Becoming Visible in Iran: Women in Contemporary Iranian Society, Mehri Honarbin-Holliday, I.B.Tauris, London, 2008, 224pp., ISBN: 9781845118785, £56.00 (Hbk) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of International and Global Studies, 2011
Gender in Contemporary Iran: Pushing the Boundaries is a collection of articles by sociologists who seek to break down stereotypes about Iranian women. The material has been arranged thematically (p. 4), with the first three of the eleven chapters analyzing discourses around gender within the spheres of law, politics, and religion. The next three chapters examine education and public discourses. The subsequent two essays examine youth in specific settings, and the last three essays address economic issues relating to women. Yet, if there is a weakness in the collection as a whole, it might be that reading eleven essays, all of which decry stereotyping, leads one to wonder if any of the people who are doing the stereotyping will ever read it. Two of the best of the theoretical works are Louise Harper's "Authority, Modernity and Gender-Relevant Legislation in Iran" and Azadeh Kian's "Gendering Shi'ism in Post-Revolutionary Iran," which are the first two chapters of the book. Although the titles make the two essays seem as if they examine different material, they utilize much of the same material through differing secondary source. This is not to say the essays are repetitious; in fact, they might readily be used side-by-side for advanced students to learn about how different thinkers shape similar material, and the chapters are enjoyable if not new for a specialist on Iran as well. Harper's article in particular is brilliantly written, with careful contextualizations of terms like "feminism" and "Islamist women," which need to be considered in an Iranian context. Each of these articles looks at marriage and how marriage and divorce have been affected by women's activism and the government since the 1979 Iranian Revolution; Kian's essay is more argumentative, one might even say polemical, but she locates agency squarely in women. The discussion of women arguing for more equitable solutions to resolve problems around women's financial inputs into family finances demonstrates well that (male) clerics in Iran are influenced by the religiously based arguments that Iranian women are becoming more adept at making. Although other authors, such as Leila Ahmed in A Quiet Revolution (Yale University Press, 2011), make the point that "Islamist" women are socially active, the religious basis of the Iranian government means that everyone who wants to implement change needs to work within this paradigm, in many ways making Iran far more dynamic religiously in the post-revolutionary period (and especially in the post-Khomeini period) than it was in the fifty years before this period. Fatemah Etemad Moghadam's article, "Women and Social Protest in the Islamic Republic of Iran," the third in this section as the editors organized it, is a highly condensed historical survey, perhaps useful for providing context; the article's sources include conversations with government ministers and lawyers working in Iran. In contrast, some of the book's later essays appear naïve. Goli M. Rezai-Rashi's "Exploring Women's Experience of Higher Education and the Changing Nature of Gender Relations in Iran" sets out "to show the participation of women in higher education and to examine women's views of their interests and desires in obtaining a university education and how this increasing access to higher education is affecting the dynamics of gender relations" (p. 45), a broad topic for an essay. She discusses how the Iranian government "removed the secular discourse" concerning gender relations (p. 48); problematically, however, while discourse might be supplanted, it is difficult to "remove." Government agencies are said to "lay out roles" for women (p. 49), without any discussion of how those roles might have changed, even from the government's position, using a book chapter published in 1994 as a source. One might have
International Journal of Middle East Studies
contexts, could have led to a more nuanced discussion of such experiences, as opposed to leaving them as awe-inspiring individual stories. In other cases, it is not clear how Iranian women acted differently from men, from women in other contexts, and from what the government and the patriarchal society expected from them (even if we accept the controversial assumption that these imposed a clear and uniform set of expectations on women). Contrasts in the analysis also appear when in a great many of the narrated stories, women participate in the war in their traditional roles as suffering or supportive mothers and wives. Such stories-and the author's interpretation thereof (see p. 6, for an example)-do not represent any challenges to cliché female roles and women's victimization narrative; rather, they reinforce them. The caveats that come with the abundant and colorful narratives, as discussed above, can be seen not as shortcomings, but as potentials for exploration. They leave the reader with the possibility to decide what to take away from the narratives, empirically and thoeretically. Significantly, for the first time, non-Persian speakers can dive deeply into the rich world of Persian-language memoirs written by women. Farzaneh's Iranian Women is the first book-length source in English that engages readers with these women's stories as deeply as the memoirs would. Articles published on this topic have not had the space to serve this purpose, and the very few translated memoirs constitute too small of a sample to do so. Although the book does not contain many direct quotes from the texts, it can be used as a great initiation to the world of memoirs and autobiographies published in Iran. In addition, the book stands out in other seemingly marginal but very important ways. First, Farzaneh decentralizes the war narrative by covering stories from across the country, as opposed to focusing on either Tehran or the major wartorn cities on the western border. That allows us to get a snapshot of how women in different locations and from various social backgrounds experienced the war in different ways. Second, the book comes with useful appendices such as a list of articles about women's participation in the war in Persian, published during the war itself, as well as a name index of female war participants. These additions will be useful for other researchers trying to tackle this important subject. Last, but not least, Farzaneh's citation of junior scholars, female scholars, and scholars residing in Iran is a much needed celebration of their work. I hope that we see more of this thoughtful manner of citations in future studies of Iran and the Middle East.
Understanding the Evolutions of Iranian Women's Identity
IJEP International Journal of New Political Economy, 2022
The living and social nature of women has always been questioned by traditional and modern political systems, forces and social currents, from both religious and secular sides. To explain this subject methodically, the problem of research can be made more comprehensible by formulating the concept of "Living Shi'ism", which is considered as a manifestation of collective unconsciousness and the context of political and social action. The main question of the article is what the role, weight and influence of Living Shi'ism ideas are in the processes of shaping women's political and social behaviors in contemporary Iranian history? Living Shi'ism in Iran is not entirely Shiite, but it borrowed concepts and received influences as a result of interaction and intellectual contact with intellectual currents and ideologies. Findings showed the process of political and social identification of Iranian women is influenced by a set of thinking styles and patterns based on Shiite teachings or alienation and borrowing from new intellectual currents making any socio-political status conditional on their acceptance and reform. Patterns such as modern Iranian woman, Shiite autocratic woman, left feminist woman, armed Mujahid woman, housewife with hijab, Religious Modern woman and the emergence of dual hijab /veil and woman with hijab /chaste woman are examples of empathy or women's encounter with Living Shi'ism in different periods of Iranian contemporary history. Hence social structures such as unveiling, forced hijab, the transformation of hijab from a religious to political matter, and the formation of foregoing currents are not sudden, but a gradual process of women's biological interaction with Iranian society.
Iranian Women: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Through a summarized historical review; this paper is studying Ira-nian Women's century long struggle to improve their status in the society and achieve some basic rights such as education and suffrage. The paper demonstrates how the patriarchal system cemented with the male interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence has created strong foundations based on which women have been deserted of many rights for decades. This foundation has resisted change and exhausted positive efforts when progressive statesmen tried to provide women with some developments. Exactly for this reason the Islamic Revolution turned the clock back on women's rights and acted regressively against limited advantages that women had gained in previous decades. Despite frequent draw backs; Iranian women have continued with their struggle for improving their social and legal status. In this struggle, education has proven to be their most effective mean, as it has provided opportunities and strategies for social and political participation, giving the women the voice of reason to argue for their demands and moreover has given them the ability and skills to interpret the Islamic jurisprudence and hence find avenues through which women can be provided with greater rights and privileges. This in term has empowered them to have constructive dialogues and debates on women related issues with jurisconsults and legislators and urge them to review the legal system with a more favorable approach towards women's rights and status. However, so long as the social patriarchal system is intact, any progress would be slow and faced with great challenges.
WOMEN ISSUE AND WOMEN MOVEMENT IN IRAN - İRAN’DA KADIN SORUNU VE KADIN HAREKETİ
Maduniyet, 2019
The women issue in Iran is an important fact that it leads to political and social mobility and protests. Although the issue of women and women's rights were first introduced in Iran at the beginning of the 20th century, they have not been solved until today, and still, maintain its importance. Although some rights were granted directly to women in the scope of modernization projects in the last hundred years, it is observed that serious restrictions are applied after the 1979 Revolution. Women who took part in the revolution were subject to compulsory veiling (hejab) in the post-revolutionary period, faced with the pushing out of the public space and being confined to the private space. These practices bring many questions together. Why the women actively involved in the revolution exposed to clear discrimination after the revolution? How women were affected by this situation? How did women respond to this new situation? How do all this shape women's situation and the women's movement? This study aims to shed light on the above questions. In this study, firstly, the image of women constructed after the revolution and construction process is explained.