Women and the Moral Politics of Dress in 20th Century Tehran (original) (raw)

The Veiling Issue in 20th Century Iran in Fashion and Society, Religion, and Government

Religions, 2019

This essay focuses on the Iranian woman’s veil from various perspectives including cultural, social, religious, aesthetic, as well as political to better understand this object of clothing with multiple interpretive meanings. The veil and veiling are uniquely imbued with layers of meanings serving multiple agendas. Sometimes the function of veiling is contradictory in that it can serve equally opposing political agendas.

BETWEEN MODERNITY AND MODESTY: IRANIAN WOMEN'S RIGHTS IN PERSPECTIVE

2019

In the modern era, although women's and gender rights movements across the world have gained widespread acceptance in much of the world, they have faced and continue to face a much more uphill struggle in traditionally conservative societies. As this premise holds for much of the Middle Eastern region, Iran is no exception to this general trend. On the contrary, Iran comes forward as a country where each incremental gain made in women's rights had to be fought over with tremendous effort. Emerging as a distinct movement during the early decades of the 20 th century, the women's (and by extension, gender) rights movements in Iran have been continually shaped and reshaped as decades progressed until contemporary times. Particularly, the question of women's place in Iranian society took central stage with the onset of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Taking the story of nation-building and modernization that the country experienced as a backdrop, this present analysis will be tracing the progression of Iranian Women's rights in its domestic and international contexts; while also striving to determine the numerous ways in which the Revolution, directly and indirectly, impacted the agency of women in relation to state power as well as endeavouring to pinpoint the contemporary consequences of the Revolution from a rights point of view. Research Question: In which aspects the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and its ripple effects have impacted the practice of women's and gender rights in contemporary Iran?

Breaking the dress code: gender identity and fashion in Iran

Breaking the dress code: gender identity and fashion in Iran, 2019

Dressing is a symbolic tool for not only showing the social identity of individuals but also the Gender identity. We can manipulate the roles dressing plays and by modifications and supplement we use for decorating our body as an individual with repetitive symbols, we challenge the gender system of dressing. Therefore, fashion is one of the most important instruments in boosting the consciousness of gendered individuality. In This Paper, I investigated the effects of Fashion on construction of gender identity in Islamic Republic of Iran, where there are a lot of dressing codes and limitations monitored by the government.

The Girls of Enghelab Street: Women and Revolution in Modern Iran

Global Policy , 2018

Beginning with the 1891 Tobacco Protest, women have played a vital role in revolutionary Iran. In opposition to the post-9/11 zeitgeist's hegemonic framing of the Middle Eastern Woman, as bereft of agency, this paper highlights the agency of the Iranian woman and their involvement within revolutionary struggles in the modern history of Iran. What is of particular concern here is the ways in which hijab is utilized as a revolutionary symbol and the particular narrative of this performative trope as designated by "the West". The 1979 revolution provided a discursive space in which to rearticulate the hegemonic gender identities as formulated under the Pahlavi regime. Here, the ruptures and continuities of dominant gender identities are highlighted through the use of the chador as a placard for political action. Drawing on this framework of gender (re-)identification, the notion of Iranian womanhood was again contested during the 2009 Green Movement. In considering the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, this paper identifies the re-articulation of the masculine discourse of martyrology as a means of contesting the ideological apparatus of the state. Following from the Green Movement, "the Girls of Enghelab Street" again bring the issue of Iranian womanhood to the forefront of revolutionary action. Here, hijab is utilized, quite literally, as a revolutionary flag. While the use of the hijab here appears in stark contrast to that of the 1979 revolution, this protest draws on a definitive history of the headscarf as a marker of female revolutionary action.

THE WOMAN WITH A GUN: A History of the Iranian Revolution's Most Famous Icon

Brandeis University Senior Honors Thesis, 2016

*Only Introduction Is Available for Viewing. For Full Thesis, Go to Brandeis Digital Repositories* In the year following the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy, one image in particular proliferated in national and international press as indicative of the social revolution that had unfolded in Iran: that of the veiled woman with a gun. Much of the scholarly work on the aesthetics of Iran’s revolutionary culture has focused on the way embedded Shi’i cultural tropes expressed themselves visually in public space – primarily through the ta’ziyeh passion plays and the Ashura processions – and argues that it is through a lineage of Shi’i symbolism that we can locate imageries of women, chiefly through the figures of Fatima and Zeinab. Yet, the visual representations of women in the years leading up to 1979 pose a stark contrast to this explanation – militant women were compared not to Fatima or Zeinab but rather to figures like Leila Khaled of the Palestinian liberation struggle and Djamila Bouhired of the Algerian independence movement. Women were seldom shown as “a model of a daughter before her father, a wife before her husband, a mother before her children” – characteristics which chief revolutionary ideologue Ali Shariati had claimed Fatima embodied – but rather as fist-raising, gun-toting fighters. This thesis examines how we can account for this gap in the historiography of women’s revolutionary imagery, by tracing an additional lineage of aesthetics to transnational and Third Worldist visual cultures. Instead of viewing the Iranian Revolution as an “exception to the rule”, the work of this thesis asks how we can locate the Iranian Revolution within the global traditions of this era; and asks how Iranian revolutionary consciousness was itself influenced and inspired by the contemporaneous struggles, from Algeria to Nicaragua to Vietnam. Through mapping a number of prevalent symbols and gestures that formed a sort of vocabulary of resistance during the era – specifically, that of “the fist”, “the v-for-victory” sign, “the gun”, and “the militant woman,” this thesis looks at how Iranian revolutionary culture – and the place of women within it – came to adopt these era-specific codes of militancy. The work to map a transnational genealogy of political symbols can open up space to analyze the many aesthetics of the Iranian Revolution beyond the “Shi’i lineage” that has been assumed for it; and can provide new insights into the ways such transnational aesthetic traditions were in fact sustained, continued, and centered in the gendered iconographies of the Islamic Republic.

Iran's Woman Life Freedom Movement and the Critique of Mandatory Hijab

Blog of the APA, 2023

In this short piece, I look at some of the implications of the Woman Life Freedom movement for feminist scholarship, and especially for our understanding of the Hijab as a cultural formation. I argue that postcolonial feminism needs a more nuanced discourse about the Hijab, one that takes into consideration the political construction of mandatory Hijab in the context of colonial modernity.

Dressed for Success: Hegemonic Masculinity, Elite Men and Westernisation in Iran, c.1900–40

Gender & History Volume 26, Issue 3, pages 545–564, 2014

From the late nineteenth century until the mid twentieth century, men of an emerging western-educated Iranian elite used knowledge, practices and objects originating from the West to reach and hold a hegemonic position in their society. This article traces the appropriation of western education, clothes and manners and explores how these became essential components of a new hegemonic masculinity in Iran.1 In so doing, it demonstrates the significance of these imports for constructing gendered social identifications, as well as the role of the Iranian state in enforcing such constructs. Knowledge, appearance and manners were not the only western imports to be appropriated by the new hegemonic masculinity. Modern perceptions of patriotism, new approaches to love and sexuality and different images of male beauty were all incorporated into this model. Education and appearance, however, were strongly associated with the debate on westernisation, and are therefore the focus here. This article explores the history of masculinities in Iran and positions masculinity as central to understandings of nationalism, social distinction and modernisation. Masculinity studies are currently under-represented in historical scholarship on the Middle East. Despite the fact that historians of the Middle East have become more attentive to masculinity since the mid-1990s, recognising its importance as the indispensable second half of gender studies, very few publications to date have been dedicated to the history of Middle Eastern masculinities.2 These include Wilson Chacko Jacob's study of Effendi masculinity in Egypt and two interdisciplinary volumes on Islamic and Middle Eastern masculinities.3 In the field of Iranian history, Joanna de Groot called for the consideration of men as gendered subjects as early as 1996, and some steps have been taken in this direction during the last decade.4 Afsaneh Najmabadi has written on male sexuality and the disappearance of boy-loving in late-nineteenth-century Iran. Joanna de Groot considers the masculine gendering of Iranian nationalist discourse. Minoo Moallem incorporated some aspects of masculinity studies into her research on Islamic fundamentalism and patriarchy.5 Shahin Gerami also studies masculine identities in post-revolutionary Iran, but from a sociological perspective.6 This article focuses on the historical construction of Iranian masculine identities and draws on the theory of hegemonic masculinity as a primary perspective from which to survey changing power relations within Iranian society.