3

Glocalizing Women’s Empowerment

“Over here! Our class got canceled, they told us we are watching a play!” Nazanin, one of the clients, yelled as she stood on the stairs, directing me to a classroom on the second floor by nudging her head. None of us knew what had triggered that day’s change of plans. I could see, however, that the prospect of skipping the regular class schedule had excited many of the girls. Marva, the managing director, was standing at the large classroom door where the play was scheduled to be performed. As I passed her, she gently grabbed my arm. “It’s The Vagina Monologues, you might want to be here,” she whispered in my ear as I leaned toward her. She walked away from me with a cheerful smile and an inconspicuous wink, acknowledging our mutual knowledge of what the promised play was about. As I moved past the front rows, I noticed Reza taking a front seat. Reza was an Iranian Swedish art therapy teacher at ALLY who directed plays for local theaters while staying in Iran. Little by little, it dawned on me that the three actresses sitting on the chairs facing the audience, reviewing their notes, and chatting with Reza might be his theater colleagues and friends. I had heard from the managing team their plan for holding multiple performances of The Vagina Monologues for both the clients and the staff. The administrators believed the performance and educational workshops on sexuality, which they had made mandatory for all, were necessary for raising a feminist awareness among ALLY’s staff and clients. As I picked a seat somewhere near the back of the room, I wondered about the reception of such sexually explicit language among the young women.

Unlike what I witnessed during my previous experiences watching the play in the United States, the raunchy performance in Tehran appeared to have left a tense feeling of discomfort in many of the audience members. I did not notice any strong reaction from the clients—neither the collective laughter nor the voices of confirmation I had heard during the performance in the United States. While the three actresses offered believable performances, I wondered if the stories of American women simply had not resonated with this group of young, impoverished Afghan and Iranian women. While shame, pain, and pleasure are experienced universally, the tone, language, and mode with which women share their sexual stories and the appropriate context for those stories vary considerably among cultures and social groups. That afternoon, at the center’s cafeteria, I met Nazanin, who sat down to have tea with me. Having seen her at the performance, I asked what she and other clients thought about The Vagina Monologues. “Most of the girls were OK with it,” she said. “It was some of the staff that got really angry after.” I probed Nazanin for her view on the workers’ reaction to the performance. “I think it’s because the male and female staff were all in the same room. They said they were embarrassed to look into each other’s eyes after,” Nazanin said, shrugging her shoulders. The days and weeks following the performance were tense with conflicts between some of the personnel and the managing team. While I did not witness it firsthand, I heard about the conflicts from the clients and administrators. The conflicts resulted in two male staff members, who clients counted among their favorites, leaving the organization. In the meetings held by the managing team with the distraught clients who were upset about losing their beloved teachers, the details of what transpired were not shared. Clients were only told about the “irresolvable disagreements” of some of the staff with the managing team. Later, in personal conversations with the administrators and the remaining staff, I heard varying accounts of the nature of the disagreements. For the managing team, the workshops and their “radical” content worked as a filtering system through which they could discard those staff who did not “share the same feminist values” and thus “did not belong at ALLY.” Maryam, the founder, spoke of the mindset of those staff as being “patriarchal” and recounted how one of the male workers had mocked the program director for “only being concerned with things from the waist down,” referring to her insistence on holding workshops on sexuality. Other staff members, however, blamed the tension on the culturally insensitive character of the workshops prescribed by the administrators who lived abroad and were unwilling to consider the point of view of the local workers, who favored programs that were more culturally resonant.

The decision to perform The Vagina Monologues was one of many choices made by the administrators that were challenged by the staff. The secular and liberal women’s empowerment program of the organization (with its emphasis on sexual autonomy, sex positivity, and freedom of choice), designed by members of the cosmopolitan middle class, was contested and challenged by the local middle-class staff of the organization on varying grounds. This chapter examines these points of tension between the cosmopolitan administrators and the locally grounded staff to reveal the contestation of globally hegemonic discourses of empowerment and agency by actors with varying levels of access to the global stage. I show how the staff were actively involved in contesting certain aspects of the feminism advocated by the organization for lacking cultural resonance and practical value. However, the cosmopolitan administrators rejected constructing resonant frames because of their lower transformative potential and an uncompromising commitment to a liberal and secular feminist framework.

The activities of an organization like ALLY were shaped by forces beyond its national borders. The presence of Western feminist discourses of sexuality in ALLY’s programming reveals their movement across borders and actors’ responses to globally hegemonic discourses of women’s empowerment. Embedded within these discourses of empowered sexuality are the accounts of feminist scholars who have revealed the links between women’s status, economic mobility, and sexuality and have related women’s liberation to their sexual autonomy. Marcela Lagarde (1990) has argued that the construction of women’s sexuality as passive justifies their mandate to serve and please others. Others assert that access to sexual pleasure relates to one’s position in social structures that determine who can access resources and respect. These arguments have compelled feminist scholars and activists to emphasize women’s sexual liberation as necessary for their emancipation. ALLY’s focus on women’s sexual autonomy and its development of sexual education programs for the staff and clients were done in the light of this feminist scholarship. ALLY also relied on donations from Iran’s diasporic community and its Western donors in Europe and North America. A liberal frame that emphasizes sexual liberation, secularism, and choice resonates with Western donors, whose interest often drives the process. Millie Thayer’s (2010) ethnographic study on feminist movements in Brazil demonstrates that access to and dependency on foreign funds have shaped and transformed the agenda and content of many feminist NGOs in the Global South over the years.

Sexual education programs often emphasize the importance of sexual knowledge and “knowing one’s body.” These narratives around “knowing” as a means of feminist empowerment, however, imply a “valid” sexual knowledge and that the knowledge held previously does not count as valid and is, in fact, lacking (Portocarrero Lacayo 2014). As Ana Victoria Portocarrero Lacayo explains, “Through this exercise of validation/invalidation of knowledges, a particular way of understanding sexuality and pleasure is understood as universal, and the variety of ways in which women construct and negotiate their sexuality in their particular contexts become invisible” (2014: 232). The liberal conception of sexuality and agency, deemed universal, sees sexuality at the center of an individual, open, visible, and out loud, and in so doing “reinforces power inequalities between women based on their access and willingness to embrace this new knowledge” (Portocarrero Lacayo 2014: 232). Portocarrero Lacayo argues that this discourse separates women into a binary of “liberated” and “disempowered other” and justifies efforts for enlightening those who lack such knowledge. It is in this process of the colonization of knowledge that Western sexual knowledge becomes “common sense” (Santos, Nunes, and Meneses 2007) and sexuality becomes understood as an experience that some “liberated” women have “discovered” and should transmit to others. “This hierarchal relationship between women who know and those who require instruction continues to haunt contemporary Western and diasporic Iranian feminist discourses that celebrate the universal experience of all women” (Naghibi 2007: xxvi).

The hegemony of the feminist discourses of the Global North, with their emphasis on women’s sexuality, is manifest in many empowerment programs implemented in the Global South, including ALLY. The content of an empowerment program does not merely reflect the intentions of its developers, as is often assumed. Intentions themselves reflect social and cultural forces that often remain unacknowledged (Sharma 2011). Development experts or feminist activists create and implement programs not in isolation but within the larger global context in which certain hegemonic discourses shape their assumptions and objectives. ALLY’s women’s empowerment program was a function of nonindigenous interests (e.g., donor interests and the hegemony of the model of empowerment advocated by international institutions) as well as indigenous interests (e.g., feminist discourses in Iran, the interest of dominant classes, and political structures). In any given study of empowerment, the intended objectives of administrators and translators should be studied in relation to the larger unacknowledged discourses that define empowerment, feminism, and development. As Shubhra Sharma argues, “the best of intentions may not produce the best of results and the reason for such infraction lies not in the intentions per se but in the complex social and cultural structures and discourses that such intentions are embedded in and also shaped by” (Sharma, 2011: 3). The discourses, not the intentions, produce effect. Yet, while intentions are often clearly stated, discourses remain hidden, even as they produce structured effects (Sharma 2011).

Glocalization and Vernacularization

Various studies (Merry 2006; Sharma 2008; Levitt and Merry 2009; Thayer 2010; Radhakrishnan 2015) have explored the processes of adaptation, translation, and appropriation of globally generated ideas in local contexts. For instance, Peggy Levitt and Sally Merry (2009) speak of the presence of a “global women’s rights package” with loosely coupled elements such as gender equality, autonomy in marriage and divorce, the right to earn income and inherit money, and protection from violence and discrimination. They argue that this global women’s rights package shapes the agenda and activities of many local NGOs and national women’s movements across the world and “is expressed through a set of national and international laws and practices like the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), international women’s conferences, International Women’s Day, and the theoretical work of many women’s and feminist studies programmes that have proliferated at universities over the past 30 years” (Levitt and Merry 2009: 448). This package refers to a set of ideas that are promoted and acknowledged globally and derive their legitimacy and influence from the countries and institutions in which they are born (e.g., UN) and the media that broadcast their messages.

While this package is widely circulated across many national contexts, Levitt and Merry demonstrate that in contact with local settings, these notions take on some of the ideological and social attributes of the local context. They call this process vernacularization and argue that this process of adaptation varies greatly depending on the context and the character of the channels through which these messages are transferred. “NGO directors and staff are quintessential vernacularizers” (Levitt and Merry 2009: 449), and they determine the frame through which the global value packages will attach to local norms and institutions. In the case of ALLY, the administrators and program developers decided whether The Vagina Monologues would be performed and whether its content would remain the same or adapt to local norms. Message framing is a political project decided on by a host of factors, including donor interests, the convictions and objectives of program developers, the appeal to local actors, the desire for a wider audience, the financial resources of an organization, and the symbolic value of certain messages (Levitt and Merry 2009). For instance, a secular human-rights frame is associated with the West, modernity, and progress, which increases the audience of the organization and allows for alliance and coalition building. However, such a frame may not always find resonance in postcolonial contexts and among the more religiously oriented, who resist secular and foreign influences and are suspect of cultural imperialism.

In any given process of vernacularization, intermediators and translators play a key role in negotiating local, national, regional, and global systems of meaning (Merry 2006). This process of translation, however, reflects inequalities of power between actors. The translator’s work is influenced by factors ranging from their ethnic, gender, and class identity to the agenda of those who fund them. It was not surprising, then, to notice conflicts between the Western-educated upper-middle-class administrators of ALLY who were tasked with satisfying and impressing their donors and modeling effective empowerment programs tested in other national contexts, and the more locally grounded, college-educated middle-class staff of ALLY, who were more concerned with local cultural norms and the applicability of the program objectives to the lives of the organization’s clients. In addition to operating within their class and social positions, both groups worked within the constraint of hegemonic discourses that defined their perceptions of feminism and their interpretive framework. For instance, the global women’s rights package encourages “embracing a particular kind of agentic self that is self-interested and rational rather than religious, affective and communitarian” (Levitt and Merry 2009: 448). Many empowerment programs across the world have adopted this notion of agency, which finds rejection of religious and traditional norms essential to women’s empowerment and development of an agentic self. As local actors design and define their empowerment programs, the globally dominant liberal and normative assumptions promoted by international institutions shape their assessments of clients’ progress.

Thayer’s study (2010) reveals that the global flow of funds and donations, often from the North to the South, determines the content of women’s empowerment programs. Her research on feminist organizations in Brazil clearly demonstrates that access to and dependency on foreign funds have shaped and transformed the agenda, content, and relations of feminist NGOs over the last few decades. As liberation movements in Europe and America began to place women’s bodies, sexualities, and health at the center of their struggles, the content and agenda of feminist organizations in the Global South experienced a similar shift in objective. The material and cultural resources of the Global North transform into global forces as they travel to their former colonies. This, however, is not a simple case of “cultural diffusion,” where hegemonic discourses of Northern feminists are meekly accepted by women in the “Third World.” While the North’s economic and cultural resources and travel budgets allow the movement of feminist theories and gender discourses from the North to the South, there are still a variety of actors who engage in the dissemination, selective adoption, translation, or rejection of those ideas (Thayer 2010). Glocalization in this context does not refer to cultural hybridization but to how the global permeates the local. Studying the articulated intentions and interests of program developers and implementers can help us delineate the negotiations between international development imperatives and local cultural, political, and social norms.

The Cosmopolitan and Local Elite

Everyday interactions and relationships at ALLY were shaped by care and camaraderie yet also marked by increasing tensions and conflicts over what constitutes women’s empowerment. The administrators of the organization saw education, sexual autonomy, freedom of choice, and inclusion in the market economy as necessary for clients’ empowerment. In this chapter, borrowing from Levitt and Merry (2009), I refer to this group as cosmopolitan elites—individuals who have ties to the global stage, have often lived or studied abroad, and teach and learn about global value packages. These activists or NGO directors interact with outside ideas on a regular basis and take on the task of translating and transferring those ideas to local contexts of which they are also a part. With their intercultural skills, cosmopolitan subjects negotiate complex global processes and relate in diverse ways to different cultural environments and groups of people (Chin 2013).

Another group of NGO staff—who I call the local elite—is more situated within the local culture and is often college educated and middle class. These vernacularizers acquire ideas from the cosmopolitan elite and perform a second level of translation for the clients and fellow staff. The local elite at ALLY saw empowerment in the same light as the cosmopolitan elite, though they rejected certain elements of secular and liberal feminism (such as sexual autonomy and rejection of religion) as culturally alien and practically irrelevant. This group measures the feminist ideals of the organization against the practical realities that govern the marginalized clients’ lives and their own gender and sexual norms. As I show in the following sections, vernacularizers also translate the grievances of local constituents and talk back to the cosmopolitan elite. Clients also talk back, resist, and engage in the process of vernacularization by placing the new ideas in dialogue with their own personal experiences and standpoints. The third group—the local subaltern, or the marginalized clients of the organization—saw gender oppression as deeply linked to their class and ethnic oppression and resisted those organizational narratives that reduced the struggles of the poor to their “cultural poverty” (I explore the perspectives of the local subaltern in Chapters 6 and 7).

It is important to note that by classifying the Western-educated administrators as cosmopolitan elites, I do not intend to construct them as Western or inauthentic agents or their feminist ideals as “foreign.” To do so is to ignore the processes of hybridization central to all cultural contexts whereby the new discursive formations open themselves up to intrusions by various elements in the preexisting intellectual and linguistic practices of a country (Chatterjee 1995: 23). As Margot Barden (1995) has argued in her analysis of Egyptian feminists, cosmopolitan activists who have lived abroad are still part of the vital local culture—even if unaware of its intricacies—through their identification with the local and their commitment to it. The cosmopolitan and local elite shared similar national, ethnic, and class identities and therefore many similarities in perspective (although their transnational connections were vastly different). Hence, this categorization is merely conceptual, and the role and social class of participants did not always place them neatly in one category. This chapter illustrates how liberal and secular feminism is perceived among middle-class NGO workers in Iran and how assumptions about anti-traditionalism as a feminist value created challenges for ALLY’s objective of empowering women.

Contesting Religion and Agency

It was when I saw the girls’ issues that I created ALLY’s vision. And now I have come to this conclusion that [the girls] can learn all the vocations in the world, but if their perception of themselves and the society does not change, if they don’t gain self-esteem, [nothing will change]. You can train them to go to work and make money, but that doesn’t change anything. (Maryam, Founder)

Maryam shared this sentiment with me on the fourth-floor balcony of ALLY’s second building, where she and other managing staff often took their smoking breaks. The spacious balcony was sparsely decorated with planting pots and separated from the busy management office by a large glass door. Sitting on the balcony stairs leading to the rooftop and watching Maryam share her convictions about ALLY’s ultimate objective, I wondered about the significance of the narrative I was hearing so frequently. A few weeks before, Shirin, a college student who taught community development classes with her fellow colleagues and friends, had shared a similar conviction:

After a few months (of teaching at ALLY), I realized that I need to get more involved. I talked to one of the psychologists and told him about my concerns. I told him I feel like you are giving these girls a series of abilities and skills. But at the end, their perspective is not changing. What changes their lives is not those skills but that perspective that has to change. (Shirin, Teacher)

I wondered about the importance of these narratives for ALLY’s staff and administrators and the meaning they gleaned from their work. I had come to learn from the same staff and administrators the structural inequalities that left many young women in need of seeking refuge at ALLY: Extreme poverty, exploitation at sweatshops, living conditions that included sexual and physical abuse by drug-addicted and negligent families, the absence of legal protection or material resources to escape abuse, and the unwillingness of the state to prosecute violence against women, particularly when Afghan immigrants were involved. They had shared these factors and many unsettling stories with me as they explained their criteria for—and the urgency of—admitting clients into ALLY’s empowerment program. Despite this shared realization that it was the objective reality of the clients’ lives that required transformation, the fundamental objective of ALLY’s program was consistently and firmly described by the cosmopolitan and local elite as effecting a “change of consciousness.”

This insistence on consciousness-raising did not mean that the material reality of the clients’ lives was overlooked. The organization’s program emphasized vocational training and equipping clients with necessary skills for participation in the market economy. Yet the strong organizational narrative that defined empowerment in terms of clients’ subjective transformation was noticeable. In fact, Nasim, a member of the managing team, told me that ALLY’s vision had come to change over the years to move from focusing on the material reality of the clients’ lives to focusing on their perspective of reality:

At the beginning, empowerment meant that they would come here to get an education, we work on their behavior and mental health, and then they will get a job. That was the end of it. The end goal was for them to be able to go to work and make money. Of course, this is empowerment. But this is not all that empowerment means. It’s great if they could get a job and be independent from their family, their husband, or their boyfriends. But there are other things, in my opinion, that are even more important. . . . The program has been maturing. Our new goal of wanting to change society and change every girl’s consciousness wasn’t always there, or maybe the idea was not this mature in the beginning. (Nasim, Managing Director)

I could see that for many at ALLY, consciousness-raising was seen as the most crucial component of empowerment in that it could allow women to construct a sense of self that recognizes oppression and demands change. In many conversations, the cosmopolitan and the local elite shared their belief about the importance of developing in clients an awareness that had the potential to disrupt the cycle of abuse, poverty, and misogyny with which clients struggled daily. “It’s so baffling that many of them have no specific definition of rape,” Rose, a twenty-four-year-old social worker, told me about Afghan clients, “yet nearly all have been assaulted in so many ways, even the completed rape.” The major impediment to change, many of the staff told me, was clients’ inability to see their living circumstances as oppressive and to see themselves as worthy of different living circumstances. The newly gained knowledge, they believed, would compel women to exercise choice and separate themselves from the oppressive patriarchal forces that restricted their agency.

The organizational emphasis on consciousness-raising reflected a feminist scholarship that finds emancipation in the recognition and rejection of patriarchal control. Since feminist scholars have revealed the embeddedness of patriarchy in all social institutions, such as family, religion, the economy, and the very fabric of morality, empowerment is understood as a process whereby women exercise autonomy and separate themselves from the patriarchal forces that fetter their agency. Transforming into a liberal, secular, and rational actor capable of exercising individual freedom is defined as empowerment when, for instance, culture and religion are found to be deeply patriarchal. This perception of empowerment is particularly prevalent when Muslim women are concerned. Orientalist feminist discourses have long constructed Muslim women’s rights in opposition to local familial, communal, and kinship structures of Muslim societies (Kandiyoti 2005) while approaching these structures as the mere reflection of Islam rather than a complex product of social, economic, political, colonial, and historical processes (Khurshid 2015).

While education and knowledge are empowering forces, I wondered if the staff’s narratives reflected the growing problem identified by Shenila Khoja-Moolji (2018) in her analysis of the dominant rhetoric of international agencies concerned with the empowerment of Muslim women. Khoja-Moolji demonstrates the dominance of an Orientalist image of Muslim-girl-in-crisis whose salvation depends on her education rather than the decolonial restructuring of the political and economic conditions of the Global South. She questions the emancipatory capacities of educational campaigns that are assumed to be able to “miraculously empower [young Muslim women] to confront historical and structural issues of gender-based violence, poverty, and terrorism” (Khoja-Moolji 2018: 4). While the effects of dominant discourses that prescribe education for Muslim women as the ultimate means of empowerment were seen in ALLY’s programming goals, I further explain this focus on social education in Chapter 4 in relation to the organization’s strategic measures of advocacy that required emphasizing clients’ capabilities and, in Chapter 5, in terms of the perceived need for developing a middle-class habitus in clients. Regardless of the multifaceted motivations behind ALLY’s social education program, developing an agentic self through self-realization was understood as an important indicator of empowerment among ALLY’s staff.

In ALLY’s narratives of empowerment, practicing autonomy was commonly discussed as a significant indicator of having developed an empowered/agentic personhood. Choosing one’s own spouse, job, clothing, or values was the most discussed signifier of agency. In my interview with Hamid, a twenty-six-year-old college graduate from Tehran who taught a community development course with Shirin and Barmak, the importance of granting marginalized women the ability to exercise choice was clearly discussed as the central component of empowerment:

[ALLY] tries to help those who were subservient and at their family’s feet and those whose needs were ignored to not feel suppressed, to overcome this feeling of suppression, do some serious work, study, go to work, and choose their spouse and their job and their path not from that place of feeling suppressed. But to think for themselves, to choose their path according to their own will, and make decisions for themselves. (Hamid, Teacher)

Like Hamid, many other employees saw autonomy as the most significant indicator of tavanmand shodan (becoming empowered), as it requires separating oneself from the forces that bind one’s agency. This separation was especially discussed in relation to religion and culture when empowerment was defined as resisting the norms and values that limit choice and govern action.

I personally believe that religion is very limiting and binding. I mean, it closes off your mind. It doesn’t allow you to think. It’s like you think and you want to do something but then you hear certain Imam has said you can’t do it and so you don’t. But that Imam lived like fifty million years ago! That holds people back and won’t let them grow. And that is how we see things here. . . . I’ve heard that some of the girls have complained about this . . . but it is what it is, whether they like it or not. (Nasim, Managing Director)

Nasim shared her view about religion in her interview with me as I asked her to comment on the growing complaints of clients who believed some of ALLY’s employees were mocking or disparaging their religious beliefs. I had witnessed firsthand those class conversations in which teachers spoke of religious moral norms as antiquated and most religious beliefs as superstition. The personal convictions of ALLY’s teachers shaped those classroom discussions, not an organizational agenda to oppose religion. Yet, the values and belief systems of those working at ALLY were intentionally and unintentionally defining the hiring process, creating a nearly homogeneous group of staff with secular views.

In the same interview, Nasim also shared her view of empowerment and the impact ALLY has left on clients:

How do I say this? In this social group, the perspectives are much narrower because the girls come from dogmatic families. So when she comes to [ALLY], a new world opens up to her. . . . For example, today I saw one of the girls saying that she has a boyfriend. I was so shocked; mostly because she comes from a very religious family. She was saying that “my brother doesn’t understand anything. He is so religious, he can’t even comprehend this.” This is huge! It’s so little, I mean it’s not really anything, or it might even seem wrong by some. But to me, it’s a big jump in that girl with that religious view from such a religious family. The mere fact that she says she has a boyfriend and that her brother will kill her if he finds out means that she has made a choice. . . . This is a huge jump that you can choose for yourself. You can have this kind of life or the other; but we are showing the way: That you can choose. Which one do you want? (Nasim, Managing Director)

For Nasim and many other staff, a client’s decision to engage in premarital relationships in a context where such practices are taboo was a strong indicator of the development of an agentic personhood. Having a boyfriend, not wearing proper hejab, and refusing arranged marriages were discussed by many workers as small yet important instances of exercising choice by defying the dominant discourses of ideal womanhood with which the young women grew up. The cosmopolitan elite’s emphasis on choice in clothing, marriage, and sexual relations reflects the global women’s rights package that is often adopted by NGOs and carries a liberal bias in its definition of agency. For instance, while Nasim defined choice as one’s autonomy in deciding for herself, only the instances of rejecting religion or tradition were recognized as acts of agency. Choosing to comply with the dominant norms and values were never discussed by the staff I interviewed as being instances of practicing autonomy. This bias in feminist theorizing of agency carries a liberal assumption that conflates agency with resistance to norms and not in many acts that inhabit norms (Mahmood 2005). Under these normative liberal assumptions, the religious compliance of clients who chose to wear their hejab or follow religious or traditional guidelines of sexual behavior was not seen as agentive or as a form of patriarchal bargaining (Kandiyoti 1988) with which clients could gain currency in their environments or communities. The lack of data here is a strong indicator of such bias toward certain displays of choice as agentic, which reproduces assumptions about religious women’s lack of agency if liberal ideals are not embraced.

These accounts of sexual liberation and personal autonomy also fail to account for variations in the discourses of sexuality and love between people of different economic and ethnic groups. The authority of the patriarchal family and the value placed on female virginity are different across class and ethnic lines in Iran. Lower-class women in Iran who seek boyfriends and engage in premarital sexual relationships might do so not for the purpose of flouting authority but due to their aspirations for social mobility. Many of these women have long used sighe (temporary marriage) to access financial resources through a higher-status husband, though such relationships often turn into a nightmare of sexual exploitation (Olszewska 2013). Meanwhile, having a boyfriend might have been perceived by clients as being a means of accessing the worldly and cosmopolitan lifestyle lived by the organization’s staff and claiming a higher social status. Romanticizing the sexually licentious behavior of the marginalized clients as a signifier of feminist empowerment or a hard-won freedom overlooks the fact that the risks and benefits of extramarital sexuality are not evenly distributed across class lines and that most women remain ambivalent toward those very practices (Olszewska 2013: 855).

The emphasis on consciousness-raising and a conception of agency rooted in liberal notions of resistance to cultural and religious norms were shared by the cosmopolitan and local elite, reflecting the hegemony of the mainstream liberal and secular feminism among middle-class Tehranis. This brand of feminism assumes that women’s struggles are shared universally and ignores the effects of the structural inequalities experienced by women marginalized at the intersection of their class and ethnic identity. Despite this shared perspective, certain elements of this liberal and secular feminism were a source of contestation between the cosmopolitan and local elite at ALLY. In the following section, I demonstrate the contestations over the role of religion in women’s oppression or liberation, the importance of sexual education for women’s emancipation, and culturally authentic versus culturally alien reform.

Contesting Sexual Autonomy as Empowerment

Liberal feminism’s allegiance to individual freedom did not go unchallenged at ALLY. My conversations with the local elite revealed an inner conflict around aspects of ALLY’s empowerment program that emphasized sexual autonomy in a context where women did not have the ability to implement the newly raised consciousness in their lives:

Social work is about teaching fishing rather than giving fish to people. But I sometimes wonder if we are teaching them fishing because we are teaching the girls things that are averse to society. We are giving them sexual definitions, but how much can they talk about these definitions at home? If they want to say that we are free to choose our sexual partners, can they really? You know, I feel like it’s incompatible with society. . . . If they listen to what ALLY tells them, they will be kicked out of home and they will be ostracized, and honestly, what can they hold on to in this society if they don’t have the support of their families? (Rose, Social Worker)

As Rose’s statement suggests, ALLY’s teachings centered on an understanding of feminism that advocates for women’s recognition of their rights as autonomous individuals, with sexual freedom symbolizing that autonomy. However, Rose questioned the practical value of advocating for sexual autonomy among the clients’ social group. While such sexual education would be sought after by secular upper- and middle-class youth in Tehran and other big cities who have been able to navigate their sexual autonomy more safely within the societal restraints with the help of their economic resources, clients’ poverty, refugee status, and dependence on their families would not allow them to demand autonomy or have an independent and safe space for their sexual practices, particularly in a country where government has criminalized premarital sexual relationships. Other local elite shared Rose’s inner conflict about the personal and social impact of ALLY’s sexual education program. Some even questioned the outcome of teaching clients about sexual boundaries and violence, noting that such education had only heightened young women’s awareness of their surroundings while they remained unable to escape sexually abusive situations when, for instance, abusers were family members on whom they depended.

There was a case when the girl did not know what had happened to her was sexual abuse. When she found out, she became extremely sensitive to the extent that if anyone at home touched her, she would think that they wanted to abuse her. She had become restless and had lost her peace at night. When you think about their living circumstances you need to realize that they don’t have much space. It’s not like they have separate bedrooms. All family members that aren’t usually less than five people live and sleep next to one another in a place that is like a studio. Now in these circumstances, for a person that has become extremely sensitive to these sexual matters . . . we haven’t given them peace; we have taken that peace from them. (Azar, Social Worker)

Clients’ distress and helplessness were the unintended and unanticipated consequences of sexual education for impoverished women in a context where women had no power to interfere with the conditions of their living circumstances and where ALLY’s program remained limited to consciousness-raising. This posed serious challenges for the young women’s mental health, and some reported an increased sense of anxiety and helplessness following this education. In this context, teachings centered on sexual autonomy, while in demand for the middle-class urbanites, were found incongruent with the realities of subaltern women’s lives. Moreover, other staff spoke of the dangers of emphasizing individual freedom without attending to the consequences of acting outside of social norms:

They are given a lot of information about how you have the right to have relations with your boyfriend, you have the right to have sex, or have the right to wear a certain kind of dress. OK, you have the right, all of us have the right to go out wearing shorts, but we will get arrested. They don’t teach what having a right means. You gotta say you have the right to have relations with the opposite sex, but how can you maintain your status in this culture and social context, how can you keep yourself safe? This education isn’t done with respect to the other person’s beliefs. It’s done with an attack on them. (Arezo, Psychologist)

ALLY’s clients were encouraged to articulate and actualize in their lives the feminist values of autonomy and equality. Such liberal articulations of rights, however, not only provoked a backlash among clients’ families but also lacked translatability between the two contexts. Women would often report that they were mocked and silenced at home when they spoke like their teachers for “using words that are too big for their mouth” or acted middle class in poor communities, where middle-class manners and modes of speech appeared suspicious, at best. Right-based conceptualizations of empowerment, which are popular among many international NGOs, if not translated into local ethical and religious norms might not gain traction among constituents (Ong 2011). Translating and recasting gender rights ideals into local politics and ethics (e.g., through the Islamic feminist framework) may have given the organization’s discussions of gender justice more social legitimacy in clients’ communities. But those teachings of ALLY that emphasized liberal and secular conceptions of rights and autonomy did not equip the local subaltern with the necessary symbolic tool to carve out for themselves a powerful voice that could meaningfully influence the environments in which they were living. This conflict was also a source of concern for the staff, who worried about the repercussions of the lack of conformity in the context of clients’ families and communities.

Our girls come from very religious and traditional families and from a particular cultural context, and then we bombard them with a series of information, which is a good education, it’s not a bad education but . . . the problem is that we don’t pay attention to their cultural context and that the girls have to go back to the same context. . . . Many of the girls get excited about what they are learning and talk about what we teach them at home, and then their father comes here and is like, “What are you teaching my daughter? What’s all the talk about homosexuality?” (Barmak, Teacher)

I just tell the girls to think about what you are learning and where you are talking about it. For example, you tell your mom that my virginity isn’t important for marriage, and your mom is like [says with angry mom voice], “Your virginity is all that you are! If you say it doesn’t matter, it means that you’re not a virgin!” And then how are we going to fix this? The problem is not ALLY. It’s just that education must be adjusted. (Rose, Social Worker)

Clients differed in the way they responded to the teachings of ALLY that conflicted with their norms and values. While some clients ignored the sexual education offered in favor of their internalized system of morality, others embraced the change at the expense of losing status, credibility, and acceptance within their families and communities. The latter group of women discussed in detail and in various classes a serious feeling of alienation and lack of belonging as well as various instances of confrontation with family members who would not accept the women’s new transformed self. In the face of the shortcomings of secular and liberal conceptions of empowerment, a group of local elite argued that religious teachings, rather than being an impediment to women’s empowerment, are the only effective tool for an organization like ALLY to secure the well-being of its clients and their communities:

If I really believe in human rights, if I really believe, human rights are for men, women, children, a Muslim, and a Jew alike. I don’t have the right to speak against anyone’s religion. . . . If one day, hopefully, I teach this [women’s empowerment] workshop in Afghanistan, what kind of weapon do you think I’ll use? Do you think I’ll have these pictures [of women on my PowerPoint]? I will reap the Quran. Don’t doubt this! I’ll reap the Quran. I’ll read it and read it and read it until I can take out facts that I can use for my work. I’m not going to attack their beliefs; I’ll trap them with their own trap. (Alborz, Psychologist)

These secular and nonreligious staff members did not mean to leave religion intact. Their goal was to challenge those aspects of religious beliefs that were tainted by patriarchal motivations:

In this journey [of being at ALLY], anything that is important for them is going to be questioned. They see that hejab is being questioned. . . . But the [important] thing is to ask “why.” If someone says your hair shouldn’t show, why? What’s the deal with that? Is it about a belief or is it a masculine controlling thing? [It’s different] if you say I want to fast or pray, whereas someone is forcing you to dress a certain way. (Omid, Managing Director)

Separating religion from patriarchy is the central theme of Islamic feminism (Moghadam 2002) and the scholarship and activism of feminists who strategically critique religion, whether it be Islam, Christianity, or Judaism, without intending to step outside of those traditions (Israel-Cohen 2012). Omid’s and Alborz’s narratives suggest a similar understanding of religion, where dominant interpretations of religious texts or practices are questioned for their patriarchal motivations. These workers perceived a different relationship between religion and patriarchy, arguing that ALLY’s feminist activism should entail developing in clients the ability to separate religion from patriarchy and to utilize a resonant religious discourse to advocate for women’s rights. Yet, it is important to note that these employees were not Islamic feminists in that they did not have any religious inclination or necessarily identify as feminist. These local elites were simply doubtful of the practicality of a secular and liberal education in a social context where ALLY’s clients lived. Many of the teachings, according to this group of staff, were disconnected from the practical realities of the clients’ lives and were merely a reflection of the desire and values of the cosmopolitan administrators of ALLY.

The disagreements between the cosmopolitan elite and the local elite at ALLY in many cases reflected the dilemma of resonance identified by Levitt and Merry (2009). While the cosmopolitan elite emphasize the universality of human rights to increase the power and legitimacy of their frame, the local actors often emphasize localization to increase the resonance of the human rights frame with existing ideologies or the practical realities that govern the lives of their constituents (Levitt and Merry 2009). Unlike the cosmopolitan elite, the local elite believe in a mode of feminist teaching that is context-specific, practical, and culturally sensitive. Teaching clients grand and uncompromising values of freedom and equality, they argue, has little practical productivity in a context where women lack the power to intervene and their communities value a different system of meaning. Their solution was bridging the gap between ALLY’s feminist ideals and the belief systems of clients and their communities.

We are searching online every night to see what kinds of work are being done around the world similar to ours. For example, I saw a [white] woman working in Africa wearing a headscarf, why? So that the society would accept her. The target population that is being educated accepts her like this. So she wears a headscarf. It doesn’t matter! What matters is exchanging information. In another context, I will have to wear a (revealing) top in order to say what I want to say. We shouldn’t be dogmatic toward anything. The more we bring ourselves closer to the target population’s context in terms of their religion, beliefs, and culture, the easier they will accept our words. . . . We need to create some kind of a common language so they would trust us. (Fatemeh, Foreign Affairs Personnel)

On various occasions, Fatemeh expressed her concern over the decisions of the cosmopolitan elite, who refused to take into consideration the symbolic meaning of self-representation as helpers. The local elite understood the importance of acknowledging the target population’s values, culture, and belief systems and were pessimistic about the impact of ALLY on clients if the young women could not see themselves in the women they were asked to model. The contentious character of interactions between the cosmopolitan and local elite and the discrepancy between their perceptions of empowerment became particularly evident after a sexuality workshop series and the performances of The Vagina Monologues described in the beginning of this chapter. Alborz, a middle-aged male psychologist, for instance, believed that much of the sexual education offered at ALLY was developed and designed for a Western audience and, without proper adaptation, was simply inappropriate for the Iranian cultural and social context.

[Sexuality] is a very sensitive topic. It’s not that we are sensitive, humans are sensitive to it. The world is sensitive. The fact that they [administrators] don’t see the cultural context is sometimes really bothersome to us. Even when you are working in America, background and social context are very valuable factors. You can even see that Jennifer Lopez dresses like a nun when she goes to certain places. It’s just so great to see how much they care about and study the context . . . sometimes these are big concerns for us. We can’t take a pre-made package and just take it from one context to another. (Alborz, Psychologist)

The staff’s call for adaptation and cultural resonance shows the perceived importance of choosing approaches that are deemed credible and salient by the target population. The closer the content of the program to the essential values and beliefs of a target population, the more likely they will be to embrace the new ideas. However, the call for cultural adaptation was not always perceived as credible by the cosmopolitan elite, who rightfully worried that some staff’s desire for “cultural resonance” meant they did not want to be challenged on their (patriarchal) views. The cosmopolitan elite believed that challenging dominant beliefs required aggressive methods and that the power of feminist programs lay in their radical quality. Shiva, a twenty-seven-year-old female employee and a former women’s rights activist, had a similar view, believing that the transformative quality of ALLY or any feminist initiative lay in its willingness to “courageously break social norms.” For this group of staff, remaining true to one’s feminist ideals and values should take precedence over people’s convenience or comfort. In response to my question about the perceived “radical” character of ALLY in clients’ communities and the subsequent backlash they have experienced, Maryam responded:

I don’t know how radical it is. ALLY is radical. You don’t even have to be radical. In the context of Iran, this is radical. But in my mind, it’s not. The girls always say here is like heaven. I tell them: This is not heaven; this is normal! That [life you live] is abnormal. In a normal life, they respect you and you can speak and criticize, and this is nothing extraordinary. What can I do if everything in Iran is radical? This might cause a problem at home, so what? What are we gonna do? Stop because of it? Eventually they have to learn that, like any family, you have to handle tradition and modernity, if you want to call it that. I don’t think it is modernity. I’m very radical compared to my mom too. She is my mom, and I’m living with her. She took a step forward and I took a step forward, and we finally met somewhere in between. We tell the girls not to hold a microphone and yell all the things you learn here because it will be bad for you. But at one point, we can’t really control it. She has to learn to handle this. In the meantime, some will perish too. It’s a way of life. (Maryam, Founder)

Although resonance with local norms is significant for the acceptance of new ideas, Myra Marx Ferree (2003) argues that resonant discourses are not as radical as nonresonant ones, and it is the desire to induce greater social change that compels some activists to adopt nonresonant frames. A resonant frame, in fact, can limit the possibility of long-term change due to its less challenging character, which often entails sacrificing ideals. The cosmopolitan elite’s insistence on their sexual education program, however, reflected their assumptions about the universality of liberal values of individualism, autonomy, choice, and bodily integrity. The cosmopolitan elites’ proximity to the global stage, where “universal” frameworks for women’s empowerment are developed through a lens that sees religion and tradition as fettering women’s agency, shaped the content of ALLY’s program. Moreover, a religious framework for gender justice might not have appealed to ALLY’s foreign donors, who valued liberal feminist ideals and traveled to Iran to witness the organization’s program firsthand. The local elite, grounded in the local context and in daily interaction with clients, noticed the impracticality of espousing uncompromising values of sexual autonomy for a target population embedded within a different cultural, economic, and political reality. However, in many cases, the local elite reproduced Orientalist and middle-class discourses that emphasized poor religious women’s false consciousness, reflecting the history of the development of Iranian feminism out of colonial discourses and class politics.

The administrators and the staff navigated competing demands and realities, which complicated their decision-making regarding the framework and scope of their educational program. While the cosmopolitan and local elite acknowledged the never-ending struggles created by poverty and structural inequalities in Iran, they did not always critically challenge their own assumptions about gender oppression and liberation. During the sexuality trainings at ALLY, the belief that sexual liberation is necessary for women’s empowerment stood in contrast to the local elite’s perception of the practical realities that governed Iran and the lives of marginalized women. These conflicts nevertheless generated important and vibrant conversations about gender oppression and liberation that are absent in government-sponsored organizations and initiatives in Iran. Despite its challenges and shortcomings, ALLY played an important role in revitalizing feminist debates while offering life-saving social services to marginalized women.

______________________

Portions of this chapter previously appeared as Fae Chubin, “Glocalizing Women’s Empowerment: Feminist Contestation and NGO Activism in Iran,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 49, no. 6: 715–744. © Fae Chubin 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241620947135.