WOMEN'S RESISTANCE AND CONSEQUENCE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR CHIMERIC SPACE IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY IRAN (original) (raw)
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Immediately after the overthrow of the Reza Shah Pahlavi by a popular movement in 1979, the new Islamic regime introduced a series of discriminatory laws, annulling the meagre rights that women had secured in the previous seventy-five years. This was done despite the massive participation of women in the revolution bringing about the newly established regime. Although there was some protest on the part of middle class women, mostly in Tehran, the unbelievably discriminatory laws were passed with ease. Among other things, the value of women’s lives legally became half that of men; two women witnesses became equal to one man; women were banned from becoming judges; and a notoriously misogynistic orthodox Muslim family law was introduced (Paidar 1995, Hoodfar 1998). All this indicated that while women had acted as political agents, the regime’s leaders were not politicized regarding the specific concerns of women.1 This realization became the starting point and a building block for tho...
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The emergence of Islamic feminism in Iran is here analyzed as a consequence of the process of social change that took place after the Revolution and the new awareness that resulted among traditional, religiously observant middle and lower class women who had been largely excluded from the public sphere under the Shah. The presentation of a typology of Islamic feminists and the examination of the multiple sources of their identity explains the similarities and differences between secular and Islamic feminism. The social, political, cultural and intellectual struggles of Islamic feminists seek to introduce changes in laws and institutions in order to establish equality between the sexes and alter relations of power between men and women. To the degree that they challenge the single model of emancipation that has characterized the Western trajectory, Iranian Islamic feminists must be seen as active subjects.
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.
Book Review, women, power and politics in 21st century Iran
Feminist Review, 2013
[...] Indigenous’ is a key term in the book; it is used to refer to the character of the Iranian women’s movement that developed after the 1979 revolution, in contrast to the arguably less authentic movement that had been associated with the Shah’s projects of westernisation and modernisation. In the first two chapters, Elaheh Rostami-Povey contests the notion that Islam and the Islamised state are the primary agents of Iranian women’s oppression (p. 17). She describes women’s activism after 1979 as ‘diverse and independent from the state’, in contrast to the ‘state-sponsored’ women’s movement under the secular, pro-Western, Pahlavi Shahs in the 1960s and 1970s (p. 17). In such analysis, Islamic belief becomes the key dividing line between the pre- and post-1979 movements. However, by implying that Islam is the ultimate defining and determining frame for the ‘indigenous’ women’s movement, her account appears to construct an essentialised, monolithic version of Iranian women’s history, in terms of a binary opposition between the indigenous movement after the revolution and its inauthentic, pre-1979 Other.
The Women's Movement and Feminism in Iran: A Glocal Perspective
Women's status and rights in contemporary Iran and thereby the trajectory of Iranian women's activism and feminist movements are paradoxical and complicated. 1 Many factors have shaped this contradictory status, including the patriarchal and patrimonial patterns in Iranian history and culture, be it secular or religious (Islamic), the state policy and state ideology, or the influential ideological or intellectual trends such as nationalism, socialism, Islamism, and more recently liberalism and a human rights framework. Another set of factors, of increased influence in more recent years, has to do with increased processes of globalization and the international currency of the discourses of human/women's rights spreading through transnational feminist activism and new communication technology such as the Internet and satellite TV. Increased globalization has intensified " glocal " dialectic, meaning the interplay of local-national factors with the global-international factors. This chapter provides an overview of the current women's movement and feminism in Iran from a glocal perspective. First, a brief review of the historical background of this movement is presented. Then, to illustrate predominant characteristics of leading feminist activists in Iran, a glance is cast over two prominent women, Sedigheh Dowlatabadi and Shirin Ebadi, who represent different generations of Iranian feminisms. This is followed by a brief discussion on methodological and theoretical issues concerning the women's movement in Iran. Then the trajectory of women's activism after the 1979 Revolution and the ironic and paradoxical aspects of the emergence of a growing women's movement and feminist discourse under an Islamist state are discussed. Special attention is paid to transnational, diasporic, and international interplay with local-national factors such as state policies, oppressive laws, and patriarchal cultural traditions as well as socioeconomic and demographic changes. Historical, Socioeconomic, and Political Contexts The history of Iranian women's quest for equal rights and their collective actions for sociopolitical empowerment dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Iran, as in other parts of the world, the women's movement and feminist discourse are by-products of modernity and industrial capitalism. At the same time the women's movement, especially feminism, has provided a challenge to and a critique of the andocentric aspects of modernity. Modernity in Iran and in many other Middle Eastern countries has been associated with Western intrusion, imperialism, or colonialism, thus resulting in mixed feelings, resistance, and nationalistic anti-Western resentment among many women and men.