royals and the US First Lady seemed to validate Pahlavi aspirations to both greatness and whiteness.Footnote ³¹

From the mundane to the geopolitical, the mediated international public sphere of the early Cold War encouraged categorizing, comparing, and ranking. As a result, comparativism saturated both US-based representations of West Asia and local responses to it. Perhaps most obviously, proof by comparison undergirded the leading political epistemology of the era: modernization theory. Disagreements about the rubrics, priorities, and rankings of modernization, such as those between the shah and JFK, demonstrate that the “science” of modernization was hardly fixed. However, between the tabloids and social science scholarship, the tabloids were more honest about the primacy of the ranker’s goals and agency in determining outcomes. Throughout her tenure as Empress, Farah Pahlavi cut across these “facile” and “serious” types of comparativism, especially as her public profile grew and she began to take an increasingly active role in politics.

Crowned and designated regent in 1967, the empress would play a significant public diplomacy role in representing Iran to the rest of the world. Initially cast as a naive schoolgirl in a modern-day Cinderella story, her image shifted to serve as the gendered embodiment of Iranian modernization. A self-described “soldier of the [White] Revolution,” she ran her own bureau with hundreds of employees, overseeing countless artistic, cultural, educational, welfare, and public health initiatives.Footnote ³² In the early 1970s, she also began to play a more active role in foreign policy; for example, representing Iran in China in 1972 on the heels of the shah’s visit to the USSR. Farah Pahlavi was a popular figure, but her rising profile meant she became the subject of gossip and criticism as a symbol of the shah’s regime and its Western orientation. Throughout these shifts, the meanings of the empress’s beauty and theorizations of her soft power also changed. These assessments paralleled the fate of modernization theory, which was first taken as an article of faith and increasingly critiqued for being a superficial ruse that failed to deliver on its most important promises.

As noted in Chapter 1, modernization theory had its roots outside “the West”; through authoritarian modernization, leaders like Atatürk and Reza Shah sought to direct development to strengthen their nation-states with the ultimate goal of countering imperialist encroachment.Footnote ³³ After World War II, US-based social scientists built a hegemonic (albeit flexible) version of modernization theory through uneven interactions with non-Western scholars and communities.Footnote ³⁴ Constructed by scholars such as Talcott Parsons and Walt Whitman Rostow and with devotees including JFK and the shah of Iran, US-led modernization ideology proposed a linear and objective route of development and progress.Footnote ³⁵ Based on the foundations of Weberian sociology, the comparativism of modernization theory went beyond identifying similarities and differences between nation-states; it designated exemplars and urged conformity. In this formulation, the contemporary United States constituted the ideal model and could actively serve as a guide and benefactor to other states.Footnote ³⁶ The modernization ideology promulgated by the United States underplayed the colonial and imperial entanglements that had led to the “development” and “under-development” of various political entities. At the same time, along with the doctrine of containment, it justified US involvement in parts of the world where the United States did not yet enjoy hegemony, including West Asia and North Africa.

US Cold War ideology established similitude between Iran and Türkiye as modernizing, Muslim-majority, US-aligned states bordering the USSR. As such, Türkiye and Iran (sometimes with the addition of Pakistan) served as foils to Arab nationalism and neutralism, personified by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. The two countries’ intersecting histories and parallel positions all but guaranteed that they would be compared to each other as well. Thus, Iran and Türkiye appeared in a comparative fashion in classic US analyses of modernization, including Thomas and Frye’s The United States and Turkey and Iran (1951) and Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958), which sought to point out “relative positions of Middle Eastern individuals and countries on a common scale of modernization.”Footnote ³⁷

US analyses from 1950s to the mid 1960s ranked Türkiye higher than Iran when measuring modernization in the Middle East, constructing the country as the US-approved model for the region. Lerner declared the country “the area’s bright model of successful transition.”Footnote ³⁸ In the field-defining Politics of Developing Areas (1960), Dankwart Rustow similarly placed Türkiye ahead of the curve in terms of “the cultural and social transformation set off by the Western impact” and assigned Iran to an “intermediate group.”Footnote ³⁹ In the words of a 1955 National Security Council report, Türkiye could be “an example of peaceful evolution for other underdeveloped areas.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The “alignment of knowledge practices and Cold War politics” meant that the stakes of comparative modernization theory could be high.Footnote ⁴¹ US policymakers and popular media worried about wasting aid on “incompetent” nations and peoples.Footnote ⁴² Comparativism under Pax Americana, therefore, often meant competition among US allies for the political, military, and economic resources allocated by the United States. Türkiye’s status was reflected in its NATO membership and in the larger amount of aid it received compared to Iran.

While an ascendant ideology based on earlier, more explicitly racialized theories of civilization, US-led capitalist modernization theory was not uncontested. Perhaps its biggest challengers were Marxist approaches to development promulgated by the USSR, its allies, and non-aligned nations.Footnote ⁴³ In addition, even pro-US non-Western leaders, such as the shah, regularly pushed back against US-based comparisons, rubrics, and recommendations. In his 1961 Mission for My Country, the shah also compared Türkiye and Iran but with the intention of contesting what he saw as a discrepancy in US policy. “Our good friends the Turks,” the shah complained, “have received over three times as much military and non-military aid as has Iran.” After several paragraphs relying on similar comparisons with several other states, he argued Iran deserved “a higher rank in the scale of assistance priorities.”Footnote ⁴⁴

While the shah ostensibly cited foreign policy needs, his book also demonstrated his conviction that perceived civilizational rank had influenced aid assignment. He conceded that Türkiye had been much more advanced than Iran during his father’s 1934 visit. While Reza Shah had credited the difference to Turks’ racial obedience to authority, his son referenced Türkiye’s geographic closeness to Europe. Türkiye, “being nearer to the West and in constant contact with it,” simply had more time to absorb its methods and techniques.Footnote ⁴⁵ This reinforced the standard US narrative – critiqued in Chapter 1 and in the shah’s other commentary about Persian history – that progress is transferred from West to East. However, it also challenged personified Reza Shah–Atatürk comparisons that operated to the former’s detriment (Chapter 1). While the historical comparison was ostensibly to the advantage of Türkiye, strategically, the shah’s claim demonstrated how far Iran had progressed under the Pahlavi dynasty.

At his 1962 meeting with JFK, the shah sought again to challenge US-based modernization rankings and their connections to US policy by complaining that “America treats Turkey as a wife, and Iran as a concubine.”Footnote ⁴⁶ He thus described US–Türkiye–Iran relations as an intimate power triangle, qualifying the egalitarian illusions of Cold War cosmopolitanism. The shah’s metaphor placed the United States over and above as the powerful authority acting upon the others. The husband (“The United States”) was giving the wife (“Turkey”) preferential treatment while treating the concubine (“Iran”) as less worthy. Despite the wife’s official position, the shah’s metaphor established similitude between wife and concubine via their passive positioning: The two rendered similar services to the husband and competed for his good judgment and rewards. Although the analogy feminized Türkiye and Iran, the casual reference to wives and concubines taking place between two male leaders known for their extramarital escapades also marked the space of politics as one of masculine jocularity.

Befitting the shah’s metaphor, “jealousy” and “envy” became operational terms for Türkiye–Iran relations under Pax Americana even as the old “friend and neighbor” trope continued to dominate official speeches.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1965, for example, the US embassy identified “envy and frustration” as the dominant Iranian response to the recent free elections in Türkiye, making a “painfully embarrassing comparison” to the highly repressive political situation in Iran.Footnote ⁴⁸ “The Turkish ambassador,” continued the document, “with a certain amount of pride, has told us that he has heard many envious remarks by Iranians as a result of the free elections in Turkey.” While technically focused on comparing Türkiye and Iran, such rankings highlighted the role the United States played as the transcendent model and arbiter of modernization. Relations between the two countries remained friendly. However, the fact that two ostensible allies would be upset about each other’s progress demonstrated the symbolic and material stakes of comparativism during the Cold War.

The White Revolution, launched officially in January 1963, gave the shah a chance to push back against the perceived unfairness of Western rankings and dividends. The reforms initiated under its auspices included large-scale infrastructure projects, land distribution, disease eradication, workers’ profit-sharing, the establishment of a literacy corps, and the institution of women’s suffrage. Supporting this ambitious program with oil wealth, the shah hoped to temper the dissatisfaction brewing within multiple segments of Iranian society, cement the dynasty’s role as the primary agent of “revolutionary” progress, and justify its continued existence.Footnote ⁴⁹ In addition to leading to profound changes within Iran, such as raising per capita incomes, destabilizing feudal arrangements, and increasing urbanization, the reforms also boosted the country’s and the shah’s international profile. In less than a decade, the regime drastically improved Iran’s relative status on Western rubrics of modernization.

1967 was a key year in which the outcomes of comparison between Türkiye and Iran shifted in favor of Iran. In October of that year, the shah and Empress Farah’s official coronation took place, filling the world’s media with images of pomp, glamor, and beauty. The same year, Empress Farah became regent, and the United States declared Iran to be “a developed nation.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The USAID mission to the country was cut. The shah, now lobbying for partner (opposed to client) status, vastly increased his US arms purchases on credit. After a CENTO meeting in Türkiye in 1967, the shah and Asadollah Alam, now his court minister, concurred that the shah’s leadership in the region was becoming increasingly apparent.Footnote ⁵¹

In 1968, with the withdrawal of Britain from the Persian Gulf and the election of Richard Nixon, the shah found further opportunities to challenge the metaphorical concubine role. US arms began to flow even more freely to the country as Nixon and Kissinger largely acceded to the shah’s foreign policy goals.Footnote ⁵² In his meetings with US representatives, the shah argued Iran was the only stable country the United States could count on in the region. Arab nations were reeling from their defeat in the 1967 war against Israel. “Even Turkey,” Alam noted in his diary in 1969, was “too volatile to trust.”Footnote ⁵³

A significant blemish in the shah’s plan to boost Iran’s international standing was the notorious 1963 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which gave criminal immunity to US personnel in exchange for a massive US weapons loan. Resembling the old capitulations granted to imperial powers, the agreement seemed to reinforce Iran’s subservient role. In his fiery sermon against the SOFA, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini mobilized comparisons that differed little from the shah’s wife/concubine quip, except perhaps in intensity. According to him, the agreement had “reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog” and had made the Iranian nation seem even “more backward than savages in the eyes of the world.”Footnote ⁵⁴ For these insights, the regime charged Khomeini with inciting rebellion, placed him under house arrest, and exiled him to Türkiye. He resided for less than a year in Bursa, Türkiye, before making his way to Najaf, Iraq, and, in 1978, to Paris, France. While Khomeini and other regime opponents seethed, waited, and organized, the shah proceeded with the White Revolution.

The economic and military advantage shifted further toward Iran as the decade progressed. So did the direction of perceived jealousy. As early as 1972, the State Department considered Iran to be “a success story among developing countries” – an intermediary model of sorts.Footnote ⁵⁵ The 1973–1974 oil crisis and the attendant price hike flooded the shah’s treasury with petrodollars, whereas the Turkish economy – heavily dependent on oil imports – faltered. Türkiye’s diplomats found the “pavenu” shah unsympathetic to their plight.Footnote ⁵⁶ While the shah channeled Iran’s coffers toward military infrastructure, the Turkish military was hit with a US arms embargo over the Cyprus invasion (more on this in Chapter 3). Turkish opinion leaders expressed envy about the higher standard of living Iranians had been gaining and Iran’s close relations with the United States.Footnote ⁵⁷ This time, it was the US Embassy in Ankara informing its Iranian counterparts that Turks were increasingly worried about the country’s “secondary role” in the new world order, while allies like Greece and Iran “were determining the tempo of change in the world.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Unmatched by the status of any Turkish celebrity in Iran, Empress Farah’s elegant visage graced Turkish newspapers and magazines regularly (as it did European and US periodicals), operating as one of the most constant reminders of Iran’s strides in modernization and increasing prestige in the world. The Turkish state had a long history of encouraging participation in international beauty competitions, with questions about female visibility and beauty linked to “larger questions of Turkey’s visibility and legibility to the Western gaze.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Under Atatürk, the regime had presented its first Miss Universe, Keriman Halis, as a representative of state feminism and a model for emulation for the rest of the region.Footnote ⁶⁰

However, in this period, the country lacked a comparable feminine figure to mobilize for nation-branding. Princess Fazilet, the great-granddaughter of the last Ottoman sultan deposed and sent to exile by Atatürk himself, made international news when she became engaged to King Faisal II of Iraq in 1957. Yet, despite the general consensus on her beauty and impeccable upbringing (“a blue-eyed blonde Istanbul schoolgirl and a princess to boot,” effused The Chicago Daily Defender), she could hardly be expected to represent republican Türkiye.Footnote ⁶¹ The teenager was also star-crossed: Two weeks before the wedding, her betrothed was murdered in Iraq’s July 14 Revolution.

Empress Farah held such a presence in Türkiye that a journalist reminiscing about his childhood years later wrote that the faces and names of the shah’s second and third wives had been as familiar to him as the members of his own family.Footnote ⁶² My family history matches this assessment. My mother remembers habitually skimming Hayat magazine as a teenager, considering the periodical’s regular comparative question, “Farah or Soraya?” She remembers being partial to Soraya’s look. Unbeknownst to her, my aunt on my father’s side, then also a teenager living in Istanbul, cut out and pasted photographs of the shah and Empress Farah’s 1967 coronation on her room’s walls, partaking in their aesthetic pleasure. She remembers the “magnificent” clothes and the throne and notes, “Farah Diba was especially beautiful.” Like other teen girls, the two were fans of various Turkish actors and singers as well, but the country simply did not have a comparable female icon among its political elite. The president’s wife was propelled into national style news only during a 1967 visit to Türkiye by the Pahlavis: Empress Farah had praised her dress, and Hayat dutifully offered its model to its readers.Footnote ⁶³ The policy documents and the magazine spreads thus shared a silent question: Had Iran become the wife and Türkiye the concubine?

Even as countries jockeyed for better rankings, the rubrics of modernization remained labile, including within the United States. Walt Whitman Rostow’s Stages of Growth, which prioritized large-scale economic development, had shaped the initial direction of the theory; however, scholars consistently debated the parameters of proper modernization.Footnote ⁶⁴ They agonized over the dearth of information, the instability of categories, and the ethics of comparison. They dreaded the prospect of being called out by representatives of lower-ranked states.Footnote ⁶⁵ Some critiques even made their way into popular culture. Perhaps, most famously, the best-selling political novel The Ugly American (1958) demonstrated how US middlebrow culture both affirmed the importance of modernization as a bulwark against Communism and remained skeptical of its various applications. In addition to highlighting the risks of corruption, racism, and incompetence in diplomacy, The Ugly American criticized the wasting of aid funds on large, flashy projects that made little sense for local conditions.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even the “ugly” in the novel’s title warned about the lure of aesthetics; it refers to a physically unattractive, roughhewn American engineer who is nevertheless cast as a hero for working hard, avoiding elitism, and responding to local needs. JFK himself was a fan of this line of critique, which convinced him to prioritize smaller-scale initiatives, such as the Peace Corps, and view the vast amounts of military aid sent to modernizing autocrats such as the shah with a critical eye.Footnote ⁶⁷

Thus, increasingly in the United States, an obsession with the aesthetics of modernization (the buildings, the highways, the gendered styles of self-presentation, etc.), which could confirm a non-Western nation was advancing along the correct developmental trajectory, operated alongside a suspicion that such visible markers of modernization might hide unseemly realities, including oppression and corruption. This distrust of aesthetics was perhaps ironic for an academic theory that had borrowed its foundational term (“modern”) from the arts.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet it cohered because modernization theorists advocated deep transformations in the societies they deemed “traditional.” As primarily white men working at the masculine intersection of academia and politics, they maintained a gendered and classed suspicion of “the superficial.” While seemingly opposed, these two aspects of modernization theory – aesthetics as proof and aesthetics as ruse – both assigned the prerogative for judging modernization onto the US elites.

As Iran’s new empress became a symbol and active agent of her country’s development, depictions of her beauty and fame merged with politicized views on Iran’s modernization and global status. As delineated in Chapter 1, the personification of policy doctrines or entire countries through salient or stereotypical figures is not unique to the Cold War era. A long-standing dynamic of foreign policy, personification permits simplification. Naoko Shibusawa has noted, “This is how an entire country could be depicted and acted upon as if it were a singular, developing human being.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Personification also adds to the persuasive force of comparativism: Coding individuals as stand-ins for complex political realities facilitates ideas regarding race, gender, and class to color the comparison, fueling blunter assessments.Footnote ⁷⁰ Commentary about Empress Farah and Iranian modernization thus boosted each other in comparative scholarship, popular media, and diplomatic reports in alignment with the authors’ and the institutions’ ideological stances.

The Official Politics of Aesthetics: Obsession and Disavowal

Reflecting some ambivalence about the aesthetics of modernization, US diplomatic dispatches from the 1960s and 1970s Iran evinced a simultaneous obsession with and disavowal of Empress Farah’s appearance and political role. Beginning with the lead-up to Farah Pahlavi’s ascent to regency in 1967, US diplomatic entities in Iran and the CIA considered the empress significant enough to be mentioned repeatedly in their reports. They represented her as both the symbol and an agent of Iran’s modernization, praising her self-presentation and touting her artistic, educational, and public health initiatives. However, the reports simultaneously disavowed her political agency. The analysis, therefore, often landed on the “Farah as symbol” trope.

The Tehran embassy reports tended to depict the empress’s role in passive terms while emphasizing “appearance” and “image.” For example, in 1967, the embassy reported “the systematic upgrading of the Queen through public appearances, provincial tours, and other devices” as “a significant political development.” It was likely, the report stated, that the shah was “grooming her for the succession.”Footnote ⁷¹ The word choices here highlight what we might call the important non-importance of the empress, emphasizing “a significant development,” in which Farah Pahlavi herself appears to play a relatively subservient role. While she is becoming increasingly visible in the public sphere, the report interprets this agency in the passive voice as her being “groomed.”

This reading of the empress’s public appearances as both noteworthy and primarily orchestrated by the shah was common. An August 22, 1968, report on her visit to the Western regions of Iran similarly stated, “The visit was clearly another successful image-building effort to strengthen her role as regent.”Footnote ⁷² An October 7, 1972, telegram about her visit to China, the first for an Iranian leader in decades, argued that “substance” had not been the goal of the journey, but image-building and “psychological” maneuvering. “From this point of view,” that is, in the realm of appearances, the report stated, the “visit was resounding success.”Footnote ⁷³ These official documents, therefore, associated Empress Farah’s in-country outreach to the people and her international diplomatic efforts with “appearance” and dismissed both as shallow (if wily) maneuvers of the shah.

Occasionally, discussing the empress gave US government officials a chance to delve into romance and storytelling, as with the flowery 10-page telegram titled, “Portrait of an Empress,” written by Ambassador MacArthur for the State Department on January 20, 1971.Footnote ⁷⁴ The report’s very title offers a promise of Orientalist titillation, mobilizing the pre-established associations of the empress with aesthetics. The Embassy regularly produced reports on key Iranian political figures. However, they were titled generically in all capital letters as “BIOGRAPHIC REPORTING,” not with a title that might have jumped out of a mid-century Harlequin paperback. The telegram praised Farah Pahlavi as “a European woman of Iranian birth,” highlighting her education in France and noting her role in “humanizing” the monarchy. Yet, while giving the empress credit for her good works and outreach to the population and highlighting her steadily rising public profile, MacArthur ended his report on a note that doubted her ability to hold on to power if the shah left the throne before the crown prince’s majority. Instead, he claimed, even as Regent, her primary role would be image based: “a symbol of legitimacy and continuity.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The State Department was not the US government entity assigning a superficial importance to Empress Farah and connecting her to the aesthetics of modernization and nation-branding. In a 1973 intelligence survey about Iran, the CIA echoed the empress-as-symbol trope, connecting political power to “image” and “beauty” but failing to explain the parameters of this power. “The image [Empress Farah] projects – that of a beautiful and talented woman devoted to her family and to good works – is especially useful in Iran,” explained the authors. Claiming that “the culture had lacked before any such ‘lady bountiful’ tradition,” they argued that “the attractive Empress” constituted a “useful model of the modern Iranian woman.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The CIA analysis thus both gave and took away. The report called Farah’s attractiveness “useful” twice and connected this usefulness to a previous lack of a “lady bountiful” tradition without explaining either. The authors praised the empress to highlight a certain civilizational lack: The image she projected was “especially” valuable “in Iran” and as a “model of the modern Iranian woman.” The analysis thus utilized the application-oriented comparativism of modernization theory: Empress Farah, by her very presence, could model the type of womanhood worthy of emulation. The document assigned some political importance to the empress as regent designate and as the court member “with the greatest influence” on the shah. However, the following sentence undermined this power: “Of more political significance are the Prime Minister, other members of the Cabinet, high-level civil servants, and political party leaders.” A twofold comparison operated here: Farah Pahlavi was “less than” when it came to Western women and Iranian male political figures but much “more than” other Iranian women, who apparently needed her to model gendered modernity.

The US State Department and CIA reports thus appeared unable to theorize a politics of beauty. They awkwardly mentioned Empress Farah’s appearance, clearly considering it significant and somehow connected to modernization and nation-branding. Then they prevaricated and exited the conversation, refocusing on the men in power. The authors constructed themselves as immune to the effects of Iranian image building despite constantly – and sometimes effusively – commenting on Empress Farah. Of course, the men who dominated the US State Department and the CIA also regularly invested in cultural outreach and “psychological” tactics, but did not recount their own efforts so dismissively. The archives they left confirm the racist/sexist dismissal of non-Western women in international relations and anticipate scholarly debates about the effectiveness of soft power, explored in the conclusion of this chapter.

Aesthetics as Proof, Beauty as Good Governance

In her groundbreaking 1990 monograph, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Cynthia Enloe urged scholars of international relations to ask, “Where are the women?”Footnote ⁷⁷ This question is deceptively easy to answer in the case of Empress Farah, who was everywhere in the image-oriented culture of the 1960s and 1970s – from the style sections of women’s magazines to top-secret telegrams ferried between US embassies. She traveled frequently, locally and internationally, alone and with her family, and her every step at every airport became a news item. In 1964, the empress made it to the list of the world’s best-dressed women for the first time and stayed high up on such lists throughout her reign.Footnote ⁷⁸ The mainstream French media lionized her as one of its own daughters; “die Soraya Presse” of Germany was equally invested in discussing all things Farah.

In short, Farah Pahlavi was hard to miss: She appeared everywhere, at once familiar and aspirational. Moreover, unlike official government sources, the popular press worldwide put the empress front and center (often over and above the shah) in their coverage and openly pontificated on the politics of her appearance. “When the monarchs of Thailand and Iran met in Teheran last month, some onlookers thought they were attending a beauty pageant,” a 1967 Washington Post article began, bracketing questions of what the male monarchs were doing at the same meeting.Footnote ⁷⁹ As her 1972 visit to China demonstrated, Farah Pahlavi could draw admiring gazes across vast ideological divides; however, her star shone brightest in the world’s capitalist media.

Throughout most of the 1960s and into the 1970s, tabloids, illustrated magazines, and newspapers based in “the free world” mobilized aesthetics as proof of Iranian modernization and the rightfulness of Pahlavi rule. They held as self-evident that Farah’s beauty – in comparison to other famous women – mattered. They helped popularize the hairstyle the famous Carita sisters had designed for the young bride and offered the “Farah Diba” hairstyle to their readers as a model up for adoption. Their breathless analyses of Farah Pahlavi’s sartorial choices, personality, and everyday habits operated as political signals. The message they gave was that of a young queen who was glamorous enough to compete with the crème de la crème of the world but also a kind and down-to-earth mother who breastfed, translated children’s books, and remained “as simple and unaffected as when she was a commoner-school girl.”Footnote ⁸⁰

The popular press most openly compared Empress Farah to her predecessor Soraya, whose postdivorce dating life generated gossip. It also subtly juxtaposed Farah Pahlavi with Princess Ashraf, the shah’s twin sister and outspoken proponent of women’s rights. The Princess’s connections to scandals had made her a very polarizing figure in Iran and abroad.Footnote ⁸¹ Media gossip depicted her as power-hungry and conniving and pitted her against her brother’s wives. One particularly pernicious rumor claimed she had given drugs to Soraya to ensure her infertility.Footnote ⁸² In contrast, Farah Pahlavi was depicted as a modern, humble, and hard-working mother with no time for palace intrigues. Through the persuasive power of personification and sexist comparison, aesthetics became proof not only of the empress’s modern, feminine virtues but also of Iran’s standing as a developing nation under righteous rule.

In its outreach to the nation and abroad, the Pahlavi state broadly utilized visual tools, and the Farah Pahlavi’s positive public image was an essential part of this arsenal.Footnote ⁸³ She was represented first and foremost as a modest mother and dedicated servant of the country.Footnote ⁸⁴ This preferred understanding of the empress was apparent in the full-page ad the Iranian embassy took in the Washington Post in 1967 to coincide with a visit of the shah to Washington, DC, and the upcoming coronation ceremony.Footnote ⁸⁵ Titled “Iran A Country on the Move,” the ad contained a large picture of Empress Farah and the crown prince alongside the shah (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 In this Washington Post ad sponsored by the Iranian embassy, the off-camera gazes of a modern nuclear family represent “a country on the move.”

The photo initially seems to be an unusual choice. None of the subjects look at the camera; instead, dressed in understated elegance, they appear caught in a candid, private moment. The shah’s gaze is fixed forward, and the empress holds her son with a demure and downcast look. The crown prince stands, leaning sideways with a hint of a smile. The empress and her son’s white clothes suggest a subtle hint at “the White Revolution,” the achievements the ad copy delineates, and a certain purity and innocence. Combined with the off-camera gazes, the ad implies the family was not concerned with publicity themselves – they were too busy being productive and caring – just like any other nuclear family. Given how preestablished representations of the Middle Eastern family centered around the sexualized, decadent trope of the “harem,” this understated monogamous arrangement itself coded progress.Footnote ⁸⁶

Not leaving much to interpretation, the ad copy informed the readers that “The shah and Empress Farah exemplify the youthful and dedicated leadership that characterizes the ‘White Revolution’ at every level.” The text, which contained separate sections about land reform, the Literacy Corps, and technical improvements in farming, also noted that Farah’s crowning as regent would constitute the first for a Muslim-majority country, “marking the new and important role of women in Iran.”

With its reference to youthfulness, the text subtly modified the metaphors of maturity associated with Cold War modernization theory, making youth an advantage connected to dynamism and open-mindedness.Footnote ⁸⁷ This emphasis on youth would have been especially resonant for any readers who could remember Iran’s past Prime Minister: the elderly, ailing Mohammad Mossadegh. Leading up to the coup, Orientalist representations of age and gender had molded the mainstream US public’s view of Mossadegh as unfit to rule.Footnote ⁸⁸ In his 1961 Mission for My Country, the shah had similarly used vivid gendered and sexualized metaphors in maligning Mossadegh, criticizing his “political honeymoon” with devotees and accusing him of entertaining “strange bedfellows” in a section of the book that was technically devoted to the woman question.Footnote ⁸⁹ At the same time, he demanded privacy for himself, connecting the issue to political freedom.Footnote ⁹⁰ This was likely an attempt to quell rumors about his countless extramarital escapades.

A symbolic emphasis on the everyday life of the nuclear crown family, especially on Farah Pahlavi, while recounting Iran’s modernization was common in sympathetic articles across the US and international media. A 1963 New York Times article praising the White Revolution, for example, contained a candid photograph of the first family on vacation along the shores of the Caspian.Footnote ⁹¹ The unassuming image of the family – the empress in a simple daytime attire consisting of a button-up shirt and pants, the shah’s bare legs visible in shorts, and the little crown prince taking careful steps with the aid of his doting father – appeared alongside pictures of peasants getting land deeds and Iranian women celebrating the right to vote. Having the right to vote for any gender meant little in 1960s Iran, where the shah controlled both the incumbents and the opposition. However, women’s voting was a powerful symbol of “progress” and “reform” in both Pahlavi propaganda pieces and the sympathetic media the world over.Footnote ⁹² Everyday pictures of the crown family connoted progressivism, caring, and youthful energy, a symbolic sleight of hand that could help the readers forget they were looking at the photograph of a thoroughly undemocratic leader.

Good governance could sometimes be symbolized by regal flamboyance, as at that 1962 reception in the White House. More often than not, however, it was indicated by the simplicity of Empress Farah’s make-up and clothing and her use of Iranian materials and designs. In her interviews, Farah Pahlavi emphasized that, no matter the focus on her appearance, she was to be identified by her acts as a “working empress.” The positive press took its notes from her. For example, in the 1971 article/interview “It Isn’t Easy Being the Empress of Iran,” Sally Quinn of the Washington Post noted that the empress welcomed her in “what looks like a very pretty long cotton house dress, a simple old silver necklace, a gold wedding band, and a plain gold watch.”Footnote ⁹³ This emphasis on “plain,” “simple,” and even “old” accessories complemented the author’s suggestion that Farah Pahlavi was busy with work and most interested in connecting to the real people of Iran. The gold wedding band invoked the Cold War ideal of heterosexual monogamy and would have appeared understated even for the middlebrow American reader. While glamorous chicness linked Empress Farah to the Western feminine icons of Cold War cosmopolitanism, such references to “simplicity” implied her connectedness to the Iranian people and her similitude to the stereotypical white, middle-class American woman.

In a famous 1975 article written for the Ladies Home Journal, Betty Friedan, one of liberal US feminism’s most well-known leaders, called Empress Farah a “feminist,” using aesthetics as proof.Footnote ⁹⁴ Friedan, for example, noted the subtlety of Farah Pahlavi’s eye makeup alongside her many public roles: Both symbolized how “down-to-earth” and busy she was. Friedan was visiting Iran with a feminist delegation in response to a call from the shah and Princess Ashraf to advise on the status of women. Her visit, however, came a couple of years after the shah’s infamous interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, in which the shah had emphasized the importance of beauty and femininity in women and had insisted that women could never be truly equal to men in any real capacity. Asserting that no woman had ever influenced him, the shah rhetorically assigned women to the level of superficial, feminized aesthetics: “In a man’s life, women count only if they’re beautiful and graceful and know how to stay feminine.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Defending her husband to the famous feminist icon, Empress Farah claimed the shah had just been “teasing” the journalist and that she herself, in fact, represented Iranian women’s liberation beyond the aesthetic. As evidence, the empress referenced her position as regent: “For the first time in our history, [the shah] had me crowned Empress in my own right.” She emphasized this was “not just a gesture to be modern” but a sign of his respect for her as “a person in my own right.”

In contrast to US diplomats and spies, the popular press was willing to concede political agency to Farah Pahlavi and connect her appearance to her actions. These accounts also liberally quoted the empress, giving her a relatively unfiltered platform. Thus, the capitalist media constituted the prolific, image-dominated ground on which Pahlavi nation-branding flourished. A “pattern of enthusiastic support for the Pahlavi regime,” deeply connected to ideas of gendered reform and bolstered by visual aesthetics, prevailed in the US mainstream press throughout the 1960s and late into the 1970s.Footnote ⁹⁶ However, the question of whether Farah operated as a mere symbol of modernity justifying the reign of a dictator (“a gesture to be modern”) became more and more common even in the Western corporate media as the century progressed. Therefore, we can read a tone of frustration in Empress Farah’s response to Friedan above. The repeated, defensive use of “in my own right” aside, the shah had not “had her crowned,” as she phrased it, but had crowned her himself. Although grounded in a different context, the gesture resembled a well-known iconography of dictatorship: Napoleon snatching the crown from the Pope to bestow it upon himself and Empress Josephine.Footnote ⁹⁷

Aesthetics as Ruse, Beauty as Distraction

In her overwhelmingly positive article, Betty Friedan mused whether women in Iran were serving as “mere window-dressing of modernization and progress for a despotic regime.” Iranian-born critics of the regime across the political spectrum were less muted on this question. They shared a gendered discourse of gharbzadegi (west-struckness or westoxication) directed at Western-inspired modernization efforts. Popularized by Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad in his iconic 1962 book of the same name, gharbzadegi ideology warned that Iran risked losing its soul in modernizing superficially and becoming beholden to capitalist imperialism.Footnote ⁹⁸ Although gendered critiques of modernization in Iran have a long history, the publication of Gharbzadegi set a new tenor to these debates as the book was “read and acclaimed by every oppositionist.”Footnote ⁹⁹

According to Al-e Ahmad, the much-celebrated “liberation” of women in Iran had proceeded superficially with attention to aesthetics alone: Women were simply unveiled and thrown into the streets with “no purpose other than to add to the mass of consumers of powder and lipstick – a product of Western industries.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Underlying this passive construction was the comparative, idealized foil of proper Iranian womanhood: The spiritual equal of the man and “the guardian of tradition, family, generation, and blood.”

Another influential voice critiquing gendered gharbzadegi was Ali Shariati, often considered the ideological father of the Iranian revolution due to his synthesis of Third Worldism, socialism, and Shia theology. In his works, Shariati argued the European women paraded in high-circulation tabloids and magazines (likely appearing alongside Empress Farah) as models of modern womanhood were merely the “playthings and dolls of the capitalist industry,” and differed from politically and intellectually active Western women such magazines purposefully ignored.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thus, instead of emulating these superficial simulacra, Iranian women had to find an active middle ground between traditional femininity and dynamic, modern womanhood.

Ayatollah Khomeini, who had become a leading source of oppositional discourse against the Pahlavi government during the 1963 protests against the White Revolution, also expounded on gendered westoxication.Footnote ¹⁰² While in exile, the cleric spoke out on various issues at the intersection of nationalism, socioeconomic justice, and Islam in his recorded sermons, gaining a considerable transnational following.Footnote ¹⁰³ In his criticism of Pahlavi gender policy, Khomeini mobilized gharbzadegi ideology, arguing against the treatment of women as beautiful playthings or, as he put it, “dolls” (ʿarūsak). Khomeini claimed that the coming of Islam had empowered and liberated women. Reza Shah, who had reigned from 1925 to 1941 and institutionalized the “modernization” of Iran, on the other hand, had made women into superficial deceivers (farībā) due to his materialistic outlook: “In the name of uplifting women’s status, he brought the woman down from her position. Made the woman like a doll.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Then, in the name of making half of the population active and productive, the late Pahlavi regime had put the dolls it had created either in offices as distractors or “thrown them into the streets” to corrupt the youth.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Khomeini thus argued that Iranian women had lost their active, respected, powerful position and became painted dolls – mere aesthetic props in the service of the Pahlavi “modernization.” While Khomeini’s passive voice and suspicion of feminized aesthetics paralleled US diplomatic cables about the empress, his comparison operated in the opposite direction toward an idealized past. Within this nostalgic frame, he was willing to credit Iranian women with robust agency: “Our women were warriors (jangjū),” he declared, “they wanted them to become disgraceful (nangjū) instead.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Although gharbzadegi rhetoric was most closely associated with opponents of the Pahlavi state, it drew proponents from among Pahlavi elites as well. As Mirsepassi has convincingly argued, and as I extrapolate in Chapter 5, the Pahlavi state and the Iranian elite promoted their own discourses of Iranian authenticity and spirituality amid feverish modernization projects.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The shah worked to distance himself from gharbzadegi discourse by aligning with Iranian nationalism and attempting to co-opt the left-wing revolutionary fervor of the era with the “White Revolution,” billed as “the revolution of the people and the shah.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He felt comfortable using mystical language, was quick to criticize Western notions of “human rights,” and increasingly made independent power plays in foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ When he switched the country to a single-party system under the Rastakhiz party in 1975, he also officialized a push against Western liberalism and toward an authentically Persian “Great Civilization” overseen by the monarchy.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The shah’s much celebrated “granting” of rights to women depended on the hard work and lobbying of Iranian feminists. Iranian politician and women’s rights activist Mahnaz Afkhami has noted how, in the lead-up to the 1967 reform of the family law, the shah offered no pressure or guidance but merely warned “that no topic that contradicts the explicit text of the Qur’an should be discussed, especially the topic of inheritance.”Footnote ¹¹¹ As his publications and interview with Fallaci showed, the shah had no problem attacking women’s liberation and equality as misguided modern Western concepts.Footnote ¹¹²

Empress Farah herself warned about the dangers of superficial modernization. She voiced concerns about Iranian youth’s admiration for all things Western in her interviews and memoirs.Footnote ¹¹³ In describing herself as a “soldier” for the revolution and emphasizing her hard work for the country and role as a mother, she pushed against accusations of decadence and superficiality. In an interview with the popular women’s magazine Zan-i Ruz about a 1968 beauty contest, the empress emphasized that beauty, while indeed a blessing, could never be enough for the modern Iranian woman.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The magazine editors agreed and pushed against the doll symbolism emanating from opponents of the regime by declaring: “Today’s girl wants to be beautiful, but not a painted-up doll (ʿarūsak-i bazak kardi)!”Footnote ¹¹⁵ The official Raskathiz party organ depicted Farah Pahlavi simultaneously as an empowered working woman actively guiding the nation’s development and an average, devoted mother connected to Iranian religious traditions. A September 28, 1976, photo published in the party’s journal, for example, depicted the empress holding a Qur’an for the crown prince to walk under as he prepared to start the school year – a common traditional practice.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Farah Pahlavi also attempted to avoid being a target of gharbzadegi critique by signifying her deep connections to Iranian “authenticity” with her style and good works. In 1978, she promoted the traditionalist philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, known for his critiques of Western materialism, as the director of her office, which operated as a significant cultural, educational, and philanthropic force in Iran.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Even the title of her first autobiography, My Thousand and One Days (1978), pushed against accusations of superficiality and languorous excess and emphasized industry and modesty. In it, the empress mobilized aesthetics as proof, depicting herself as growing and maturing alongside the developing Iran. For example, she connected the progress in her beauty and style to the nation’s development, noting, “Sometimes, I jokingly say to my husband: ‘you have a seeing eye. You knew that my looks, like a Kerman rug, would improve with time.’”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The memoirs depict her maturing alongside Iran and, therefore, becoming more beautiful. Yet, she emphasizes that her appearance is Iranian first and foremost, just as Iran’s goal “is to advance towards progress in harmony with ‘Iranity.’”Footnote ¹¹⁹ This balancing act appears in her description of her good works, her art projects combining the local and the global, and how she selected her clothes with an emphasis on local designs.Footnote ¹²⁰

Despite all her attempts to cut a modest and maternal figure and all official and popular pro-Pahlavi publicity to that effect, Empress Farah was increasingly cast as a westoxicated Marie Antoinette-like figure in the heated political atmosphere of the late 1960s and 1970s. This shift in her image was hardly self-made. Instead, it reflected transformations in the ascendant ideology of the era from a modernization theory dedicated to images of women’s advancement to Third Worldism, which made masculine militarism its icon.Footnote ¹²¹ In addition, during this period, the shah’s authoritarianism came to be discussed more candidly in the US media. He drew ire for benefiting from the 1973 oil crisis, his power plays in the Persian Gulf, and the abuses of human rights associated with the Iranian security state. Similarly, the dogmas underlying modernization theory came to be questioned more openly in the anti-modernist and anti-authoritarian intellectual currents of the age. These political and economic developments negatively shifted the meaning of Farah’s beauty, even for Iran’s allies.

The aesthetics-focused critique of modernization was transnational and trans-political: In Iran and the diaspora, opponents of the Pahlavi state across the political spectrum critiqued aspects of Iranian modernization using the gendered language of aesthetic superficiality. However, only in the diaspora could the critics directly connect the empress herself to these damning constructions. US government reports were ambivalent on the political efficacy of Farah’s appearance. Critics of the Pahlavi state on the left and the right, on the other hand, saw an unambiguously clear “use” for Farah’s beauty. In their writings, they constructed beauty as an effective soft power ruse intended to distract the international public from the failures of the White Revolution and the crimes of the Pahlavi monarchy. A 1967 book by Iranian leftist scholar-in-exile Bahman Nirumand, initially published in Germany, played a prominent role in this interpretation.

Translated into English as Iran: The New Imperialism in Action, the treatise built on the established discourse of westoxication to attack almost everything associated with the Pahlavis and the White Revolution. Specifically, Nirumand accused the regime of engaging in public diplomacy efforts to come across as modern and democratic while the vast majority of the population struggled to meet the necessities of life and remained subjected to the arbitrary cruelty of SAVAK, the shah’s ruthless, CIA-trained security apparatus.Footnote ¹²² The original German title made this argument clear: Persia: A Model of a Developing Nation or the Dictatorship of the Free World.Footnote ¹²³ Appearing in bookstores slightly ahead of the shah and Empress Farah’s protest-rocked June 1967 visit to Germany, the treatise soon gained international attention.

Nirumand’s critique of Iran’s authoritarian modernization emphasized the role comparative aesthetics played in development schemes. Recounting the removal of the poor from a makeshift shelter in Tehran in 1963, for example, he claimed that “ordinarily, the government leaves such housing untouched, as appropriate dwellings for the populace.”Footnote ¹²⁴ However, what made this shelter unacceptable was its closeness to “the houses of persons whose esthetic sensibilities could no longer be offended by the sight of this eyesore.” The comparison was jarring: “The proximity of extreme poverty to the most refined extravagance doesn’t look good.” Therefore, the Pahlavi police state removed “the eyesore” through the use of most rudimentary violence (“with clubs”). Nirumand thus foregrounded what he saw as the extreme image orientation of the Pahlavi regime and connected this to its implementation of modernization in a superficial and harmful manner.

Unlike the narratives of similitude that permeated the pro-Pahlavi press, Nirumand and other regime opponents emphasized difference and disjuncture in their comparisons. Instead of idly comparing the empress to other famous beauties, they suggested, one would do well to contrast her beauty with the ugliness of Pahlavi rule. The glossy images associated with the Pahlavi White Revolution, with the young and beautiful Empress as its symbol, were nothing but a distraction. The reality on the ground was brutal. “To make up for it,” Nirumand wrote bitterly, “Iran has a beautiful Empress.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Whereas there was little talk of the repressiveness of the regime and the material struggles of Iran’s masses abroad, everyone knew about “the clothes worn by Farah Diba and the name of her hairdresser.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The afterword by Hans Magnus Enzensberger cemented the message, mocking the model/copy logic of modernization theory by calling Iran “a model of the big lie.” Enzensberger also argued for the supreme usefulness of Empress Farah’s image: “All questions then are silenced, except one: Is Farah happy?”Footnote ¹²⁷

A fiery open letter to Empress Farah, written by the militant leftist journalist Ulrike Meinhof and distributed among student protesters in Germany, further popularized Nirumand’s arguments. In her letter, Meinhof compared the description of Farah Pahlavi’s life published in the glossy magazine Die Neue Revue with accounts of mismanagement, detachment, and brutality culled from Iran: The New Imperialism in Action.Footnote ¹²⁸ Meinhof pulled no punches about mobilizing metaphors related to Marie Antoinette in depicting the empress as disconnected from the people. Mocking Farah Pahlavi’s claim of missing Iranian sweets after a stay in Paris, for example, she commented, “You see, most Persians aren’t hungry for sweets, but for a piece of bread.”

Ironically, Meinhof chastised Farah Pahlavi for references that the empress likely mobilized to represent her connection to Iran and Iranians, including vacations along the Caspian Sea (as opposed to Swiss resorts) and Iranian sweets (as opposed to Maxim’s delights). These accusations of being disconnected from the people were quite a sharp contrast to the dominant constructions of the empress. Both US government documents and the sympathetic press had regularly credited her with connecting the shah’s regime to the people. However, this negative view of the Pahlavis and the empress herself became more widespread. The extravagant expenses associated with the 1971 celebrations at Persepolis, marking 2,500 years of the Persian dynasty, exacerbated the issue, drawing critical attention even in the capitalist media.

The Pahlavi regime intended the Persepolis celebrations to pay diplomatic and economic dividends, highlight Iran’s pre-Islamic roots (thus further differentiating the state from its Arab and Turkish neighbors in line with “the Aryan myth” of Iranian whiteness), and emphasize the necessity of the monarchy.Footnote ¹²⁹ Prioritizing invitations to royalty over elected leaders, the shah mobilized a frame of comparability to European monarchs, and the sheer amount of international media coverage seemed similar to what “a coronation in England might receive.”Footnote ¹³⁰ However, the tone of the coverage was often condescending and racially inflected. The critical US press freely mobilized Orientalist tropes of decadence and despotism in covering the celebrations, challenging the Pahlavis’ aspirational whiteness.Footnote ¹³¹ Cold War Cosmopolitanism notwithstanding, the mainstream US media claimed a prerogative for judging and ranking other nations, asserting Western superiority. For example, Charlotte Curtis, who covered the event for the New York Times, noted that it was far from being a “Congress of Vienna.” Falsely labeling 85 percent of Iran’s population “illiterate peasants,” she mocked Iranians for believing they had “arrived.”Footnote ¹³²

The realm of aesthetics came under particularly sharp scrutiny. Empress Farah recounted the criticism in her memoirs: “Indeed much space was devoted to the latest eyelashes, the hairpieces and the beauty products … as if these petty details had the slightest importance when one was dealing with twenty-five centuries of history.” “And since my gowns were entirely Iranian,” she complained, “they were – it goes without saying – never mentioned.”Footnote ¹³³ This account demonstrates how Empress Farah herself mobilized an ambivalent frame when it came to the politics of her own beauty. Wanting to dismiss talk of false eyelashes and hairpieces as “petty details,” she nevertheless insisted on the importance of her “Iranian” clothes.

Farah Pahlavi’s writings and interviews about the celebration reveal a profound frustration over losing control over her image. While it is not true that her gowns were never mentioned – Turkish magazine Hayat referenced them as the only Iranian aspect of the celebration – the tides were indeed beginning to turn against the shah’s regime and, therefore, against Empress Farah’s appearance.Footnote ¹³⁴ There was little she could do to turn them back, no matter how she attempted to adjust her clothing choices. Beauty had become a liability. The November 14, 1975, issue of The Village Voice published a picture of the empress and Andy Warhol, standing in front of his iconic portraits of her, titled “Beautiful Butchers: The Shah Serves Up Caviar and Torture.”Footnote ¹³⁵ The attendant article did not even mention the empress. With the repeating Warhol portraits behind her, she simply served as a symbol of the feminized aesthetic realm, a distraction from and a sharp contrast to sinister realities (Figure 2.3).

Figure 2.3 Empress Farah Pahlavi, an art connoisseur, poses alongside the famous American artist Andy Warhol, whose stylized portraits of her can be seen in the background. She is wearing a long-sleeved top featuring traditional Iranian designs. The New York-based left-wing weekly Village Voice reprinted this photo on the front page on November 14, 1977, with the caption, “Empress of Iran and Andy Warhol: Wire whips seem very far away.” Emphasizing the contrast between the Pahlavis’ cosmopolitan glamor and the Shah’s police state was a common comparative strategy for dissident activists from the global sixties to the Iranian revolution. Used with permission from Street Media.

Farah Diba Pahlavi remained a popular subject in Turkish tabloids throughout the 1970s. In a 1975 special issue dedicated to the Iranian monarchs’ visit to Türkiye, Hayat noted the empress remained popular the world over due to “her measured behavior and modesty which only becomes an Empress,” and reprinted past photos of her being welcomed by loving Turkish fans at the airport.Footnote ¹³⁶ However, behind closed doors, Türkiye’s ruling elite expressed disdain for what they considered the shah’s “megalomania” (büyüklük hastalığı) and his comparative, competitive aspirations to greatness.Footnote ¹³⁷ Although the shah’s military and economic aid for Türkiye during the US arms embargo (1975–1978) garnered him some positive press, his support for Kurdish guerillas in Iraq further besmirched his image.Footnote ¹³⁸ The coverage of Iran’s crown family slowly turned less sympathetic in the Turkish news media, as it did in the West.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Türkiye’s newspaper of record, Cumhuriyet had mimicked illustrated magazines like Hayat, publishing pictures of the shah and Farah Pahlavi at any opportunity. In the pages of this famously “serious” newspaper, one could repeatedly see the shah and Empress skiing, passing through the Istanbul airport, or enjoying a seaside holiday in casual attire. However, Cumhuriyet took a sharp turn against precisely this type of reporting by the end of the decade. In a March 5, 1979, editorial about the Iranian revolution, for example, famous columnist Oktay Akbal criticized a Turkish tabloid that had asked Turkish celebrities whether the divorced Soraya or the dethroned Farah was luckier. Akbal argued the question was irrelevant since it did not make sense to waste time discussing these “two parasitic women.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Engaging with rhetorical comparisons like this, according to him, only served to distract the readers from their real-world problems. Calling both ex-queens “decorative dolls” (süs bebeği), Akbal demonstrated the transnational purchase of the doll trope. Up to then, comparing Farah (cast as grounded and maternal) to Soraya (cast as flighty and rebellious) in terms of beauty and personality had been a mainstay of the mainstream Turkish press, and the op-ed’s title mimicked the familiar comparative trope: “Farah or Soraya?” Yet, Akbal rejected the terms of comparison, grouping the two women under the same frivolous and superfluous category.

In the June 1988 issue of Vanity Fair, radical Australian feminist Germaine Greer published her own memories of the feminist meeting in Tehran that had also featured Betty Friedan. Friedan had called Empress Farah a “feminist,” using aesthetics as proof; in Greer’s construction, feminized aesthetics became the opposite of feminist politics. While reserving her most acerbic commentary for Friedan, Greer claimed their royal Persian hosts had had little substance to contribute since they were “exhausted after a day of having their eyebrows and hair roots bleached and their arms and legs depilated in preparation for the meeting.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Unfounded rumors that she bathed in milk hounded the empress, symbolically linking her to mythic representations of Cleopatra and feminine Oriental decadence. This trope proved long lasting enough to even make it to the deeply stylized opening scenes of the 2013 Hollywood blockbuster Argo.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Aesthetics and Soft Power in Comparison

In her influential article “The Biopower of Beauty,” Mimi Thi Nguyen writes, “The ideas in which we traffic – including that of beauty, which is so often aligned with truth, justice, freedom, and empowerment – must be interrogated not as unambiguous values but as transactional categories that are necessarily implicated and negotiated in relation to national and transnational contests of meaning and power.”Footnote ¹⁴² The relational, comparative, and deeply political qualities of beauty explain why US government officials struggled to make sense of Empress Farah’s image at every step, even as they could not avoid addressing it. In the international public sphere, comparisons relied heavily on the visual, and soft power claims were bolder. The empress was cast first and foremost as the beautiful symbol of an authentically Iranian modernization and, increasingly, as a shiny distraction from the regime’s extravagant failures: a painted doll. The aesthetic could support political claims, but the influence was more robust the other way around.

Debates on the operations of nation-branding and soft power would benefit from paying more attention to beauty and its intersections with gender, race, class, and nation. It does not take a sophomoric imagination to note that the words “soft” and “hard” are thoroughly gendered. In fact, in describing soft power, the term’s coiner Nye used the libidinal language of “attraction” and “seduction,” claiming “seduction is always more effective than coercion.”Footnote ¹⁴³ At the same time, the concept has come under criticism from “realist” authors who claim soft power barely constitutes power.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Central to this discussion are the crucial ways in which soft power maneuvers are backed by the threat of coercion or “hard power.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The concept of “soft power” separates and essentializes culture as a singular dimension of foreign policy to be considered alongside the military, the economic, and the political.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ However, as multiple scholars have shown and this book concurs, ideology and discourse are essential to the very foundations and practice of statecraft.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ While gender has not been central to the scholarly debate on soft power, in a media environment that regularly personifies politics through the bodies of salient figures, public diplomacy maneuvers (and the pushback against them) will always be gendered, racialized, and classed.

Equally important are the power differentials between states and the outsized impact some polities, such as the United States, have on determining the ideological and discursive field upon which others’ soft power maneuvers must occur. A particularly evocative study by Paul Michael Brannagan and Richard Giulianotti examines the conflicting international responses to Qatar’s attempts to rebrand as “an ambitious, pioneering, and vital actor” through high-profile events, particularly in the arena of sports and leisure since the early 2010s.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Identifying a “soft power-soft disempowerment nexus,” their research demonstrates how Qatar’s soft power agenda backfired as opponents used the boosted media attention to highlight the state’s less-than-stellar human rights record. The authors’ depiction of soft power as a comparative, “competitive game” is pertinent here.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Comparativism, as this chapter has argued, plays a catalytic role in shifting perceptions and rankings of nations and states. Given how much epistemic power the United States and its European allies hold in determining ruling categories and rubrics, it is common for nation-branding attempts of non-Western states to be praised when in alignment with Western goals and mocked as mere window-dressing when not. Even non-state actors’ judgments are amplified as long as they emanate from these power centers.

The politics of beauty are labile because they are gendered and comparative. Aesthetic judgments do important work for national image-building, feeding international comparisons and rankings. Yet, in the field of foreign relations, beauty can easily transform from an asset into a liability due to the gender hierarchies that associate the aesthetic realm with femininity and, therefore, artifice, superficiality, and deceptiveness. The fate of Iranian nation-branding in the late 1960s and 1970s, with Empress Farah as its most visible symbol, demonstrates how critiques of soft power initiatives can be gendered and comparative in so far as they mobilize indictments of the aesthetic.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the images of Iran’s Empress Farah saturated the world’s capitalist media. Before long, her beautiful visage would be replaced by another riveting figure: A stoic Iranian cleric in robes sitting cross-legged under an apple tree in the garden of a French cottage. In exile in the country that had once hosted the empress, Ayatollah Khomeini’s homespun Islamic style communicated what Farah’s ultimately could not: A deep connection to the people and authentic Iranian culture. Back then, no one could doubt that Ayatollah Khomeini’s image, his charisma, mattered: In fact, by the time of the revolution, the capitalist media had become as obsessed with him as they had been with Farah Pahlavi.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Yet image-based criteria are inherently unstable. The same Western media that had once helped Khomeini grow his political mystique eventually came to depict him as both physically repellent and out-of-touch. Within Iran and in the diaspora, critics cast the revolutionary regime itself as too focused on appearance over substance. Objecting to rising pressures regarding women’s veiling early on in the revolution, Simin Daneshvar, distinguished Iranian academic, novelist, and wife of Gharbzadegi author Jalal Al-e Ahmad, argued that the revolutionaries needed to enact deeper changes to improve the lives of millions of Iranians instead of focusing on the hijab: “But in any case, everyone knows that piety is not in outward appearance; piety must be rooted in the mind and soul of a human being, whether a man or a woman.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Still harboring hope for the Iranian peoples’ movement, Daneshvar worded her objections mildly. Soon, however, it would be increasingly common to hear strident critiques of the Islamic Republic that coalesced around the superficiality of its revolutionary Islam: Its symbolic nature, its over-dependence on the aesthetics and performances of devoutness that hide an underlying menace of corruption and greed.

It may be ironic but not surprising that Iran’s last Pahlavi Queen and first Supreme Ruler both faced such severe reassessments of their charisma. Beauty is not necessarily “the power of the weak,” as has been claimed, but the power of the ascendant, with rankings in the eye of the comparer.Footnote ¹⁵² The next chapter takes a closer look at the ascendant ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s, which helped bring Khomeini to power, explaining how new comparative rubrics operating at the intersection of race, religion, and gender troubled Turkish and Iranian aspirations to Westernness and whiteness.