Appendix
As a feminist ethnographer, I reflected greatly on how my ethnicity, class, gender, and education could shape my research and how those identities were perceived by my research participants. While my gender, age, and the fact that I had only left Iran five years prior to my fieldwork could establish me as an insider, I knew that my identity as a middle-class Tehrani woman who lived in the United States had already solidified my status as an outsider among the impoverished ethnic minority clients of ALLY. After a few initial encounters, it became clear that the women’s conversations around me would change when they realized I was not one of the clients, and it would change even further when they realized I did not live in Iran, a signifier of class status and privilege that would distance me from them greatly. By performing approachability and credibility (Lofland et al. 2006), I attempted to build rapport with my participants to navigate this simultaneous outsider and insider status. Ethnographers often highlight similarities to develop rapport and negotiate personal connections with participants (Berbary 2014). To build credibility, I intentionally downplayed my privileged class status by dressing modestly and simple—alternating between two black manto throughout months of data collection. I did so to gain cultural credibility among the clients and not draw further distance between us with the flamboyant performance of privilege and class that is commonly practiced by the middle and upper class in Iran. While recognizing approachability and credibility as performances, I concur with Sarah Mayorga-Gallo and Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman (2017) that they are also racialized, gendered, classed, and placed on the body of researchers by participants. Therefore, I recognize that despite all the efforts on my part, being known as a doctoral student who lived in the United States had already demarcated my status as that of a privileged outsider.
I maintained approachability (Mayorga-Gallo and Hordge-Freeman 2017) by being easy to talk to and answering all questions with patience and humor. To be accepted among Afghan participants as an Iranian, I knew it was critical to make clear my views on the ethnic discrimination experienced by Afghans in Iran. I had, in fact, noticed the skillful and subtle interrogation of my views by clients during the first weeks of my fieldwork. Establishing trust and intimacy was challenging, and I did so slowly, with trial and many errors. I could see that my status and place of residence were why I was welcomed among many young women, who saw me as a source of information about the outside world. I often found myself responding to the eager and curious questions of the clients about living in the United States and even offering information and advice about immigration to those clients (and some staff) who were keen to leave Iran. The young women who had aspirations for university education and learning English often asked for my help with their English courses or with writing proposals or interviewed me for their projects.
Although being approachable and eager to help enabled me to build connections with my participants, my rapport with clients was most consolidated when I acknowledged as valid their discontent and frustration with certain aspects of ALLY’s program and recognized those organizational narratives that troubled and irritated the young women. For instance, as I show in Chapter 6, staff’s attempts to deny their privilege had led to many tensions between the two groups. Hearing the clients, legitimizing their grievances, and acknowledging my privilege were authentic practices that led to building rapport with my informants. Due to these attempts, I noticed a change in the young women’s response to my presence after a few weeks of fieldwork. I noticed that they opened up more about their views and life experiences, allowed me to be present in conversations they often hid from the staff (e.g., mocking the staff, criticizing classes), and persuasively invited me to join their classes to the extent that not attending would cause resentment. While at times the young women asked for my views as someone who had lived abroad, in most cases, it seemed they simply wanted me to hear what they had to say.
While there were status differences between me and ALLY’s clients, many of the staff members and I shared a similar class, ethnic, and educational background. Those on the managing team either lived or had the experience of previously living or studying abroad. Our similar backgrounds helped me build professional credibility among the staff and establish myself as a worthwhile investment of time (Mayorga-Gallo and Hordge-Freeman 2017). I was most welcomed among two groups of staff: One was a group of young teachers who identified as activists and taught courses on community development. I attended their classes regularly, for the clients there openly discussed their views on a range of social issues. The other group was the management team, who I admired for their courageous efforts to run a feminist project in Tehran. My periodic observations and critiques of how the organization was run seemed greatly appreciated by the founder and the program director. I had many personal conversations with a range of staff, and while I shared my views when they were solicited, I chose to mostly remain an observer and a listener, learning from and acknowledging the many challenges they faced daily.
Like many ethnographers who have researched marginalized populations, I grappled with ethical questions and dilemmas. I knew my participants’ poverty, lower levels of schooling, and ethnic marginalization could place them in danger of exploitation and coercion. Ethnographers are instructed to obtain informed consent to mitigate these harms. While I followed all the protocols mandated by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), I could not ignore that the processes of informed consent are often designed to serve and protect institutions and sponsors rather than vulnerable groups (Grady et al. 2017). Informed consent, while necessary, can give researchers an illusion of ethical conduct, for it cannot impede the common harm inflicted on marginalized communities through paternalistic ethnographic research that pathologizes and exotifies marginalized groups (Yarbrough 2020). As I had grounded my work within the postcolonial feminist literature, the implications of conducting research on the lives of the subaltern were not lost on me. Here I was, a middle-class Tehrani woman, going back to Iran after five years of graduate studies in Western academia to “go native” in my own land and study marginalized and disadvantaged women whose last resort was the nongovernmental organization at which I was going to do fieldwork. While I had assured the IRB that my research had minimal risk to the young women attending the organization, I had yet to assure myself that my social and intellectual positioning would not inflict another trauma on the collective experience of subaltern women in academic scholarship. While the inclusion of marginalized populations in research introduces many ethical concerns, so does their exclusion, underrepresentation, or misrepresentation in academic studies.
To address such ethical challenges, I have approached this fieldwork as a form of “solidarity research,” which recognizes research as a political act informed by a politics of solidarity with oppressed groups (Yarbrough 2020). I was keen on avoiding the long legacy of academic research that misrepresents marginalized women of the Global South as ignorant and with a “false consciousness.” By drawing from Dorothy Smith’s (2005) Institutional Ethnography, I treated the young, impoverished women as experts of their own lived experiences with valuable insight that could inform academic research and policy. Feminist standpoint theory claims that marginalized women can add to human knowledge by revealing distinct relations of power that are missed by those in positions of power and privilege. Black feminists, for instance, have identified the privilege of White middle-class women in feminist theorizing and have challenged the use of woman and gender as unitary and homogeneous categories that reflect an imagined essence of all women (Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1991; Davis 1981; hooks 2000). In my study, I considered how the varying standpoints of my research participants were shaped by their privileged or marginal identities. I studied the views of the marginalized clients in relation to the relatively privileged workers of the organization with the hope that the “diversity of life experiences refracts ideas through a new prism, increases the likelihood of more valid conclusions, and more useful policy recommendations” (Yarbrough 2020: 73).
Theoretically, I have placed this project within the standpoint theory, postcolonial feminism, and institutional ethnography to make it an intellectual and political project. It is intellectual because it makes visible the institutional discourses and relations of power in which my informants participated as they simultaneously confronted them. It is political because it aims to depart from the scholarly work on women in the Global South in which, according to Gayatri Spivak (1985), subaltern women’s voices remain unheard and occluded by the hegemony of privileged theoretical and conceptual constructs. Emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, the standpoint theory brought to feminist, scientific, philosophical, and political discussions a fresh perspective and anxiety-producing dilemmas that pertain to the relation between power and knowledge (Harding 2004). Beginning from the claim that knowledge is socially situated, standpoint theory takes a position against Western, androcentric science and its universalist claims for being able to transcend particular locations and human perspectives.
Nancy C. M. Hartsock (2004) claims that privileging certain standpoints over others is at the heart of the feminist standpoint theory because, as a political project, it favor positions capable of social transformation by offering possibilities for envisioning more just social relations. Chela Sandoval (2004) argues that certain standpoints are “better,” because if they are “self-consciously recognized by their inhabitants,” they can transform individuals into resistant, oppositional, and collective subjects. Patricia Hill Collins (2000) similarly sees the standpoint of the oppressed as a space for the formation of an “oppositional consciousness.” There are perspectives on society through which certain oppressive relations cannot be seen. A standpoint carries with it the contention that the ruling class and gender have a material interest in that deception. A standpoint is a position in which those relations are made visible. Hence, “the vision available to the oppressed groups must be struggled for” (Hartsock 2004: 37).
Yet, standpoint theory has been criticized by those scholars who question its plausibility for all contexts. Uma Narayan (2004), for instance, questions the epistemic advantage given to marginalized groups as holding a “double vision” capable of creating oppositional consciousness. Mere access to two different and incompatible contexts, Narayan suggests, does not necessarily guarantee a critical stance or the choice of subversive practices. Certain kinds of oppressive contexts and practices, she argues, might prevent people from developing the tools with which they can locate the causes of their misery in larger social arrangements, see their misfortunes as more than personal, or develop desire for any radical change. Thus, “epistemic advantage” and “double vision” as sources of insight are treated in this book with caution and not reified into metaphysics. While I have amplified the critical voice of ALLY’s subaltern clients and their ignored yet brilliant resistance to culturally reductionist liberal feminist discourses, it would be remiss to conclude that clients’ marginalization, deprivation, and trauma had not seriously impacted their intellectual and emotional responses. Consequently, I have treated my participants as “multiple, heterogeneous, and frequently contradictory or incoherent, not unitary, homogenous, and coherent as they are for empiricist epistemology” (Harding 2004: 134).
Standpoint theory has also been criticized for carrying in it the “metonymic fallacy of the intellectual” (Pels 2004). As it is similar in architecture to Marxian epistemology, standpoint theory is criticized for being caught in a singular conflict between primary and secondary identities, “offering similar opportunities for an identity swap and for the resultant ‘absent presence’ of intellectual spokespersons” (Pels 2004: 280). Critical theorists have created dualistic fields of contest—bourgeois versus proletariat, men versus women, White versus Black—and in so doing, they have created the duality of dominant versus dominated. Arguing that in the contest between the two, one needs to begin from the standpoint of the latter, critical theorists tend to make invisible a third position, which is the position from which they themselves speak (Pels 2004).
The position of the intellectual is that of a contradictory social location. Intellectuals identify with the oppressed but do not find that marginal standpoint suffice unless they are intellectualized by the “outsiders within,” when marginal standpoints are pushed to “pass through theory, which evidently requires the guiding presence of the professionals of theory themselves” (Pels 2004: 281). Donna Haraway cautions us that there is “a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions” (1991: 191). The problem lies in marginal intellectuals’ unwillingness to calculate the interests and advantages that define their “in betweenness” as they choose to prioritize their class, gender, or racial identities above their identities as marginal intellectuals “and, in so doing, erase the inequalities that separate them from the groups with which they politically and emotionally identify” (Pels 2004: 285). Dick Pels suggests that the position from which the marginal intellectual should speak is the position of alienation or the dominated dominant (Bourdieu 1991) rather than that of oppression or exploitation.
Hence, it is important that I make visible my position as that of the intellectual, the dominated dominant. My project, inspired by bell hooks (2000) and other standpoint theorists, is one written from the margin, a space of radical openness, with words that emerge from suffering yet carry the scent of oppression, in the language that is not of the marginalized people I speak of here but of those who dominate them, the language that is a place of struggle.