Suchergebnisse

The politics of gender segregation in Iran -- Boundaries in motion : sisters, citizens, and consumers get on the bus -- Happy and healthy in the mothers' paradise : women-only parks and the expansion of the state -- Soccer goals and political points : the gendered politics of stadium access -- Re-placing women, re-making the state : gender, Islam, and the politics of place making.

The protests that erupted across Iran in 2022 after the death of a woman arrested for noncompliance with a headscarf requirement were not only about religious dress codes. They were a culmination of years of growing discontent over broader questions involving the place of women in the Islamic Republic and other grievances about the reach of an overbearing state and perceived social and political injustices. The erosion of civil society has made it difficult to sustain the protests' momentum, as the state moves to co-opt businesses and the public into enforcing its decrees, but the uprising is part of a longer-term, nonlinear process of dissent-driven change in Iran.

Abstract: Premised on the consideration of the household as a key site of social reproduction, where the dislocating effects of sanctions and austerity are felt, this article explores the impact of the Trump administration's 2018 reimposition of punitive sanctions on Iran. The focus on the household, and the myriads of mundane everyday acts which sustain and reproduce it, renders central the study of gender relations and the gendered character of social reproduction. Drawing on the experiences of middle-class women in Tehran, I focus on the ways in which sanctions become manifested in the coping practices developed by those they affect and sketch the contours of what I call "depleted households."

Despite Iran's geopolitical importance and mounting global concerns over its domestic and international practices, the state and its diverse mechanisms of rule have been largely neglected in mainstream sociology. To understand the state's shifting modality of power between its 1979 establishment and 2009, this paper analyzes the development of women-only parks as a major site of gender segregation. Offering a thorough account of the formation of the first women-only park in Tehran—the Mothers' Paradise—I contend that conceiving of gender segregation as a state project of Islamic dimensions overlooks significant shifts in state power from prohibition to production. I explore how the Islamic Republic of Iran, which thirty years ago considered women's outdoor exercise a problem, or even un-Islamic, now promotes it as a solution to women's health problems.

This dissertation is about state formation processes and gender segregation practices in postrevolutionary Iran. It uses gender segregation as a policy and spatial indicator to trace the shifts in state power between the establishment of the Islamic Republic (in 1979) and 2009. It explores the politics around the production of gender-segregated spaces, the imperatives of the state that produces them, and the implications for women's public presence.Building on 182 interviews, more than 16 months of fieldwork between 2008 and 2011, this dissertation offers a thorough account of the (trans)formation of three major sites of gender segregation in Tehran, Iran, namely women-only parks, segregated buses, and men-only sports stadiums. Throughout this work, I argue that current models that attribute the endurance of the Islamic Republic of Iran to its application of coercion and prohibitive measures, fail to account for the productivity of the Iranian state power. Thus, instead of dismissing the Iranian government mode of rule as that of religious totalitarianism using repression, I illustrate that it is more productive to look closely at the intricacies of power and the multitudes of their logics, in order to understand spaces, gender, Islamic rule, and subject formation.This dissertation contributes to theories of the state, feminist theories, and theories of urban governmentality: First, a close examination of the state's official rationales for gender segregation policies and the tensions and problems these policies address illuminates how the state continuously reconfigures its power in order to maintain its legitimacy in an increasingly globalized world with its shifting geopolitical alignments. By delineating several historically contingent shifts in gender segregation policies, I illustrate the broader shift in the Iranian state power from authoritarian sovereignty in the 1980s to disciplinary governmentality.

This article focuses on the ways in which opinion polls in Iran were conducted during the 'reform' in Iran (1997–2005). Instead of highlighting the various ways in which polls strategically manipulate, persuade or represent 'the people', the article shows how the specific modes of interpretation of polls enable different kinds of publics. Drawing on the case of the Ayandeh Polling Institute, the author demonstrates how opinion polling in Iran was utilized as a political strategy that contributed to the formation of a counter-public, which served as the backbone of the reform movement. The author highlights not just the macro-historical processes within which the practice of polling is embedded, but also the micro-interactional impact of polling on the people whose opinions are being gauged.

This paper begins from a paradox. In the 1980s and 1990s, women became increasingly mobile, especially in the developing world. Scholars generally attribute this shift to global economic pressure or to the spread of (Western) gender egalitarianism. Yet, in some places, women gained mobility just as local institutions extended policies excluding them or segregating them from men. Here, we look at two such cases: first, how women of Tehran, Iran, became the majority of bus riders just as the city segregated public transportation, and second, how women in the rural, Mexican village of San Pedro came to predominate among emigrants to the United States, even as they were excluded from participating in village politics. We use what we call "linked ethnographies" to put these two cases into dialogue. While attending to the particularities of each site, we find that in both, women gained mobility through the very policies that appeared to confine or exclude them. We call these policies "patriarchal accommodations." They were patriarchal, because they enshrined formal gender difference associated with male dominance. They were accommodations, because they adapted existing standards of "appropriate" masculinity and femininity to global economic pressure, enabling women to work, study, and consume. We argue that patriarchal accommodations may facilitate women's entry into the public sphere, particularly in non-Western regimes.

Published in Association with the Institute for the Study of Muslim CivilisationsAnalyses the links between gender and governance in contemporary Muslim majority countries and diaspora contextsFollowing a period of rapid political change, both globally and in relation to the Middle East and South Asia, this collection sets new terms of reference for an analysis of the intersections between global, state, non-state and popular actors and their contradictory effects on the politics of gender.The volume charts the shifts in academic discourse and global development practice that shape our understanding of gender both as an object of policy and as a terrain for activism. Nine individual case studies systematically explore how struggles for political control and legitimacy determine both the ways in which dominant gender orders are safeguarded and the diverse forms of resistance against them. Key FeaturesHighlights the centrality of gender politics in understanding political changes and new forms of governance in Muslim majority contextsExplores gender politics in Muslim majority countries as well as Muslim diasporas in Europe and the USCritically discusses the transformations of the role of religion in intersecting layers of local, national and transnational governancePresents 9 case studies: Egypt; Iran; Turkey; Saudi Arabia; Afghanistan; Palestine; Iraq; Pakistan; and diasporic communities in Europe and North America