7

The Symbolic Economy of Propriety

“The government and the law are mardsalar [patriarchal], we have got to stand against them,” Noshin, one of the newly admitted clients, said decisively during a creative writing class. “We have to start the movement from inside the smaller societies that are our families,” she continued. The discussion Hiva had started on wanting to be a boy had let to a lively discussion among the young women, who passionately shared their views on the relation between Hiva’s rejection of femininity and patriarchy. Only a few months into ALLY’s three-year journey and living at its dormitory, Hiva had changed considerably in appearance and style. Hiva began wearing loose shirts over their¹ baggy jeans and caps rather than a scarf to cover their newly cut short boyish hair. Wearing bold red lipstick that day during class, Hiva said they did not care that they wanted to be a boy and wear lipstick too. “I’ll be whoever I wanna be!” Hiva said indignantly. As I sat there and gazed at Hiva’s new look, I recalled our interaction during their first week at ALLY. I remembered Hiva’s long hair, their pink and glitter phone case, and their discomfort with revealing their ethnic identity when I asked where they came from. Looking away uncomfortably, Hiva had said they were from Mashhad. Mashhad is a city in the province of Khorasan, which borders Afghanistan and has a large Afghan population.² I later learned that Hiva’s response is a common one among Afghans living in Iran who fear revealing their stigmatized ethnic and national identity. Hiva’s Tehrani accent, commonly used by them and many young Afghans who were born and raised in Iran, was enough to stop anyone from further questioning. That day during class, I could see Hiva’s new confident attitude as they identified as “pesar nama,”³ explaining how their “eccentric character” had caused them a great deal of pain over the years. The other young women, however, had strong ideas about why Hiva felt trapped and ashamed in their female body: “You think being a girl is so horrible because of what our society is like,” Nasim, one of the clients, said confidently as she noticed the approving nods of the other women who began sharing different instances of women’s oppression. “Boys have a lot of freedom, but we can’t even choose to go on trips with our friends,” Mona said in support of Nasim’s claim. “We have to be home by a curfew when our brothers do whatever they want,” another client said before Noshin chimed in to argue that it is in fact the laws and the government that are mardsalar.

The young women’s analysis of Hiva’s rejection of femininity as being associated with patriarchy reflected the absence of larger social debates on the fluidity of gender identities and expressions. Hiva, however, did not reject any of their claims and got furious when one of the young women claimed that “being a woman is not that bad.” By that time, Noshin had begun, rather heatedly, to respond to classmates who were sharing their experiences of gender discrimination. “I’m not talking about any particular person, so please don’t take it personally, but we are all just big mouths, we protest verbally but don’t do anything about it.”

Noshin performed middle class exceptionally well. From her stylish clothing to her highlighted hair to her eloquent speaking, which reflected a strong sense of efficacy, she appeared to be a college-educated middle-class woman. Noshin’s remarks in class, however, did not sit well with Hiva. “I didn’t take what you said personally, but I’m not just a big mouth,” Hiva said while explaining that they act nonconforming “in spite of it all,” pointing to the challenges of stepping outside normative performances of femininity. For Hiva, their gender-bending practices—dressing in masculine attire and wearing lipstick—were already political acts of protest. For Noshin, however, protest meant an old-fashioned collective organizing of women against patriarchal laws; she recounted a recent women’s protest at a soccer stadium to lift the ban on women’s presence as an example of a real protest.

I use the heated conversation in the creative writing class between Hiva, Noshin, and the other young women to draw attention to a few important and interrelated modes of self-representation common among ALLY’s impoverished young clients. First, just like Hiva and Noshin, many clients transformed swiftly in appearance and style after joining the organization. The early morning routine at ALLY entailed a rather quick makeover for many of the young women; they replaced their black chador with colorful scarves, styling the hair that was now to be revealed from under a loose headscarf, and applied makeup and nail polish, all of which would come off before they left for the day. The inclusive and nonjudgmental atmosphere of ALLY allowed many clients like Hiva to show their nonnormative gender expressions in a space where they felt safe and enabled young women like Noshin to diverge from the conservative norms of ideal femininity that emphasize modesty. But the transformation I speak of here reflects more than the freedom to express one’s deeper personal desires. The longer they stayed at the organization, the more the young women resembled ALLY’s middle-class and secular staff in terms of the style of clothing, makeup, demeanor, lifestyle, and modes of speech. Was the new, secular appearance reflecting the young women’s adoption of the feminist ideals of the organization and their “enlightened” self or an aspiration to class mobility in a city characterized by class tensions and social exclusion?

Olszewska (2013) has critiqued a common trend in Iran studies—particularly the anthropology of urban youth culture—in which most social phenomena, such as lifestyle, style of clothing, and consumption patterns, are generally conceptualized as “resistance” to and “defiance” against an oppressive and Islamic regime. Olszewska warns against this trend of theorization, given that lifestyle and consumption patterns are endowed with symbolic values as status attributes in societies with shifting class configurations. Khosravi’s (2008) ethnography, while critiqued by Olszewska for carrying the analytical flaw of privileging resistance as a theoretical frame, clearly demonstrates that middle-class norms of respectability in Tehran are characterized by attempts to appear cosmopolitan, chic, ba-kelas, and open-minded, all through the consumption of expensive Western brands and the mockery of the working class for their bi-farhangi (lack of culture), being dehati (rural or village minded), or javad (an epithet that implies lack of taste). Given this larger social context, how can we best explain the efforts of this group of marginalized and impoverished young women to look like their middle-class teachers?

The second noticeable feature of the conversation that ensued in the creative writing class was how the clients’ modes of speech reflected an aspiration to the status of roshanfekr, or intellectual, which “involves projecting oneself as a sensitive but alienated observer, critical of what they may see as oppressive social convention” (Olszewska 2015: 186). As Hiva and Noshin’s debate in the creative writing class demonstrates, ALLY’s clients willingly participated in many discussions on gender oppression as critical observers of subjugating social norms. The figure of the intellectual emulated at ALLY was that of a liberal thinker concerned with a society’s cultural backwardness that leaves no room for personal autonomy. This mode of speech entailed heavy reliance on the discourses of gender oppression as explanatory of women’s life chances while purposefully withholding references to class and ethnic marginalization. The young women’s critique of gender inequality and the lack of personal autonomy and their call for mobilization and protest (bodily or collective) resembled a middle-class sense of efficacy that many of ALLY’s workers demonstrated. While Noshin’s reference to the women’s “big mouth” and “lack of action” might reflect their compounded agency, given their marginalization at the intersection of salient social categories of gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and citizenship, could their aspiration to the status of a critical intellectual with social efficacy reflect an aspiration for a symbolic capital and a dignified habitus?

Another noticeable change in clients was their adoption of a more secular lifestyle, which included having boyfriends and engaging in sexual relations outside marriage, despite the consequences of these practices in their conservative communities. While this was partly the result of the organization’s emphasis on sexual autonomy as empowerment, Olszewska argues that for lower-class women, premarital sexual relationships might not be an expression of resistance, as Mahdavi’s (2009) research suggests was the case for the Iranian youth who used their defiant sexual lifestyle as a means of protesting the regime. For the poor and the working class, sexual practices might also reflect a desire “to appear more worldly and cosmopolitan, or to tap into the perceived pleasures of a lifestyle that is seen as higher status, and which may be otherwise inaccessible. For girls from impoverished families, making themselves sexually available may be part of a strategy to access material goods or to find a higher status husband, a dream that so often turns into the nightmare of sexual exploitation” (Olszewska 2013: 853).

In this chapter, I reveal class and ethnic discourses that shaped young, impoverished clients’ self-representation in a middle-class space where their social mobility depended on performing middle-class respectability. This respectability, rooted in the history of the development of Iranian feminism alongside colonial relations and class politics, demands a defiant attitude toward norms of hejab and sexual modesty as well as conformity to the latest fashion trends. Iranian middle-class feminism, which primarily grew in the Pahlavi era, positioned the liberated woman in opposition to the veiled and subjugated zan-e sonati (traditional woman). Elite Iranian women’s self-alignment with Western cultural norms has historically occurred to claim an enlightened status and to situate themselves against the “backwardness” of the traditional and religious poor with lingering patriarchal attitudes (Naghibi 2007). Discourses of middle-class respectable femininity were manifested at ALLY in teachings about patriarchy where male domination was reduced to traditional cultural norms from which some societies and social groups have yet to escape. The figure of zan-e sonati—stuck in her traditional religious beliefs, veiled, prizing her virginity, and subjugated by her male relatives—was the one in need of empowerment and transformation into a liberal unveiled woman critical of oppressive cultural gender and sexual norms.

While previous studies have explained Iranian women’s badhejabi (improper hejab), sexual relations outside marriage, and high fashion in public as a form of resistance against the moral order defined by the government (Khosravi 2008; Mahdavi 2009; Bayat 2013), this study borrows from Olszewska (2013) and Manata Hashemi (2020) to add that the adoption of fashionable and secular lifestyles can also be attempts at upward class mobility and developing a dignified self in a classist society. Hashemi’s ethnography demonstrates that the practices of the working-class youth in Iran for the purpose of “saving face” help with increasing their stock of moral capital, which they can subsequently exchange for social and economic opportunities. While the transformations in the young women were commonly interpreted by the staff as a reflection of their newly empowered self, arguments here and in previous chapters aim to complicate this assumption by exploring a multiplicity of motivations in order to move past reductive dichotomies of empowered/subjugated or secular/religious in our analysis of gender in Muslim societies.

By utilizing Bourdieu’s (1997) concept of “symbolic capital,” I analyze clients’ transformation as an effort to construct “symbolic economies.” Bourdieu argues that “the structures of the social space (or of fields) shape bodies by inculcating in them, through the conditionings associated with a position in that space, the cognitive structures that these conditionings apply to them” (1997: 183). These cognitive structures are a form of practical knowledge that emerges bodily between the players in the field. Bourdieu argues that people have practical and bodily knowledge of their present and potential position in any given social space, and this governs their sense of placement and experience of the place occupied. This also determines their efforts to behave in ways that would allow them to maintain their relational position (“pulling rank”) or to stay within it (“knowing one’s place”) (Bourdieu 1997: 184). In her ethnography of white and Mexican-American working-class high school students in California’s Central Valley, Julie Bettie uses the concept of “symbolic economy” to show how hairstyles, clothes, shoes, and the color of lipstick and nail polish were “employed to express group membership as the body became a resource and a site on which difference was inscribed” (2003: 62). In cultural contexts stratified by class and race, the symbolic economy of youth culture is undoubtedly marked by race and class exclusion.

Given that I did not interview clients about their transformed style and speech, this chapter does not aim to investigate individual motivations behind these transformations. Instead, I place my observations of clients’ changing self-expression in their social context to reveal the intersecting gender, class, and ethnic discourses of respectability that coordinate people’s everyday actions and are reproduced through them. Rather than examining women’s secular or conservative look merely as a reflection of their gender ideologies or a defiant subjectivity, I show how constructing a dignified self for women marginalized at the intersection of class and ethnic inequalities requires constant self-editing and embodying conflicting systems of meaning. Arguments in this chapter do not supplant but supplement data provided in Chapters 5 and 6, where I demonstrated that clients’ clear awareness and harsh critiques of middle-class privileges shaped ALLY’s program through a visible class consciousness. Here, I simply reveal the other side of the coin—clients’ attempts to navigate conflicting and exclusionary social and cultural systems through self-expression in the hopes of increasing their stock of symbolic capital.

The Symbolic Economy of Style

The summer heat rushed us down the stairs and into the basement of the building that was commonly used for art workshops. Allocation of our regular class space to a two-day workshop had brought our community development class to the basement, a space kept cool by two large fans around which clients had quickly gathered to drop their scarves and enjoy the breeze. The walls of the large room were covered with sketches by the young women and the floors with clay sculptures, many still in the making. Before getting the chance to settle around the large rectangular table in the middle, Zahra, a seventeen-year-old Iranian client, began to tell Barmak, the teacher, that she could no longer work on the community project she had chosen for the class. Worried about an area in her neighborhood that was frequented by children and had recently become the dumping site of the neighbors’ waste, she had planned to take on the task of making her neighborhood cleaner and safer for children. The municipality’s closest trash bins were located a few alleys away. Concerned about the health of the young children playing in the area and done with its pungent smell, Zahra had planned on dragging one of the trash bins from another alley and placing it at the dump site in the dark of the night. After learning of her plan, her mother and brothers were quick to forbid her, as they were concerned about her safety in a bad neighborhood late at night. Disappointed, she turned to Barmak and the girls for help. Barmak’s suggestion to call the municipality and report the problem was quickly dismissed by Zahra. However, she seemed to like a classmate’s suggestion that she talk to the clergy of the mosque in their neighborhood, as his words would likely be taken more seriously if he were to instruct the community to find a solution. Mina, another classmate, expressed her concern about Zahra’s legitimacy as a nonconforming teenage girl in the eyes of the Imam: “If she goes to the Imam looking like this, the first thing he’s going to say is, ‘You fix your hejab, young lady!’” The girls laughed at the way Mina mimicked the Imam as having a thick voice, holding his head down, and frowning while refusing to look at Zahra.

Mina was pointing to Zahra’s new look at ALLY; like the appearance of many other young women at the organization, Zahra’s had changed considerably over time. This entailed abandoning the more conservative norms of modesty in favor of a look that was more fashionable in Tehran among the secular middle class with whom they now were in contact nearly every day. The transformation was a noticeable one and reflected aesthetic standards that rejected dark and long coverings in favor of short, tight, and colorful ones and a sheer and loose headscarf on the head that showed their styled hair underneath. The government’s attempts to control women’s clothing in public through arrests and fines and its imposed definition of respected Muslim femininity (as modest in appearance and dressing in loose, dark, and long clothing) means that Iranian women’s badhejabi and their colorful, immodest, and stylish appearance are, in many ways, manifestations of their defiance against the government’s imposition of its moral order. This analysis is shared by many scholars, including Khosravi (2013), Mahdavi (2009), and Bayat (2013). As Olszewska argues, such analysis of resistance has limitations: “Cultural dispositions—the consumption of certain products, the profession of certain aesthetic tastes and ideological beliefs, or the practicing of certain lifestyles—are endowed with values as status attributes and may be used as chips in the high-stakes game of social mobility” (2013: 843). Hashemi’s (2020) ethnographic study of the lower-class youth in Iran demonstrates that the poor and working classes spend a great deal of effort to “save face” and escape the stigmatization of their identity by appearing middle class. The style adopted by the marginalized clients of ALLY was as an emulation of the cosmopolitan trend in Tehran among the upper and middle classes, whose sense of fashion and understanding of hejab are formed by their transnational ties and exposure to Western fashion and beauty trends. The entanglement of feminist discourses (women’s defiance toward imposed norms of femininity) with middle-class norms of respectability (adopting the latest fashion trends) meant that the clients’ transformation in appearance could be read as the expected conversion from zan-e sonati (a traditional woman) to zan-e modern (a modern woman).

I witnessed many daily efforts to accurately perform the norms of respectable middle-class femininity through the aforementioned style of clothing and makeup. The women’s transformed appearance, I was told, had made some visiting donors doubt the financial need of the clients. For many of these women, the distance between the norms of self-representation in their communities and the norms of respectability at ALLY was one to navigate skillfully. Knowing that secular and middle-class norms of self-representation were rejected within their home communities, many clients embodied middle-class discourses of respectability part time. The other group of young women who maintained their new appearance in their home communities often struggled with acceptance and respect, and their sexual morality was questioned due to their immodest appearance.

Mina’s remark about Zahra’s appearance was to remind her that her transformed look would pose a challenge outside ALLY if she were to seek out the help of a local Imam. Zahra, who had found the clergy’s influence to be the only realistic solution to the problem of waste disposal in her neighborhood, said, in an indifferent tone, that she would wear a chador when meeting the Imam. Barmak, a young college-educated man in his twenties, taught courses on community development and creative writing and was always interested in engaging clients in important conversations about morality and social attitudes. That day, I was taken aback by how Barmak was quick to reject Zahra’s willingness to wear a chador as unethical. He was quick to argue that “one doesn’t need to be a hypocrite to do something good.” Soon, I noticed that I was not the only one to feel this way, as clients furiously jumped in to convince Barmak that navigating spaces with conflicting norms is not an instance of hypocrisy. Ahoo, a seventeen-year-old client, reminded Barmak that she wore her chador because of her father but took it off as soon as she left home each day. She asked Barmak, in a defiant tone, if he found it right to call her a hypocrite. Ahoo was clearly offended by Barmak’s comment. I had heard him make a similar statement in another class about “those women who wear their makeup in the subway and are different people at home.” For Barmak, remaining true to one’s beliefs and values despite potential opposition was an important indication of empowerment and autonomy. For these marginalized women, however, such privileged ethical bounds meant risking further invisibility and stigmatization. “It’s not hypocrisy,” Ahoo repeated after every claim made by Barmak, with a tone that suggested her confidence was turning into frustration. Mina, uninterested in the conversation, reminded Zahra that she could wear the chador out of respect for the Imam and to simply make him hear her. Zahra, also looking frustrated, said that the “hejab thing” did not really matter to her and that she would wear a long manto and cover her hair to meet with the Imam. “I’m not sure anymore, I might be wrong,” Barmak responded, sounding puzzled after nearly an hour of heated discussion.

It was not difficult to see Ahoo’s perspective and to realize the necessity of conforming to the norms of respectability to maintain social status. Seeing her own acts as simultaneous practices of compliance and resistance, Ahoo would not let anyone define her efforts to build a dignified self as an act of hypocrisy. Instead, aware of the conflicting social systems of values, she realized the thin line between defiance and becoming an outcast. As Holly Wardlow (2006) has argued, unfettered acts of resistance can bolster hegemonic structures when stigmatization throws one’s very status as a person into question. Yet, Barmak’s argument also carried the assumption that women’s new look at ALLY reflected their “true” and autonomous self. Assuming that the secular lifestyle adopted by clients reflected their newfound freedom from the pernicious control of their families ignores the dynamic social and political forces (urban youth culture, class and ethnic discrimination, the hegemony of liberal feminism, etc.) that were formative of the subjectivities that appeared as defiant and autonomous. In fact, the ease with which the young women changed their modes of self-expression at ALLY and at home and their nonchalant attitude toward wearing a chador to meet the Imam demonstrated an ambivalence toward these changing modes of self-representation. Hashemi’s (2020) research on lower-class youth in Iran demonstrates that public performances of normative modesty in conservative communities, while perceived as submissive behavior, can allow marginalized youth to articulate agentic selves by increasing their moral capital and carving a socioeconomic space. The establishment of a good reputation in their communities, in fact, would lead to small social and economic gains. Hashemi’s respondents did not experience the kind of tension that we assume Iranian youth do due to contradictions between their “performative front” and their “private self,” neither did they understand their strategic performance as a form of deception. In fact, striving to be judged positively through self-editing enabled them to feel true to themselves by building a social character that “live[s] in a good way” (Hashemi 2020: 154). While Iranian youth, following the revolution, have experienced a figurative split between their public and private selves and the notion of saving face in the West has negative connotations of covering one’s “true self,” the process of self-editing is not unique to Iran or the poor. All cultural systems demand conformity to socially acceptable norms that may or may not coincide with what people choose for themselves (Hashemi 2020). In fact, aspects of the public and private self may overlap as sanctioned codes of conduct are internalized and seen as an important part of the self (Hashemi 2020).

While maintaining a conservative look in their neighborhoods could increase their stock of moral capital, outside their home communities, ALLY’s clients could see that gaining access and belonging to middle-class social spaces demanded a different mode of self-representation and that this transformation could grant them social status and opportunities for more income. Some clients, in fact, repeatedly complained about the special treatment certain clients received for looking and acting in ways that pleased ALLY’s teachers and administrators. While I did not notice such discriminatory behavior, this common perception among clients reveals the pressure felt at ALLY to project an empowered persona. As explained in previous chapters, embodying a secular middle-class habitus was perceived by ALLY’s staff as a sign of empowerment and progress. Adopting middle-class norms of respectable femininity as well as conservative discourses of modest femininity allowed for the cultivation of symbolic economies capable of granting clients a dignified status in the two distinct spaces they frequented. While navigating contradictory discourses of respectability, clients resisted the dominant accounts that would further stigmatize them as deceitful or submissive for inhabiting conflicting social systems. Hence, the young women’s appearance and style cannot be simply examined as a manifestation of their defiant predispositions, the repression of their will by their conservative families, or their liberal gender and sexual norms. Adding class and social status to this analysis offers greater insight into clients’ agency and their motivations for modeling their middle-class teachers in lifestyle or maintaining a religious look in their communities.

Performing Privilege

I had not seen Nasim for two days. The week before, she had asked me to help her write a proposal for ALLY’s managing team to request funds for conducting a workshop on “violence against women” in her neighborhood. After taking the same workshop at ALLY, she was feeling compelled to share her knowledge on the subject with women in her community and later in Afghanistan, to which she and many other Afghan women spoke of yearning to return one day. Having crafted a proposal with her, I was excited to hear about the managing team’s decision. After lunch, I finally saw Nasim coming out of the social workers’ office with teary eyes and in a neck brace. I could not ask what happened, as she was being led upstairs by a group of social workers. I went to a class where I knew I would find Samira, one of Nasim’s close Afghan friends. “We fought in the subway with a crazy woman, she picked a fight with us and called us harze [whore]!” Samira said laughingly, alleging that the woman kept calling them “sluts” and then pulled Nasim’ hair, injuring her neck. I did not probe her more, but I was quite confident that she was not telling me the whole story. After a few minutes, I was able to piece that day’s events together: That day, the Afghan women were more distant and reserved, and I remembered overhearing the conversation of a group of Iranian girls having lunch at the table next to me. In whispers, they discussed an incident that entailed a women yelling out “Afghani ha-ye Kasif [you dirty Afghanis], Harchi mikeshim az dast-e shomast [all our problems are your doings].” I realized Nasim had become a victim of another hate crime against Afghans in Iran, which she confirmed when I spoke to her after class. I was confused about why Samira had hidden the biggest piece of the puzzle from me. When I heard Samira tell the story in another class and again focus on the gendered nature of the attack (being called a whore) and not its ethnic nature (being also called a dirty Afghani), I knew there was more to it.

An unwillingness to disclose one’s ethnic or national identity was only an issue among the incoming Afghan clients of ALLY. Those who were part of ALLY for years knew that ethnic discrimination was rejected at ALLY—although some clients had accused certain staff members of being prejudiced. The longer they stayed at ALLY, the more comfortable Afghan women were with discussing their ethnic marginalization, as was the case for Nasim, Samira, and their cohort. As I showed in Chapter 6, Afghan clients shared their experiences of ethnic discrimination and victimization openly in some classrooms, reminding the staff and Iranian clients of their ethnic privileges. Yet they also performed middle-class Tehrani norms of accent and speech, speaking Dari only among themselves and in private settings. Their performances of femininity (choice of attire and makeup) and class (shopping and consumption patterns) would often intertwine with those of ethnicity (accent and dialect). Yet, at times, the young women’s performances of middle-class Tehrani femininity entailed a particular privileged demeanor and modes of speech that ignored class and ethnic inequality. Samira’s refusal to disclose the ethnic nature of Nasim’s victimization was similar to many other instances of careful, well-crafted performances of privilege I had witnessed that would allow clients to embody a dignified habitus. This performance of privilege often entailed refusing to share one’s ethnic and class marginalization by emphasizing the gendered aspect of their victimization. Here I argue that clients’ rhetorical and discursive strategies can be understood as the cultivation of certain cultural dispositions as markers of higher status—attempts to signify a privileged status by not seeing class or ethnic inequality, as their teachers often did not.

The interaction of another group of women illustrates this strategic performance. Following a passionate discussion about the public harassment of Afghan women, Mona, one of the Iranian clients, shared her own story of being disrespected in public, claiming that such experiences were not unique to Afghan women. “One day, I was on the subway, and two women started fighting. I jumped in to say something,” Mona said, “and one of the women yelled out: You shut up! Who do you think you are to open your mouth?” Mona described her experience to claim that public harassment and dismissal are experiences shared by many women, not just Afghans. The teacher asked Mona to reflect on what had triggered the woman’s disrespectful reaction. Hesitant to respond, Mona said, “Hmm . . . I don’t know, but I didn’t used to wear makeup back then and I didn’t try to look nice.” Mona’s working-class appearance, still evident despite her efforts to wear makeup, had likely been the cause of her rude public dismissal. Her references to not wearing makeup and not looking nice also reveal her awareness of the importance of performing a respectable middle-class feminine persona in public if one is to be granted a voice, yet she associated the experience with her lack of a proper feminine performance rather than classism. Ziba, another Iranian client, interjected to share a similar story, revealing how she and her family were mocked in public when wearing chadors for “looking different.” It seemed to me again that Ziba’s insecurity about wearing a chador reflected the experiences of lower-class chadori women in upper-class spaces, since working-class neighborhoods are still marked by black chadors, stereotypical displays of humble classes and religious piety. “Looking different” for wearing a chador was an invisible reference to one’s exclusion for not embodying respectable secular middle-class femininity in Tehran, where being modern, cosmopolitan, and fashionable defined who belonged and who was pushed to the margins. The discursive dismissal of class inequality and the association of public degradation with “problems of women” can be best understood when exclusionary discourses of class and ethnicity are examined. These discursive strategies can allow impoverished women to refuse to bolster their marginalization by acknowledging it. It was, after all, their middle-class teachers who similarly and regularly refused to see the ethnic and class dimensions of women’s struggles by constructing universal conceptions of womanhood and patriarchy. By doing the same, clients could dissociate from the stigma of being poor and construct their selves as dignified (yet oppressed) women.

Given Iran’s long history of monarchic rule and elaborate court rituals, “status recognition remains encoded in, and a crucial part of, language, comportment and social etiquette, persisting after the revolution to an ‘extraordinary degree’” (Olszewska 2013: 850). Even though the revolutionary government emerged with the claim of establishing Islamic economic justice and guarding the dignity of the mostaz’afin (dispossessed) and framed the pursuit of profit as exploitative and evil, Iran has become characterized by a neoliberal political economy that encourages profit-making investments, reduces social welfare, and privatizes resources and social services. In the process, the Islamic revolutionary discourse has changed, as evidenced by its capitalist and consumerist culture (Olszewska 2013). Class and status are major occupations in everyday discourses in Iran (Olszewska 2013; Khosravi 2008), and the consumption of expensive Western brands remains the key attribute of being recognized as ba-kelas. Meanwhile, the lower classes in Iran with aspirations for higher status encounter snobbery, prejudice, and humiliation at the hands of the upper class. As argued by Hashemi (2020), for the lower class, the risk of losing face hinges on being exposed as poor. In this context, posturing through manipulation of one’s physical appearance, mannerisms, and modes of speech is an effective means of hiding one’s stigmatized social identities and building a dignified habitus as a form of symbolic capital. The experiences of Mona and Ziba reveal the consequences of losing face in public when one fails to present oneself as “respectable.” Associating their experiences of victimization with their poverty when retelling their stories of exclusion would have exposed their stigmatized identity. Given the shame associated with poverty, I noticed the young women’s efforts to save face in front of one another by creating a hierarchy among themselves in terms of their access to resources, knowledge about what is in fashion, and references to the relatively higher status of their neighborhoods.

It is worth noting again that many of the clients had a clear awareness of their ethnic and class struggles and often problematized the privilege of teachers who ignored the structural effects of inequality. But demanding respect, in public and at ALLY, required constructing universal accounts of oppressed womanhood and presenting themselves as women untouched by inequalities that separated them from the middle-class women they aspired to appear as. They evoked class inequality and economic justice in certain contexts while continuously aspiring to a higher status by performing middle class, bodily and discursively, in other settings. For instance, when asked about their impression of ALLY and its objectives, the young women noted how the organization had helped them to “gain confidence in being a woman,” how they needed to “know their rights as women,” and how ALLY had shown them that “it’s not like the past with patriarchy, when only men had rights; women can enter the society as well.” What struck me each time I heard such accounts is the seemingly purposeful dismissal of poverty, racism, or the immigration laws that had created the level of marginalization that brought these women to ALLY. After all, the middle-class female staff there did not need the same services offered by the organization and had already “entered the society” alongside their male counterparts.

The history of women’s rights activism in Iran has allowed women to rightfully associate their underachievement with the oppressive and patriarchal policies of the Islamic government rather than personal shortcomings. The biopolitical management of women’s bodies by the state, gender segregation of certain work and educational spaces, and the persistence of misogynistic laws have been largely and publicly discussed since 1979. Speaking out loud about women’s oppression has become an acceptable and expected signifier of an educated and progressive woman. This manner of speech is particularly embraced by women’s empowerment programs, which encourage such a feminist outlook. Sharing their ethnic or class stigmatization, however, only reinforced women’s stigmatized identities, particularly in a context where staff had adopted a liberal feminist discourse that did not equally problematize class inequality and ethnic oppression. As such, clients frequently abandoned their intersectional feminism in favor of performing middle-class modes of speech (e.g., referring to the poor in the third person or sharing their desire for “helping the poor”), speaking highly of education, and discussing gender oppression solely in terms of patriarchal cultural norms or laws. The Afghan clients similarly distanced themselves from the stigma of their ethnicity and poverty by making statements such as “not all Afghans are poor and dirty,” pointing to the respectability of those Afghans who have embraced the norms of the Tehrani middle class. As Olszewska’s research on Afghan refugees in Iran also demonstrates, a microprocess of class differentiation was taking place when those Afghans with newly acquired cultural capital and middle-class cultural dispositions were distancing themselves from those who were deprived of both cultural and financial capital. While resisting exclusion by countering stereotypes, the young women avoided one system of power while assenting to another and creating other hierarchies to carve out a dignified status. An examination of these women’s approaches only in terms of gender performances, their feminist sensibility, or class strategies fails to account for the subjective ambivalence of people who engage in these acts (Ortner 1995) or the internal hierarchies within subaltern groups. This reveals that separating resistance from compliance is in fact more difficult than many studies on resistance tend to argue (Ortner 1995).

Performing Entitlement

My mental picture of overtly grateful young women who felt they owed their livelihood to the kindness of a charity organization was crushed on the first day of my ethnographic fieldwork, when I was told by Marva that the girls have proven to be por tavagho (demanding). “I don’t like delsoozi [pity] for the girls; they don’t need it and it only makes them por tavagho!” Marva explained as she described her initial feelings of delsoozi when she began her work at ALLY and learned about the girls’ startling problems. She said those feelings made the girls expect too much and think they were the only ones who had problems. “Now I tell them everyone has problems!” Marva said firmly. I was shocked as I listened to Marva’s cold remarks, as I knew with certainty, and only after a short while of watching her interact with the clients, that she cared deeply about them and their struggles. Soon, I saw with my own eyes what Marva was referring to, as I encountered many unhappy young women who continuously complained about the classes, the teachers, the behavior of the staff, the quality of the food and services offered at ALLY, the decisions made by the administrators, and the lack of allocation of resources to the areas of their interest. I described some of these complaints in Chapter 5, when I examined clients’ frustration with the privileged approach of the staff to empowerment. Of interest here are the language and tone with which such complaints were expressed by the subaltern women who were seeking resources at an organization like ALLY.

Many of the criticisms were perceived as ghor zadan (nagging) by the staff. Rather than pleading with the staff or “managing their expectations,” as Marva expected the clients to do, the young women complained in a tone that reflected a sense of privilege and entitlement. I had heard other employees speak similarly of the growing “self-centered” attitude of the young women, who believed they were entitled to more and more resources from the organization. I could see that making sense of clients’ growing negative attitude had become an everyday interpretive task for the staff; I heard them attempt to explain such behavior by referencing the women’s young age and their “typical teenage attitude.” Others explained this behavior as a form of confusion experienced by women who had only been granted a voice for the first time at ALLY. Many argued that such behavior was understandable and served as practice for developing more articulated critiques of their social environment.

Vijayendra Rao and Paromita Sanyal have examined the role of poverty and its attendant habitus as they shape deliberations in spaces where “various unequal groups come together in a highly stratified social context to exercise their voice” (2010: 147). In their study on public meetings in Indian village democracies, where villagers made decisions regarding budget allocations, Rao and Sanyal (2010) demonstrate how the discursive style of the upper-caste members of the villages was different from that of the poor, low-caste villagers, who employed a fawning and pleading tone with demonstrations of helplessness. Rao and Sanyal show how groups’ varying economic, social, and cultural capital determine “who speaks, what they say, and how they speak” (2010: 152). In this sense, we can identify a link between culture and poverty not through the “culture of poverty” theories of the 1960s but by seeing the connection of economic and educational deprivation with cultural capital and discursive style.

While shaped by inequalities of power, ALLY was a space that could give rise to a community of citizens with a newly discovered voice. The staff repeatedly encouraged the young women to use their voice, to be jasoor (courageous), and to demand their rights. This space allowed clients to discard, albeit momentarily, the stigma of their marginalized identities and to slip into the identity of citizens with dignity who could demand rights and services. While the process of complaining and making demands seemed ordinary on the surface, it enabled marginalized groups to claim a sense of equal recognition as dignified members of society (Rao and Sanyal 2010). Clients’ complaints about the quality of food and the behavior of some staff and their request for more decision-making power over the allocation of resources were expressions of the politics of dignity—a demand to be recognized as social and political equals deserving of improving their material well-being.

The boundary-testing actions of the poor are skills developed and cultivated in spaces where they can discover new chances of participation (Rao and Sanyal 2010). At ALLY, “nagging” and “complaining” remained the central character of clients’ expression of discontent and means of enforcing change at the organization. The demanding attitude of the clients and their refusal to accept anything other than full respect and a position of mutuality with the staff—an attitude likely not tolerated outside of ALLY—were performances of privilege and entitlement as a means of demanding a dignified status. All these small and seemingly insignificant attitudes can add up to tangible and significant outcomes in the high-stakes game of status performance and mobility (Olszewska 2013: 860). Annette Lareau’s study (2011) shows how middle-class children learn to assume a position of equality and mutuality in relation to authority figures, which enables them to demand and receive services in various institutions, particularly schools. The growing entitled attitude of ALLY’s clients was developed within a space keen on cultivating a middle-class habitus in the young women (see Chapter 5) and in the context of a “women’s empowerment” program that encouraged participants to “demand their rights.” As shown in Chapter 6, the young women continued to problematize inequality by explaining it as a form of injustice in which those who are privileged (staff) are complicit. In doing so, they questioned the dominant perceptions of themselves as cases of pity or charity who relied on the generosity of benevolent NGO actors. Rather than asking, they demanded quality services as rightful recipients of social services in an unjust society.

The young women in my study performed middle class by adopting a secular and fashionable style of dress and makeup and a feminist language that emphasized women’s universal and cultural oppression. Performing middle class through a rhetorical dismissal of class and ethnic inequality and an assertive mode of relationship with the staff based on mutuality was common among subaltern women, both Iranian and Afghan, who wished to benefit from, albeit temporarily, taking on a dignified habitus. In this chapter, I have placed my observations in conversation with more recent studies on class and ethnic inequality in Iran that encourage an intersectional analysis of gender, where inequalities of gender, race, class, and citizenship are not treated as separate categories of analysis. Rather than examining individual motivations behind each mode of self-representation, I have revealed the institutional discourses that necessitate certain modes of self-representation for building a dignified status in a highly stratified society. By doing so, I have aimed to demonstrate the significance of adding class, ethnicity, and nationality to our examination of the transformation many participants embody in women’s empowerment programs.