Suchergebnisse

The prominent modern Iranian author Ṣādiq Hidāyat (1903‒51/1281‒1330 sh.) was arguably the most observant expositor of the contortions within the inner world of Iranian demonology during the first Pahlavī period (1921‒41/1299‒1320 sh.). Through an investigation of his many interbellum titles, such as "Zindah bih Gūr," "S.G.L.L.," and "'Alavīyah Khanum," the purpose of this paper is to flesh out Hidāyat's role as a demonographer, meaning someone who inscribes the demonic in his works. It is argued that Hidāyat's uniqueness was located in his ability to allow the demonic, "the world as it is before the human imagination begins to work on it," to interact with man at his most nihilistic moment. As such, it is unsurprising that recognition of the demonic was often simultaneously the moment when the voice and visage of Nature itself became apparent.

Around the world today, we are experiencing what scholars call a "feminization of migration," which coincides with a global panic about human trafficking and distorts the messy realities of forced labor, migration, and sex work. In the Middle East, Dubayy has become the center for the migration of many Iranian women moving into the informal economy of sex work. In this essay, I argue that the disjuncture between paradigms of Iranian women's sexualities and actual experiences of and reasons for migration to Dubayy results in complicated challenges to migrant Iranian women's agency as well as to their ideas about agency. The discourse on the innocent, trafficked woman and that on the guilty, predatory woman do not reflect women's actual experiences in Dubayy and serve only to perpetuate already gendered and raced discourses on the movement of women's bodies that is prevalent in international discourses on sex work and trafficking. Many people use the language of trafficking, problematic in its implications that women (especially from the developing world) could only be "duped" into sex work in another country, and this language serves to silence the already silenced migrant sex workers. Qualitative, ethnographic fieldwork with sex workers, migrant women, and those who provide services to them assessed the experiences of migrant women and sex workers, labeled as "trafficked" by the international community. The essay seeks to describe the experiences of these migrant women in the Middle East and how their narratives have been constructed and often misinterpreted.

This paper aims to investigate the language used by newspapers in post-revolutionary Iran. More precisely, the paper sets out to analyze how such a language is deployed to represent relevant hegemonic ideologies. The approach adopted for this purpose draws inspiration mainly from critical linguistics, where it is hypothesized that, as far as the pertinent metadiscourse goes, media genres serve to activate and perpetuate social power relations. In keeping with this theoretical stance, the paper argues that socially constructed texts can be said to perform two complementary functions; on the one hand, they shed light on the realities experienced in social life; on the other, they reveal such aspects of those realities as are constructed through the use of language. It is thus in this context that the media language used in the post-revolutionary Iran lends itself to analytical investigation, where the available data reveal the co-existence of three competing discourse processes of 'Islamization', 'Iranian Nationalism' and 'Western liberalism', relating to the third stage development of post-revolutionary Iran.

AbstractThis paper is a revised version of a Lecture delivered at the Celebrations of 35 Years of the "Encyclopaedia Iranica" project, delivered on 3 May 2008, at the University of Sydney, and on 7 June 2008, at the Arya International University, Yerevan, during the International Conference "Iran and the Caucasus: Unity and Diversity".