2

Women, Class, and Citizenship in Iran

Tehran, the capital of Iran for more than two centuries, has become a giant city in the Middle East, with a population of fourteen million. Tehran’s history of urban development and immigration and its high population density make two realities readily apparent when one arrives at the city. First, high air pollution and traffic congestion are most noticeable at first blush. Second, there is a visible divide of class apparent in the architecture and construction of the city as well as the appearance of its people. Class disparity, in fact, has become the most salient expression of the city:

Because of its location, Tehran grew along a sloping north-south axis. The resulting difference in altitude reflects the socioeconomic hierarchy, making the north-south duality a salient feature of the urban structure. The north, with its green spaces, more moderate climate, and beautiful vistas, is the home of the affluent Tehranis; the south belongs to the lower middle class and poor. Urban morphology in the north is well planned and characterized by wide, tree-lined streets, large houses, and lower density of population. . . . The class division between north and south has in turn produced a “status division.” The rural origins and ethnic backgrounds of the migrant poor in the southern suburbs have set them off culturally and socially from the Westernized urban rich, who stigmatize the poor as dehaati (rural/backward), and hamal or amaleh (literally unskilled construction laborers; see Bayat 1997: 30–32). Stereotypes also represent south Tehranis as traditional and religious. (Khosravi 2008: 59–60)

Understanding ALLY and the class and ethnic dimensions of its women’s empowerment program requires understanding the sociopolitical context of Iran. It also demands investigating the modalities of Tehran’s urban culture and the growing class and ethnic inequalities that are formative of the subjectivities of ALLY’s middle-class Tehrani workers and its impoverished ethnic-minority noncitizen clients.

The process of urban development and modernization (i.e., Westernization) began in Iran in the 1930s with Reza Shah Pahlavi; it was later intensified by his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, in the 1960s and led to the rapid industrialization of Iranian cities. Mohammad Reza Shah’s intensive program of socioeconomic development, funded by rising oil revenues, turned Tehran into the destination of many immigrants from rural areas and small towns—a migration process that increased dramatically after Shah’s mismanaged 1963 Land Reform program (Bayat 2007). The economic deprivation experienced by agricultural laborers following the Land Reform was the reason for their mass migration to urban areas, where they hoped to gain higher-paying city jobs and greater access to amenities. Most of the immigrants, being ethnic minorities, poor, and low-wage workers, had to settle in the slums south of Tehran (Khosravi 2008). The extensive and rapid demographic growth of cities such as Tehran resulted in the spread of slum areas with substandard housing and a lack of essential services and facilities.

Anti-Shah mobilizations of the 1970s were directed at Shah’s poor economic and social policies, the repression of dissent, and his rapid Westernization projects, which were perceived as facilitating imperialism. By 1978, many of the urban poor, particularly young men, had become politically mobilized largely through Islamic revolutionary committees. In his taped sermons, Ayatollah Khomeini, then an exiled cleric, condemned Shah’s failure to attend to the housing needs of the urban poor or provide basic amenities for the rural poor. He proposed that Islam represents the zagheneshinan (slum-dwellers) and the mostaz’afin (dispossessed) and not the kakhneshianan (palace-dwellers). The growing wealth inequalities, worsening living conditions, and lack of employment opportunities had aggravated the new migrant urban poor, who were encouraged by Khomeini’s populist promises and came to join the opposition forces that overthrew the monarchy and ushered in the Islamic Republic in 1979 (Hashemi 2020).

The establishment of the Islamic government was soon followed by eight years of war with Iraq (1980–1988) and the subsequent shortfalls in oil revenues, which brought on an economic crisis. The Islamic government attempted to consolidate its power by expanding its reach among the poor and those most impacted by the effects of the war economy. Among the measures taken by the state were distributing ration cards, instituting price control, subsidizing basic food commodities such as sugar, rice, and oil, providing indirect subsidies for electricity and piped water to rural and urban poor, and expanding the scope of social welfare institutions. The state also engaged in expanding the infrastructure, building schools, roads, and health clinics in small villages and the countryside, all of which gave the lower classes greater access to basic goods and social services.

The presidency of Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani following the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 and the death of Khomeini in 1989 ushered in a new “pragmatic” approach to development that aimed to integrate Iran within the global economy through liberalization policies by requesting technical assistance and credit approval from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Similar to what occurred in other countries subjected to the structural adjustment policies of the IMF, the neoliberal economic model encouraged capital accumulation, consumerism, and development centered on growth and a reduction of public spending. Iran’s move toward a global market economy expanded the urbanization and urban migration process that had already intensified in Tehran due to the settling of refugees from the Iran-Iraq War as well as those displaced by war in Afghanistan. While such policies led to the growth of the war-drained economy, it also led to the rapid growth of highly affluent social groups. A drop in oil revenues in 1991 and a sharp rise in non-oil imports strained the economy, triggered a trade deficit, and increased Iran’s foreign debt (Ehsani 1994). The subsequent austerity measures of Hashemi-Rafsanjani, which entailed cutting subsidies to large families, led to rapid inflation and unemployment that particularly impacted the urban poor.

While Mohammad Reza Khatami’s presidency (1997–2005) expanded the public discourse on civil society, rights, and social justice, Khatami’s welfare expansion and social insurance program remained limited in addressing the needs of the lower economic classes working in the informal economic sector (Hashemi 2020). Following Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s footsteps, Khatami implemented economic reconstruction programs that encouraged neoliberal economic policies and the privatization of state-dominated industries such as the telecommunication and power-generation sectors. Despite the economic growth experienced during this time, high rates of unemployment persisted while class inequalities increased. The presidency of a conservative and populist politician, Mahmood Ahmadinejad, in 2005 came with the promise of supporting the poor and upwardly aspirant social groups, who expected that the state development efforts would facilitate their social mobility. Although Ahmadinejad initially supported large-scale state subsidies for gasoline and food, the guidance of the IMF led to a blended populist/private economic model whereby state-owned enterprises were privatized and state subsidies for petrol and essential services were cut, though his administration claimed that the savings would be distributed among low-income individuals (Hashemi 2020). In his second term, the recommendations of the IMF and global financial organizations resulted in a subsidy reform plan according to which all subsidies were to phase out by 2015. The all-time-high inflation and unemployment during Ahmadinejad’s presidency and the inadequacy of his plan of monthly cash transfers to households to alleviate the economic burden of the cut subsidies resulted in the increasing indebtedness of people who sought loans from employers or banks to supplement their income (Hashemi 2020).

In June 2010, U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act, which was signed into law by President Barack Obama to increase restrictions on Iran’s oil export and other Iranian-origin imports as part of a campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. These sanctions and even stricter revisions in 2013 had a significant debilitating impact on Iran’s economy. Although the signing of the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2015 generated hope among the Iranian population that the war-like economy caused by the sanctions would improve, the U.S. withdrawal from the deal in 2018 led to a significant decline in oil exports, the shrinking of the economy, significant inflation, and a lack of access to necessities for large segments of the population.

The postrevolutionary state’s departure from a welfare state critical of consumer capitalism to one that embraced neoliberal integration in the global economy has worsened economic inequalities while promoting a consumerist culture centered on individualistic strategies for economic success. Shahram Khosravi’s (2008) ethnography demonstrates that young Tehranis engage in a global youth culture characterized by the consumption of Western products and culture, a trend that began decades ago following Mohammad Reza Shah’s modernization project (1941–1979). The wave of Islamization that followed this period in the 1980s, with its critique of capitalist consumerism and the goal of reviving Islamic tradition, created a contentious duality of sonat (tradition) and tajadod (modernity). While the Islamic government has focused on “protecting” the youth from the “cultural invasion” of the West, transnational connections forged by Iranians in diaspora, access to a globalizing media (satellite and internet), and the increased mobility of cultural products have worked as a counterforce against the Islamic government’s ideological agenda. The intensification of transnational connections, increasing wealth inequalities, and Iran’s long-lasting class and status hierarchies have consolidated a classist culture in which the middle- and upper-class Tehranis pride themselves on being well educated, egalitarian, and freethinking, with farhang-e balatar (literally having a “higher culture,” often in comparison to the traditional working class; see Khosravi 2008). These characteristics are often emphasized to embolden the constructed binary between the “cultured” middle and upper class and the “traditional, village-minded,” working-class southern Tehranis or shahrestanis.¹ While Khosravi interprets the embracing of the Western culture by the youth as a manifestation of their defiance against the imposed order of an anti-Western and repressive government, Iran’s history of Westernization and Iranians’ long history of internalized inferiority vis-à-vis the West can best explain the character of this youth culture (Olszewska 2015).

In the following chapters, I demonstrate how Iran’s class and ethnic discourses shape assumptions about women’s empowerment and progress. I show how middle-class staff and impoverished ethnic-minority clients of ALLY resisted, contested, and reproduced these discourses through their advocacy for or attempts at constructing a dignified self. Before doing so, in the remainder of this chapter, I place ALLY’s women’s empowerment program in the larger history of the development of feminist discourses in Iran along colonial relations and class politics and in response to changing political opportunities. I also elaborate on the growing trend of the NGO-ization of social movements, the state’s immigration policies toward Afghans, and the limitations of the current literature on agency, resistance, and social change.

The History of Feminism in Iran

In Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran, Nima Naghibi (2007) demonstrates the connection between the development of feminist discourses in Iran and the history of imperial expansion and class oppression. Her literary study of Western women’s writings about their travels to Persia² traces the dominance of liberal feminist discourses in Iran to the nineteenth century and the development of the language of universal sisterhood, itself fashioned within the discursive framework of modernization and progress. In their writings, Western women travelers and missionaries contrasted their self-proclaimed autonomous subjectivity to the passivity and oppression of veiled Persian women.³ In an attempt to carve out a political voice for themselves in the male-dominated imperial apparatus, Western women participated in the reproduction of colonial and racial order. They positioned themselves as the savior of their oppressed, silenced, and veiled sisters, who relied on the civilizing forces of the Empire to break free from the bondage of their backward traditions and cultures. In doing so, middle-class Victorian women constructed themselves as “intellectual and political vanguard at the forefront of history” (Felski 1995: 149).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, economically and socially elite Persian women used the framework of global sisterhood to express solidarity with their Western counterparts. Similar to their Western sisters, elite Persian women presented the practice of veiling as a marker of oppression and backwardness tantamount to imprisoning women. Privileged (unveiled) Iranian women, who wished to close ranks with their Western “enlightened” sisters, participated in the discursive subjugation of their working-class counterparts by positioning themselves as the epitome of modernity and progress while portraying veiled women as the embodiment of subservient womanhood (Naghibi 2007).

By the early twentieth century, a form of secular feminism emerged in Iran. This feminism, however, was not borrowed, derivative, or a clone of Western feminism (Barden 2005). Secular feminism in the Middle East grew within the discourse of secular nationalism, which envisioned a collective identity based on a shared cultural experience. Middle East feminism developed its own critique of colonialism and engaged with its own secular and nationalist discourses in the era of Western domination. The constitutionalist movement in Iran in the early twentieth century occasioned lively debates about modernity and religion, and the school of Islamic modernism argued that there is no contradiction between assuming a modern and Muslim identity at the same time. Women were active participants in the Iranian constitutional revolution from the early stages by facilitating strikes and offering financial, moral, and even physical support to the constitutionalists (Malikzadeh 1992). Middle- and upper-class women of Tehran and other large cities supported the new parliament formed after the success of the constitutional revolution in 1906 and contributed to the intense political debates of the time by forming a network of women’s associations, schools, and hospitals and through challenging misogynistic readings of Islam. Within this dynamic context, women of higher social and economic strata created a feminist discourse that was anchored within both the religious reform movement and secular nationalism and saw the liberation of women in the advancement of the nation. Meanwhile, the Western discourse of scientific domesticity was adapted by Shi‘a clerics and Qajar aristocrats who advocated for selective progress on gender issues. While highly regulatory, this discourse elevated the status of motherhood by presenting women as educators of the nation (Afray 2011). Other groups of women supported the popular social democratic rhetoric that had spread to Persia from Russia by oil workers and merchants who had experienced the 1905 revolution. These women wrote about the social and economic challenges of the poor, particularly poor women. Both the regulatory discourse of scientific domesticity and the discourse of social democracy allowed women to carve out for themselves a political voice, to challenge the authority of men, and to enjoy increased opportunities for public and professional participation (Afray 2011).

The reign of Reza Shah (1925–1941) brought about a new era of gender and sexual politics in Iran, as he introduced highly controversial modern disciplinary practices concerning bodies that required men to wear Western suits and hats and women to unveil. Raza Shah’s reforms were not unrelated to the unveiling and gender reforms unfolding in Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus in the 1920s. The reforms initiated by the Soviet Union included abolishing the sharia law, decriminalizing homosexuality, legalizing secular marriage based on mutual consent, ensuring the right to divorce for both partners and women’s right to vote and abortion, introducing equal pay for equal work, and establishing coeducational schools (Afray 2011). The Soviet campaign for unveiling women accompanied the formation of a government organization for women—Zhenotdel—in which hundreds of unveiled women worked. These reforms received mixed reactions from communist men in Central Asia. Eventually, the resistance of the conservative community resulted in the closing down of Zhenotdel (Massell 1974). The intellectuals in Iran and Turkey were influenced by these gender reforms, and the secular and authoritarian rulers of these two countries—Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran—used gender reforms as a vehicle for nation building and the modernization and Westernization of their respective countries. Although women’s emancipation was originally a signature issue for socialists and progressive democrats, it became appropriated by these rulers to disarm Turkish and Iranian leftist forces (Afray 2011). Rapid modernization and secularization from above created a new middle and upper class in Iran who were increasingly Westernized and unable to understand their traditional and religious compatriots. Meanwhile, the urban bazaar classes and peasants continued to follow the orders issued by the religious establishment (Keddie 1981).

Between 1919 and 1932, privileged women were responsible for the proliferation of feminist organizations and periodicals. They called for women’s educational opportunities in ethics, literature, and science, argued against the imposition of the veil, and advocated for the economic independence of women (Sullivan 1998). Intellectual women such as Taj al-Saltaneh, a princess of the Qajar dynasty, candidly wrote about forced marriages, the unilateral right of men to divorce, the impact of polygamy on women, and the importance of companionate marriage for women’s well-being while tying women’s education and rights to raising better citizens and building a stronger nation (Afray 2011). One of the best-known nongovernmental women’s organizations of the time was the progressive Patriotic Women’s League (1922–1932), which sponsored the second regional Conference of the Women of the East in 1932. The conference participants were from a variety of countries and religions and advocated for reforms in marriage and divorce, equal pay, women’s education, greater political rights for women, and particularly unveiling (Afray 2011; Salami and Najmabadi 2005). Following the conference, Reza Shah disbanded the Patriotic Women’s League and established the government-controlled Ladies’ Center (Kanun-e Banuan), which became an important institution that attracted many members. Yet the establishment of such an institution also meant that gender reforms were decreed by the royal family and were to come only from the top (Afray 2011).

In addition to his educational and legal reforms, Reza Shah aimed to create modern Iranian citizens who emulated European culture in appearance and conduct. By the late 1920s, greater interaction with the West had already resulted in slight alterations in men’s and women’s clothing. Wearing lighter veils, dropping the rubande (face covering), and even abandoning the veil were common practices among elite women in Tehran, as ministers and deputies of the Pahlavi government expected to attend social functions with their unveiled wives (Afray 2011). Reza Shah required all men, except for clerics and theology students, to replace their cloaks with European-style suits and hats in 1928 and issued a formal decree that ordered women to unveil in 1936. In doing so, he undermined social, religious, and tribal distinctions based on appearance. The unveiling of women, while done under the name of “women’s awakening” and reducing gender segregation, prevented veiled women from attending such spaces as public baths, theaters, stores, and bus stations. The new decree became popular among upper- and middle-class men and women, who eagerly purchased European-style clothing to replace their chador⁴ and keenly followed the expectations of the elite society to walk, talk, and interact in a modern Western way. Subsequently, more attention was given to women’s gestures and bodily dimensions, as these factors impacted girls’ chances of finding a proper suitor (Afray 2011). The forced unveiling did not eradicate the old discourse on women’s modesty and chastity; it simply recast it. While veiled women were harassed by the police, who ripped chadors and scarves off their heads, the unveiled women were pestered by men who saw unveiled women’s bodies as an invitation to sexual harassment. Now a measure of a women’s propriety was the simplicity of her dress, her demeanor in public, and the way she carried herself in relation to men. Without any campaign to equalize laws regarding divorce, marriage, custody, and inheritance and without any democratic debate within which gender reforms would take shape, women’s conditions did not change, and unveiling did not result in women’s personal autonomy or economic power, as promised.

By supporting the forced unveiling act of 1936, elite Iranian women reproduced colonial discourses by equating unveiling with women’s emancipation. This trend resulted in the alienation of rural, working-class, and religious urban women from the mainstream modernization project and the discourses of women’s liberation. The forced unveiling of women celebrated by privileged Iranian feminists was directly responsible for lower-class urban women’s decreasing public participation and increasing dependency on men for affairs previously conducted by women in public (Hoodfar 1997). While presented as an emancipation measure, the unveiling act was experienced as a restriction and a violation of personal choice by many veiled women. Over time, advocacy for women’s rights became associated with an authoritarian state, elite cronies, and imperialist politics as the feminists of this era attempted to consolidate feminism by reducing diversities of class, race, religion, and politics to a common identity of woman. By constructing a universal account of oppressed womanhood and dismissing the intersection of identities, they reproduced inequalities along class and ethnic lines (Sullivan 1998).

In 1941, Britain had taken control of Iran’s southern regions while the Soviet Union had stationed forces in the north. Worried about Reza Shah’s pro-Germany sympathies, the Allied forces demanded that he abdicate power in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah. The monarchy of the younger Shah brought a degree of democratization to Iran as progressive nationalists campaigned for political reform and revived constitutionalism. As a result, numerous political organizations and trade unions emerged, and the expansion of print media, radio, cinema, and television in the 1940s led to the acceleration of the modernization of gender and sexual norms. Between 1941 and 1953, dozens of political parties and women’s organizations were formed. Yet, these women’s organizations, like those in many parts of the world, were primarily auxiliary branches of leftist and nationalist political parties. The Stalinist Tudeh (masses) Party, for instance, was the country’s largest and best-organized political party and had a progressive social agenda that called for greater educational and employment opportunities for women, childcare centers, vacation time, equal pay, and better working conditions. The Tudeh also recruited impoverished women who broke through centuries of class and gender barriers by fighting for workers’ rights and organizing trade unions (Afray 2011). In 1944 and 1945, Tudeh deputies and female leaders of the party called for women’s suffrage, although without success. Other left-leaning organizations, such as the Women’s Party (Hezb-e-Zanan), also campaigned for women’s suffrage. Years later, and after changing its name to the Women’s Council (Showra-ye Zanan), the Women’s Party eventually became an umbrella organization of several women’s organizations. Members of the Women’s Council built international ties with women’s organizations in Europe, the United States, and Turkey and demanded “complete equality between the sexes” (Amin 2008). The relatively open political climate of the time allowed more women to study at institutions of higher education, become schoolteachers, and work in factories and offices, while a few women were able to enter the male-dominated professions of medicine, law, and the natural sciences (Afray 2011). The abdication of Reza Shah, while allowing for the expansion of democratic and secular groups, strengthened the culturally conservative clerics whose power had diminished under his secular rule. In the 1940s, Ruhollah Khomeini was gradually becoming a prominent conservative religious figure who attacked Reza Shah’s secular reforms and his government as corrupt and Westernized, although he endorsed similar plans for industrialization, economic development, and military conscription in his proposed Islamic state. Khomeini and conservative clerics of the era successfully created moral panics over changing gender and sexual relations in Iran and opposed unveiling, mixed schools, and women’s employment as changes that could ruin female honor, destroy families, and promote corruption and prostitution (Chubin 2014).

In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) instigated a coup to overthrow the democratic government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who, in 1949, had formed a political opposition composed of nationalists, liberals, and social democrats—the National Front. The coup was a response to Mosaddegh’s efforts to nationalize Iran’s oil, which was previously under the control of Britain. The Anglo-American coup brought an abrupt end to a period of relative political freedom by returning Mohammad Reza Shah to more absolute power. The nationalist coalition of Mohammad Mosaddegh, however, was also weaking from inside due to battles over women’s suffrage and rights. Opposition to changing gender relations was not exclusive to conservative clerics. Many nationalists within the National Front, cleric or non-cleric, supported progressive economic and political changes but remained conservative on gender issues. Some warned women’s organizations that their demand for suffrage was causing divisions at a time when imperialist threats required a united nation, while other progressives opposed it on the grounds that elite men would dictate women’s votes and further manipulate the elections. In 1952, the National Organization of Women (Sazeman-e Zanan-e Iran) sent a telegram to the United Nations requesting their intervention on behalf of women. The pressures from both sides weakened the nationalist coalition of Mosaddegh and provided the United States and Britain with an opportunity to exploit such a divide to successfully carry out a coup.

By the late 1950s, various independent women’s organizations were controlled by the newly formed High Council of Women’s Organizations, run by Ashraf Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Shah’s twin sister (Najmabadi 1991). The council was later replaced by the government-controlled Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI) under the leadership of royalists from privileged social and economic backgrounds. This transition accompanied a shift in attitude toward women’s rights as a social movement to a form of tokenism, where women’s rights were treated as a symbol of the nation’s modernity and the monarch’s progressiveness (Najmabadi 1991). Subsequently, many of the achievements of women in the 1960s and 1970s, such as gaining the right to vote and to stand for public office and the passage of the family protection laws of 1975, were framed as Shah’s “endowments” of rights to women. These tokenist policies primarily affected secular, urban, and middle-class women and were mostly “modernizing patriarchy” (Yeganeh 1993). The association of Iranian feminism with the monarchy posed considerable challenges for Iranian feminists, since their activism was limited by the ideological framework of the Pahlavi regime and the privileged women running the organization. Furthermore, the growing anti-Shah sentiments and mobilizations, which had gained widespread support by the late 1970s, came to associate feminism with imperialism due to the strong ties between WOI, the U.S.-backed ruling regime of Iran, and Western feminists who traveled to Iran with the invitation of elite Iranian women who had sought their leadership (Naghibi 2007).

The anti-Shah movement consisted of men and women of varying class and ideological backgrounds seeking to overthrow the Pahlavi regime. The rapid Westernization efforts of Reza Shah and his son Mohammad Reza Shah, the mismanaged land reforms that exacerbated the economic frustrations of the rural poor, and the repression of political dissident were major grievances of the anti-Shah movement in the 1970s. The feminist agenda of WOI, aligned with the Pahlavi regime’s project of modernization, did not speak to the material needs of the rural and peasant women who supplied labor for the growing export market and were negatively impacted by the unbalanced reforms. Those who benefited from the state-sponsored feminism advocated by WOI were primarily urban middle- and upper-class women from privileged and educated classes (Tabari 1980). This resulted in a growing gap between working-class women and their privileged “sisters,” who saw “traditional” (working-class) women as in need of their guidance and enlightenment. By the late 1970s, WOI was widely critiqued by Iranian women who did not see their needs and priorities reflected in an organization that was deeply affiliated with the monarchy.

The 1979 revolution resulted in the establishment of an Islamic government, and although their large-scale participation in the movement was paramount to its success, women remained on the losing side of this power transition (Bayat 2013). Since the mainstream feminism of the twentieth century was deeply associated with Westernization, the revolutionary government and its band of clerics opposed feminism and discourses of equality as foreign and imperialist. For instance, since Western and elite Iranian women with ties to the monarchy had associated women’s veiling with their subjugation, the revolutionary government’s nationalist and anti-imperialist project constructed the veil as a symbol of national and cultural honor and made veiling mandatory. The forced unveiling act of 1936 and the forced veiling of women after the 1979 revolution demonstrate the contentious position of women’s bodies in Iran’s colonial and postcolonial nation-building discourses. By 1979, the historical association of feminism with the Westernization agenda of the Pahlavi regime and its endorsement and control of WOI had resulted in binary thinking; (imperialist) feminism came to stand in stark contrast to Iranian (nationalistic) tradition. Hence, Iranian feminism was caught between two forces. On one hand, Western feminists and Iran’s elite feminists appropriated Iran’s indigenous anti-imperialist feminism in the hopes of transforming it into something they could relate to as “international sisters.” And on the other hand, the conservative clerics undermined and silenced all Iranian feminist groups by associating feminism with imperialism and by positioning feminism as “counterrevolutionary” (Naghibi 2007).

The newly established Islamic Republic claimed that the state had to be founded on Islamic principles and laws. Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution, and his supporters showed no tolerance toward any political opposition and, much like the secular Pahlavi regime, employed legal and political means to suppress dissent (Tamadonfar 2001). The newly established political institution, as well as the new constitution, embodied an internal contradiction for attempting to simultaneously be a liberal republic based on notions of equality, rights, and the rule of law while being Islamic (and totalitarian). The constitution written by the postrevolutionary regime contained 175 articles and was crafted in response to the political schisms within the ruling elite and a strong will to centralize power (Tamadonfar 2001). The constitution grants all Iranians a wide range of rights, including freedom of religion, freedom of speech and assembly, the right to education and social security, and the right to private property and fair trial, among others. Yet, the contradiction between notions of popular sovereignty and the sovereignty of God had to be reconciled. This was done by restricting all individual rights in favor of the clergy’s understanding of “permissible rights” according to sharia, which served the ruling elite’s interests. Freedom of press, expression, and assembly, for instance, were protected, according to Article 24, “as long as those activities are not detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam and the rights of the public.” The vague language of the constitution allowed the ruling elite to repress freedom by labeling oppositional activities as detrimental to Islam at will. While liberal principles of the constitution were limited to consolidate the power of the theocratic regime, the democratic elements of the republic, such as popularly elected presidents and parliament and local council members, were structured in ways to allow Khomeini and his band of clerics to openly and effectively exercise authority.

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the provisional government and revolutionary forces denied the legitimacy of rights talks for women, calling the discourse of “rights” the tool of “Western imperialist” forces seeking to undermine Iranians’ commitment to Islam (Osanloo 2006). The new government rejected liberalism and its emphasis on individual freedom on the grounds that individualism erodes the importance of relational identities (relation to family, community, nation, and Islam) and that communal responsibilities should take precedence over personal rights and freedoms. The new Islamic government rejected the notion of gender equality by claiming essential differences between men and women. They emphasized the complementarity of the sexes, encouraged women’s commitment to domestic life, and recognized women’s rights only within the confines of a conservative interpretation of Islamic principles. It was under this political ideology that the restriction of rights was justified. Shortly after the revolution, Khomeini made hejab mandatory for women and ordered the repeal of the 1967 and 1975 Family Protection Law that granted women the right to divorce and to custody, among other rights.

Soon after the mandate of compulsory hejab, thousands of women throughout Iran marched in protest of the state’s intrusion on their civil and personal liberties. However, their protests were repressed by revolutionary counterprotesters who physically and verbally attacked them. While secular feminism in Iran originally emerged from a religious reform movement, it was particularly at this time that secular feminism was pitted against Islamism and its regressive gender policies. As the new Islamic regime was quick to limit women’s rights and liberties, many secular Iranian feminists began to discuss Islam as the source of women’s subordination (Naghibi 2007). As secularism became associated with modernity and the West, secular activists began positioning religion as “backward” and “traditional.” This contentious opposition was ultimately to the detriment of both (Barden 2005).

The prerevolutionary modernization projects of the Pahlavi government and the growth of the school of Islamic modernism nevertheless had affected the expectations and aspirations of many Iranians, whose sizable middle and working class had relatively high rates of literacy and educational attainment by the 1980s (Moghadam 2002). Meanwhile, the Islamic policies of the state had unexpected consequences for women’s liberation that propelled scholars to question the dominant assumptions about the harmful effects of Islamism on women (see Bahramitash and Kazemipour 2006). For instance, Homa Hoodfar’s (2007) study demonstrates that Afghan refugee women’s exposure to Iran’s Islamic government, which mandated women’s education as Islamic, provided Afghans with a definition of Muslim-ness that was progressive and empowering. Meanwhile, policies such as the gender segregation of public transportation and educational spaces had the unexpected consequence of increasing women’s educational opportunities, freedom of movement, and public participation in Iran (Shahrokni 2019). These studies suggest that contrary to assumptions about the need for abandoning culture and religion, key conditions for Muslim women’s empowerment “may well remain within Islam, not only as a force for reshaping cultural, social, and political institutions, which in any case are themselves in flux, but also in terms of legitimizing such changes” (Hoodfar 2007: 266).

By the late twentieth century, secular feminism, although doing important work particularly within NGOs, seemed to have reached its impasse (Barden 2005). During the 1980s and 1990s, a form of Islamic feminism emerged in Iran, as female parliamentarians and civil servants began to advocate for greater opportunities and equality for women within the Islamic framework. Islamic feminism created a progressive religious discourse in response to the growing conservative interpretations of Islam. Islamic feminism did not legitimize Iran’s Islamic government but critiqued it and demanded a reading of the religion that was committed to gender justice. Between 1997 and 2005, the “reform period,” the administration of President Khatami motivated a vocal women’s movement to seek “a hybrid notion of rights informed by both civil legality and Islamic principles” (Osanloo 2012). Arzoo Osanloo’s ethnographic research on female Quranic meetings and family courtrooms in Iran demonstrates the presence of “rights talk” among women who, religious or not, use such discourse to articulate their experiences and demands. The reform era was also characterized by the establishment of women’s affairs offices in every ministry and government agency, the development of NGOs that addressed women’s needs, and a more assertive advocacy for women’s liberty and rights by female parliamentarians and activists who mobilized a lively women’s press (Moghadam 2002). Women’s emergence as right-bearing subjects who challenge the discriminatory policies of the Islamic government, Osanloo claims, is the legacy of hybridized spaces of mediation and negotiation within Iranian Islamic civil courts “that permit the production of right-bearing, individuated subjects that are also Islamic” (Osanloo 2006: 203).

“Rights talk” in Iran, however, was plagued by a setback after the presidency of Ahmadinejad, a conservative candidate who criticized the rights language in favor of emphasizing relational identities (Osanloo 2012). Activists’ rights talk fueled a backlash and culminated in mass protests and a clash between citizens and the state forces in 2009 over suspicions of fraud in the presidential elections. The repressive measures of the government toward political activism have increased ever since, and the election of another reformist president, Hassan Rouhani, in 2013 and 2017 did not generate much openness in the political space for rights advocacy.

Asef Bayat’s (2013) study suggests that the repression of women’s activism in Iran has been accompanied by the collective yet individualized resistance of women in public domains. Through working, playing sports, creating art and music, running for political office, gaining higher education, and simply walking and jogging down the streets, often without respect for the state’s policies of hejab, women in Iran have imposed themselves as public players with a sense of autonomy (Bayat 2013). Similarly, Pardis Mahdavi’s (2009) research suggests that the youth in Iran see themselves as part of an unfolding “sexual revolution” by opposing patriarchal sexual norms with their bodies and lifestyles. The sexual austerities imposed by the Islamic government, such as the criminalization of sexual relations outside marriage, did not result in the kind of repression assumed to exist in Iran following the revolution (Afray 2011). Gender and sexual norms have changed in Iran, and women’s increasing economic autonomy has afforded them more privacy to become sexually active before marriage. However, it is particularly the upper- and middle-class women from 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.

The repressive measures of the Iranian government toward political activism have also moved advocacy toward NGOs and charities. Many female-run NGOs in Iran, in fact, are extensions of women’s organizations from the 1990s and have the same objectives of challenging women’s subordination by confronting the state and patriarchal institutions (religion, family, and community), encouraging income-generating activities for women, and pushing for policy influence (Rostami-Povey 2004). Yet NGOs have also faced a crackdown, particularly since the presidency of Ahmadinejad, whose administration criminalized the activities of journalists and human rights and women’s rights activists. The foreign policy of the United States toward Iran is also responsible for the closing of political opportunity structures and the state scrutiny of NGOs’ affairs. In their essay “When Promoting Democracy Is Counterproductive,” Haleh Esfandiari and Robert S. Litwak (2007) argue that the United States’ $75 million support of NGOs in Iran to promote democracy coupled with loose talks about regime change from members of Congress have fed a sense of vulnerability and paranoia among elements of Iran’s ruling regime, who fear NGOs’ “soft” plot for a civil society uprising from below. As a result, NGOs in Iran are either subject to censorship or are defensively engaging in self-censorship (Esfandiari and Litwak 2007).

NGO-ization of Identity Politics

The postrevolutionary state of Iran found its revenue from oil insufficient to finance the provision of food, health care, and education it had promised to the poor, who they saw as their main constituents. To address this limitation without allowing any threat to its monopoly of power, the Islamic government has allowed a controlled form of public participation (Hoodfar 2010). By establishing state-sponsored volunteer networks, the state mobilized citizens to provide social services and education to underprivileged groups in low-income neighborhoods and rural areas. NGOs, as another form of volunteer mobilization, have taken on the task of providing social services to those in need of governmental provisions and have been relatively tolerated by the state. Most registered NGOs in Iran, in fact, cater to marginalized populations such as working children, undocumented immigrants, people with disabilities, sex workers, people with drug addiction, the impoverished, and other vulnerable groups. Bayat (2013) argues that states often encourage self-help initiatives as long as they do not turn into oppositional forces and that the unthreatening nature of NGOs is the reason behind their proliferation in Iran. Hoodfar’s (2010) study, however, demonstrates that, contrary to dominant assumptions, women working within the state-sponsored volunteer health networks in Iran saw their activities as capable of challenging the state’s ideology and policies. By changing their mandate from health activism to social and political activism, many female volunteer workers blurred the boundaries of state and civil society by successfully negotiating a number of cultural and state restrictions on women. Investigating the transformative potential of NGOs is increasingly important because of activists’ preference for working within them due to NGOs’ participatory model and because activists often fear state agencies’ top-down and corrupt approach (Sharma 2008).

But how engaged are NGOs in identity politics in Iran? The term identity politics signifies a wide range of political activity that aims to end the injustices experienced collectively by members of marginalized social groups. “Members of that constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant oppressive characterizations, with the goal of greater self-determination” (Heyes 2016: 1). Women and racial and sexual minorities are among marginalized social groups who have engaged in large-scale identity political movements in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet in contexts with limited political opportunities for mobilization, these political and social movements have faced greater obstacles (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). In studies conducted on women’s activism in Iran, scholars have documented the impact of changing political opportunity structures on the framing and tactics of women’s rights movements and their visibility (Moghadam and Gheytanchi 2010). Hard-liners’ control of the state, the state designation of women’s rights advocacy as a “threat to national security,” and the rhetorical war on Iran by the U.S. government are among the factors that have bolstered Iran’s security apparatus and have given impetus to the persecution, harassment, and imprisonment of many Iranian activists who deployed the frame of “women’s rights” advocacy (Moghadam and Gheytanchi 2010; Sameh 2014).

It is in this context of increased state surveillance and limited political opportunities for feminist activism that an organization like ALLY attempts to advocate for marginalized women. The advocacy practices of ALLY, its repertoire of action, and even the content of its program are best understood when placed within this precarious political environment. It is within the larger context of the development of feminist discourses in Iran, its colonial history, its association with class privilege, and indigenous attempts for culturally authentic feminism that we can best understand how the diverse constituents of ALLY contested women’s empowerment and defined their own feminist agenda.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 offer an institutional ethnographic portrait of the educated and middle-class NGO workers who, with varying understandings of empowerment, developed ALLY’s women’s empowerment program. Chapters 6 and 7 offer an ethnographic portrait of the poor and ethnically marginalized women from the slums of Tehran who came together every day in an upscale organization to simply stay away from the violent realities of their lives and to use the variety of resources provided by the organization to create alternative “symbolic economies” (Bettie 2014). Following Gayatri Spivak (1985), I use the term subaltern to refer to these young women, whose marginalization and inability to access the lines of social mobility were shaped not simply by being women in Iran but also by being poor, ethnic minorities, and/or immigrants. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) coined the term subaltern in his Prison Notebooks to refer to groups excluded from society’s established structures for political participation and those outside of the hegemonic power structure. In the 1980s, the term gained increased prominence and currency in the work of Spivak and the larger postcolonial studies to denote colonized people and the imperial history told from the perspective of the colonized for the purpose of countering the Eurocentric and elite bias of history. Following this approach, I speak of ALLY’s clients as subaltern women whose voices are often occluded by the hegemony of Western theoretical constructs.

Defining the Subaltern

Before beginning my fieldwork in Tehran, I read many stories on ALLY’s website about clients’ traumatic experiences of violence and neglect as well as their positive transformation after entering the organization. The website encourages the Western audience, as well as Iranians in the diaspora, to read these women’s stories as stories of oppression and defiance and to consider donating to ALLY, since its independence from the Iranian government has left it with only one source of funding: Donations. I had nothing but these stories in mind when I first entered ALLY’s organization in Tehran as my ethnographic research site. I read the website’s stories of these girl-women, rightly pictured as victims of a patriarchal society, and of how grateful they are to ALLY for allowing them to transform their lives from that of helpless victim to hopeful survivor. I believed that was the (only) story of these young women—until I entered the site.

Poor and Afghan in Iran

My second day at ALLY, I met Armaghan, a seventeen-year-old Afghan woman who, like many others who had escaped the war in Afghanistan, had sought refuge in Tehran. She was very welcoming of me when we first met, knowing that I lived in the United States. “Oh wow! It’s my dream to live in America,” Armaghan told me with a big smile and sparkling eyes. Not long after, she began to ask me questions about life in the United States and seemed disappointed when I confirmed the existence of racism there and explained the challenges of being Middle Eastern in America. Similar to many other Afghan clients of ALLY, Armaghan aspired to appear Tehrani and middle class. She spoke Farsi with a Tehrani accent, as many Afghans born and raised in Tehran do, and rarely spoke Dari outside the confines of her group of close Afghan friends. Although similar in style to what young, middle-class women wore in Tehran, Armaghan’s clothing was made of inexpensive material. That day, she had dyed her hair purple and was wearing tight black leggings under her manto, a look that I soon found out had become fashionable in Tehran. It was also the look to which the government was reacting with fines and jail time as another attempt to discourage women’s clothing that is not aligned with the “Islamic values” of the state. Armaghan, however, wore them persistently and fearlessly despite the threats from the government and her older sister’s scornful reaction, which entailed calling her a “whore” for wearing the leggings “to get attention from men.” “I’m starting to doubt whether I’m a whore because of how my family reacts,” Armaghan said at the art therapy class in which we were all sitting. “But I don’t care,” she said. “I have to dress nice especially because of what people think about all Afghans as being poor and dirty.” She was very fierce but also very conscious of the risks and challenges of being an Afghan immigrant in Iran. That day, she recounted her story of physical confrontation with an Iranian man who had sexually harassed her on the street. “I kicked him and his motorcycle while cursing at him for groping me,” she said. The man then attacked her, calling her a “dirty Afghani,” saying that he had all the rights to do whatever he wanted to “Afghani whores.” The observing police officer did not intervene after he realized her ethnicity—a reaction Armaghan believed would have been unlikely if an Iranian woman had been involved.

The parents of Armaghan and of other Afghan clients of ALLY were among millions of Afghans displaced after the communist coup in Kabul in 1978 and the subsequent Soviet invasion in 1979. Since the 1980s, the civil war, the coming to power of Taliban, and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan have led to more population movement and a growing Afghan refugee population in the neighboring countries. Among those who left Afghanistan, many sought refuge in Iran, particularly the Hazaras, who are Shia and Persian speaking (Olszewska 2015) and have come to engage in low-wage occupations as a means of securing independence and supporting the needs of their family. However, well before 1978, people of Afghanistan were visiting Iran as migrant workers, pilgrims, or merchants, engaging in trade and cultural exchange.

Although the government formed after the 1979 revolution has employed the rhetoric of Islamic solidarity to claim that “Islam has no borders,”⁵ the state has established a regime of national preference regarding social and economic rights. Particularly in the realm of immigration policy, the Islamic republic is a “modern nation-state perusing a rather ad hoc realpolitik, not too different from those of liberal Western democracies” (Olszewska 2015: 8). The Iranian government conferred on demand the refugee status of Afghans in Iran in the 1980s, embracing Afghans as cobelievers suffering at the hands of atheist Soviets. Yet their policy toward Afghan immigrants more likely reflected the need for cheap labor in a country at war with Iraq and in the postwar reconstruction that followed. Receiving residence permits, however, became more difficult in the 1990s, and it was almost impossible for Afghans to obtain a refugee status card or to renew their temporary cards after 1998 (Hoodfar 2004). Without refugee status cards, Afghans in Iran were no longer entitled to “food subsidies, healthcare, access to the labor market and public education for children” (Hoodfar 2004: 149). Without permission to work unless within a subset of low-wage and manual labor and with no financial assistance from the government, Afghan immigrants have experienced extreme financial and psychological insecurity in Iran. Poverty and housing discrimination have resulted in cramped living conditions—a family of eight might live in one room—and the absence of legal protection has left many Afghan women dependent on their families and immigrant communities for survival. As a result, these women are unable to report violence and abuse within their communities.

As scholars of immigration have argued (Golash-Boza 2015; Johnson and Trujillo 2011), the “illegal” status of immigrants is a category developed through lawmaking and enforcement by states worldwide to create a disposable population who can be exploited for their cheap labor. The periods of tolerance, harassment, and expulsion of Afghans in Iran are meant to benefit the country by exploiting their cheap labor without allowing them to feel comfortable and settle there permanently (Monsutti 2005). The government systematically enforces the low status of Afghans in Iran by such policies as the designation of certain cities and provinces as “Afghan-free zones” for the purpose of securing “public safety.” The restrictions of movements imposed by the government apply to both documented and undocumented Afghans, who are barred from certain towns and provinces, and any assistance to them is decreed a crime (Ahmadi 2012). Even for those Afghans who are documented, their “legal” status is difficult to maintain or prove and does not guarantee many freedoms. The residence permits are only valid for a short period of time, and extending them entails a difficult process, requiring investment of a great deal of time and money (Olszewska 2015).

In addition to the legal forms of discrimination imposed by the state, Afghans face prejudice and discrimination from Iranian citizens as well as the police. The racialized figure of Afghans in the Iranian discourse is one used to instill fear in children (Olszewska 2015), and the term Afghani is commonly used as an insult to imply a low class and ethnic status. Afghans have been continuously scapegoated for all social problems in Iran, including unemployment, drug trafficking, the spread of infectious diseases, and rape and murder (Olszewska 2015). Afghan refugees experience discrimination and hate crimes, and Afghan men are frequently picked up and abused by the police and deported if the family is not able to pay a bribe (Hoodfar 2004). These attitudes reflect the racialized fear of Afghans as dangerous, perverted, and criminal Others, an image reinforced through Iran’s long-lasting racist nationalistic ideologies that construct Iranians as a race distinct from and superior to their “backward” neighbors (Maghbouleh 2017). The “inferior” position of Afghans has served as a means of self-identification for Iranians who attempt to raise their own status by distancing themselves from their Afghan and Arab neighbors and through identification with the European culture (Olszewska 2015).

Despite the Islamic Republic’s anti-Western propaganda and the twentieth-century search for an authentic, native Iranian identity in the face of Western political and cultural imperialism, “the older admiration for and a sense of inadequacy vis-à-vis the West persist as an uncomfortable and guilty indulgence of many Iranians” (Olszewska 2015: 48). Golnar Mehran (2002) has pointed to a persisting deep-seated sense of inferiority among Iranians toward the West. The perception of Afghans as inferior enables Iranians to reflect the distance they have traveled from their aghab-mandeh (backward) neighbors and the pishraft (progress) they have made in becoming more modernized and Western (Olszewska 2015). Hence, Afghans play an important role in the Iranian imagination when national identity and citizenship are concerned (Adelkhah and Olszewska 2007). As Zuzanna Olszewska (2015: 21–22) has argued, the presence of Afghans in Iran remains a paradox. “They have been welcomed as oppressed co-believers and yet excluded as noncitizens; appreciated for their cheap, diligent labor and yet blamed for stealing jobs; lauded as fellow Persian speakers and yet mocked as primitive country cousins; allowed to settle in cities and integrate into Iranian society and yet discriminated against in most aspects of public life. As a result, they are an absent presence: living alongside Iranians, yet strangely invisible.” While Iranian activists for refugee rights and some NGOs, such as ALLY, have been sympathetic toward Afghans and their struggles in Iran, Afghans remain an invisible group and are treated as problems to be managed.

Olszewska’s study on Afghan refugees and their poetry circles demonstrates how Iranian nationalism has led to a sense of exclusion among the Afghan population in Iran. Yet her study also challenges common assumptions about Afghan refugees as helpless and vulnerable with no history, agency, or politics. She argues that the experiences of Afghans in Iran have been a combination of opportunities and exclusion. It is particularly the larger changes in the Iranian society, such as the rising rate of literacy, declining fertility, the increasing emphasis placed on women’s rights, and the larger modernization and industrialization trends, that have shaped the opportunities and aspirations of Afghans. The impact of these factors, however, depends on Afghan’s economic position and location (for instance, whether they worked as urban dwellers or in rural agriculture). Hoodfar’s (2004) study on Afghan refugees in Iran demonstrates that many Afghans who sought refuge in Iran following the Soviet invasion did so in protest against the communist decree of mandatory education for all boys and girls, which they saw as un-Islamic. Yet, they embraced modern education following their exposure to the Iranian government’s discourses that promoted universal education as necessary for a Muslim nation.

From the outset, the Islamic Republic placed a great emphasis on education, built schools in poor rural and urban areas, and made education mandatory for boys and girls. The state policies regarding mandatory education and the gender segregation of educational spaces made education accessible to many girls from conservative families who were no longer objecting to their daughters’ education under Islamic principles. The Islamization of the public sphere has similarly allowed women from conservative backgrounds to be active in public life, travel, enter various professions, choose their husbands, and appear on television (Afray 2011). These trends resulted in a soaring literacy rate in Iran and public engagement for women. They similarly provided Afghan women with a range of opportunities and the ability to demand women’s rights within an Islamic framework. Many Afghans, in fact, remained in Iran during the reign of Taliban in order to ensure their daughters’ education. In 2004, when the Iranian government prevented refugee children from attending public schools without paying a substantial fee, the Afghan community faced a great hurdle. Determined to pursue an education, Afghans created semi-clandestine and autonomous schools (madareseh-ha-ye khodgardan) run by educated Afghans outside the authority of Iran’s Ministry of Education (Olszewska 2015). These schools have done more than offer an education; they have also provided Afghans with a sense of collective identity (Chatty, Crivello, and Hundt 2005). Olszewska’s research on Afghan poets demonstrates that many educated Afghans have consistently sought access to the cultural capital of farhangi (cultured) or roshanfeks (intellectual), which signifies their aspiration to be upwardly mobile and claim a higher status.

Armaghan’s aspiration for class mobility was visible in her attempts to appear middle class through her style of clothing and her self-distancing from the stigmatized image of the “poor and dirty Afghani.” This self-distancing was achieved by performances of respectable middle-class femininity that, as I explain in Chapter 7, entailed adopting the liberal and secular feminist lifestyle advocated by ALLY’s middle-class Tehrani staff. As I show in the following chapters, the responses of Afghan women to the liberal feminism advocated at ALLY entailed two seemingly contradictory responses. On one hand, many Afghan women critiqued liberal feminism’s limitations for explaining their unique struggles at the intersection of their class and marginalized ethnic and national identities. On the other hand, they adopted the organization’s middle-class feminist rhetoric as a form of cultural capital to create alternative symbolic economies that would grant them agency and dignity. I examine this simultaneous adoption and rejection of liberal feminism as a reflection of marginalized women’s strong class consciousness and concurrent desire for inclusion and class mobility.

Poor and Religious in Iran

Unlike many of the clients at ALLY who would considerably transform in appearance after joining the organization, Khadije had maintained her conservative and religious look, covering her hair under her black maghnaeh,⁶ wearing no makeup, and wearing a long manto under her black chador. She was also more reserved and, unlike most clients, was not enthusiastic about meeting ALLY’s guests from abroad or becoming friendly with the staff. In fact, there was a look of detachment in her eyes that drew clear boundaries between her and those she perceived as outsiders. She was among those clients, I later learned, who saw the teachings of ALLY as antagonistic to her cultural and religious values and who would complain about the anti-religion sentiments of some teachers to those staff she saw as sympathetic. Khadije’s criticism of the staff, however, went beyond those complaints and encompassed critiques of the teachings she saw as misinformed and reflective of the privileged standpoint of ALLY’s workers.

When I met her for the first time at a community development class, her visible frustration with the teachers and her intelligent responses caught my attention. Barmak, Hamid, and Shirin were three college-educated friends in their mid-twenties who taught a community development course with the goal of educating ALLY’s marginalized clients on a range of social issues. Although none had a social science degree, their passion for the subject was enough to convince them of the importance of developing a space where the young women could discuss issues relevant to their daily lives. That day in class, soon after the conversation began on the role of technology in human history, the teachers were bombarded with skeptical remarks from the young women, who were unsure about the accuracy of the arguments presented to them. After explaining that the industrial era has been marked with “more leisure time,” “more traveling,” and a specialized labor market in which people “choose their profession based on their personal interests,” the young women exchanged hesitant glances and quickly began to express their doubts about the accuracy of the statements read to them by Barmak.

“There are still many people who can’t choose their own job and don’t enjoy any leisure time,” Khadije said while rolling her eyes and closing the book she was reading in class. I could see that the teachers were quite puzzled by the unexpected objection of Khadije and the other young women. Shirin began to describe the advancements made in transportation technology to demonstrate the increased ability of people to travel far and often in the postindustrial era. “Many people can’t travel,” Khadije said again to problematize Shirin’s privilege and her own poverty. “We don’t go on trips. Ask the people in this class to see how many have traveled during the holidays. Don’t look at yourselves,” she said as she laid her forehead in her palm and looked away, implying that she had no interest in continuing the conversation.

It was easy to interpret Khadije’s statement as that of an impoverished woman with limited education who could not see beyond her personal experiences to understand the larger impact of industrialization and technological transformations worldwide. What was not as easy to recognize was Khadije’s resistance to a Eurocentric middle-class account of history in which she and the world of poverty and uneven global development in which she lived were missing. I noticed again and again and in different classes the skillful attempts of Khadije and other young women to problematize those accounts of history or any social commentary that did not critically interrogate inequalities of class and status. Khadije’s resistance to course content and her determination to maintain her religious appearance despite a larger pressure felt at ALLY for looking and thinking “modern” and middle class were often perceived as reflective of her lower education and religious views. Her choices for conforming to religious norms were not seen as agentic, and her resistance to certain educational materials was not seen as an empowering act of defying dominant class ideologies. After a few minutes of ignoring teachers’ responses, Khadije calmly reopened the book she was reading: One Thousand Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez.

Many ethnographies on contemporary Iran that have sought to study subjectivity and personhood have focused on the experiences of secular and middle-class youth from Tehran. These ethnographies examine the lives of young people who position themselves against the moral order prescribed by the Islamic government and interpret their actions as acts of rebellion and resistance toward the political order. Olszewska (2013) has argued that these ethnographies’ perception of subjectivity is undertheorized and that they carry problematic assumptions. Among these works are Mahdavi’s Passionate Uprising (2009), which reports on an unfolding sexual revolution among Iranian youth who use their bodies as sites of protest by engaging in sexual acts outside the norm of modesty prescribed by the government. In his book Young and Defiant in Tehran (2008), Khosravi speaks of a “culture of defiance” among Tehrani youth, who resist the subject position imposed on them by the state by casting themselves as modern, cosmopolitan, and ba-kelas (classy). In this literature, “secular, middle-class subjects seem to rise autonomously, and must then busy themselves with resisting an alien subjectivity that a pernicious government attempts to force on them” (Olszewska 2015: 17).

The model of human agency in these studies has been vastly criticized for a liberal assumption that locates agency in moral and political autonomy. In their critiques of this liberal bias, postcolonial feminist scholars have offered more complex views of personhood that recognize the inseparability and continuity of agential and nonagential features of self. According to Soran Reader (2007), endurance, patience, and compassion are not signs of passive victimhood but, in fact, are rational (and at times courageous) responses. Mahmood (2005), similarly, by analyzing the practices of women in the mosque movement in Cairo, has challenged the conflation of agency with resistance to norms in order to argue for a conception of agency entailed “not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms” (15). Mahmood questions the normative, liberal assumptions that underlie dominant analyses of agency as well as their allegiance to an unquestioned ideal of individual freedom. Poststructural analyses of subjectivity see the formation of subjectivity as dynamic, shaped through coercion or persuasion, and never as a pre-given state that can later be manipulated and colonized (Eagleton 1985). In this sense, subjectivity is understood as a form of awareness shaped out of the tension between the inner processes and the external imposition of “cultural and social formations that shape, organize, and provoke” modes of affect and thought (Ortner 2005: 31). One must then ask what political forces have constituted those subjectivities that appear as autonomous and in defiance of oppressive politics of the Islamic government. “What forces contribute to the socialization of rebellious middle-class youth in Iran: class or generational awareness? Prerevolutionary memories or cosmopolitan desires transmitted through global mass media and internet? Or perhaps even the unintended effects of state policies themselves?” (Olszewska 2015: 17).

Kevan Harris (2012) has argued that the disaffection and resistance of the middle class in Iran reflect a pattern witnessed in many countries with an upwardly mobile middle class who see the state as blocking their access to social power. “They are educated and cognizant of cosmopolitan habits but lack the political and cultural capital that would allow them to fully enjoy the middle-class lifestyle they aspire to, free of the bureaucratic authoritarian characteristics of the Islamic Republic” (Harris 2012: 451). The Islamic Republic’s modernization efforts, in continuation of the prerevolutionary era, its gradual bureaucratization and professionalization, and its biopolitical management of the population have resulted in policies that on one hand centralize power and on the other create individualized self-reflexive subjects of the late modern age with a culture of consumerism and competition (Adelkhah 2000). But Iran’s Islamic government was originally a welfare state that got its strength from its economic and social populism and the development policies that particularly benefited the poor (Abrahamian 2009). Those who benefited from the state’s policies were a loyal “rentier class” who received privileges and financial incentives for embracing the state’s ideology. Among those were less-privileged rural and urban residents, veterans and the families of the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, and a group of conservative middle-class citizens. The country’s growing population of newly educated youth, however, became disillusioned by an economy and government unable to create jobs for them. These policies—in addition to larger trends, such as rapid urbanization, an increasingly youthful and educated population, growing female literacy and workforce participation rates, and the arrival of new technologies like satellite television and internet—have resulted in “the development of complex and diverse subjectivities that are some combination of Iranian, Islamic, and inexorably modern” and can be observed among both the elite and those within the lower economic classes (Olszewska 2015: 19).

The dominant tendency to either overstate the repressive power of the state or emphasize the heroic defiance of (middle-class) Iranians against it has left out the possibility of studying the overlapping space between state and society—to see the Iranian state “as an imperfect hegemony, governed through a mixture of coercion and consent, visible or diffuse” (Olszewska 2013: 844). Depicting the lifestyle of the secular middle class who are cosmopolitan, badhejab,⁷ followers of the latest fashion, and consumers of Western luxury brands as an expression of defiance against a repressive state leaves out the fact that the cultivation of certain cultural dispositions may indeed reflect norms of middle-class respectability and not merely political resistance. Meanwhile, reducing defiance to the practices of the secular middle-class urbanites leaves out the stories of poor and working-class women, immigrants, and refugees or those who support the political ideology of the Islamic Republic. How would poor women’s acceptance or rejection of secular liberal feminism be perceived if our conceptualization of agency were to change and if the discourses of class and ethnicity were to enter our analysis? By answering this question in the following chapters, I argue that any analysis of contemporary feminist dispositions and advocacy in Iran should be conducted in terms of their development out of colonial, racial, and class discourses and within the context of limited political opportunities.

The next chapter offers an examination of middle-class, liberal, and secular feminist discourses as they were translated and contested by ALLY’s middle-class staff and cosmopolitan administrators. Through an examination of this feminist contestation, I demonstrate the intersectional inequalities that limited the effectiveness of liberal discourses of sexual autonomy as means of empowerment for marginalized women and the debates around “cultural resonance” versus “universal human rights” that shaped many tensions at ALLY.

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Adapted by permission from Springer Nature Customer Service Centre GmbH: Springer Nature, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, “From Empowerment to Advocacy: Innominate Identity Politics as Feminist Advocacy in Iran” by Fae Chubin, Copyright © 2019 Springer Nature.