4

From Empowerment to Advocacy

From the first day of my fieldwork, a common narrative about clients’ talents was repeatedly shared by the administrators and staff as they introduced me and other guests to ALLY’s program. The desire to showcase the young women’s achievements was noticeable, as their paintings, sculptures, photography, and writings decorated all the walls and spaces in both buildings. During our tour of the organization, Marva, a managing director, stood before each piece and passionately shared stories about the young women who had created the art. “It’s mind-blowing how talented these girls are,” Marva told me as she explained the meaning behind each painting and the creative journey of the female artists. “When you think about it, you realize that these girls are more talented than most people. The only thing they didn’t have was the opportunity,” she said with heartfelt conviction. I heard similar narratives from other administrators, who insisted on the unique capabilities of the women who had sought refuge at ALLY:

The talent you see in these [women] you can’t find in [the rich]. I don’t know why. [Maybe] money ruins talent; or [maybe] they haven’t suffered or experienced the [same] need to develop the same feelings and thoughts. There is so much talent in these girls. So much! Anyone would be delighted to see it. We got a piano teacher who told us he can’t believe how good the girls play the piano only after six months. Because they don’t have a piano [at home]. . . . We thought what a great teacher. He said, “It’s not me, it’s them.” (Omid, Managing Director)

It was not hard to believe the many tales of accomplishment and success the staff shared about ALLY’s clients. The proof was on the walls, in the provoking and deeply intimate artwork that captured the eyes and hearts of curious onlookers and was exhibited in galleries, having won numerous prizes. Staff members not only shared prideful stories of clients’ blossoming artistic talents, they also invited me to listen to them play musical instruments or to hear readings of the poetry and essays written by them since joining ALLY. As I listened to many stories about clients’ talents and capabilities and overheard them as they were repeated to other guests, I wondered about the significance of these narratives for ALLY’s organizational objectives or for staff’s perception of their work. In this chapter, I speak of the organization’s emphasis on clients’ capabilities as a practice of advocacy for marginalized groups—an advocacy shaped by the constraining cultural discourses and the political climate surrounding identity politics in Iran. I suggest that the potential of an NGO like ALLY for advocacy should be examined through a contextual analysis of cultural and political discourses that may redefine and redesign identity politics itself.

The term identity politics describes movements with a wide range of political activity that demand recognition for the rights of stigmatized and marginalized groups. The feminist movement, civil rights movement, and LGBTQ movement in the United States are examples of identity politics practiced through large-scale political movements in the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike movements organized around belief systems or party affiliations, identity political formation aims to emancipate marginalized groups, often through consciousness-raising and legislation. While identity politics is often explained and theorized based on the examples of political struggles in Western capitalist democracies, many nationalist projects and indigenous rights movements worldwide use similar arguments (Heyes 2016).

In contexts where social movements face grave challenges for forming, organizing, and recruiting members, identity politics are often practiced in unconventional ways. Bayat’s (2013) work on “social nonmovements,” for instance, challenges dominant assumptions about the absence of a strong women’s movement in Iran by demonstrating the presence of a distinct form of resistance intertwined with mundane daily practices in public domains in a context where organized political activism by women is often subject to political repression. Mahdavi (2012) has similarly demonstrated that the absence of a visible LGBTQ movement in Iran does not signify an absence of activism and that the Iranian youth see themselves as part of a sexual revolution by using their bodies as a site of protest.

In this chapter, I demonstrate the presence of a mode of advocacy for marginalized groups that I call innominate identity politics. This form of identity politics departs in framing, strategy, and organization from the conventional practices of identity politics prevalent in Western societies, where identities are invoked, deployed, and tied to a universal conception of “rights” for the purpose of changing institutions and transforming the mainstream culture. As I show in this chapter, ALLY’s advocacy for its marginalized clients was done by using the rhetoric of “capabilities” rather than “rights.” Rather than invoking young, impoverished women’s unalienable rights as women or ethnic minorities, ALLY’s staff insisted that clients were deserving due to their capabilities. Rather than organizing their contentious politics around group identity formation, they invested in cultivating the talents and capabilities of their clients. ALLY’s emphasis on marginalized women’s capabilities was the effect of social and political processes that determined the modes of identity politics available to ALLY’s workers. For one, intersecting discourses of gender, class, and ethnicity had rendered organization’s marginalized clients as bare life (Agamben 1995). Second, the inaccessibility of the rhetoric of rights in the political climate of Iran had required creative rethinking of alternative frameworks of advocacy. And third, the perceived limited success of large-scale protest movements in Iran had generated among my participants a collective desire for identity politics focused on grassroots cultural change.

Innominate identity politics, as examined in this study, represents a mode of activism that is visibly formed around advocacy for marginalized social groups, yet the possibility of advocacy rests on denying group identity formation and rights-claiming. Identities are innominate (unnamed) yet fought for. It is important to note, however, that while I speak of the organization’s framing practices (Goffman 1974; Benford and Snow 2000), the extent to which the staff’s framing was done consciously or strategically is not a concern of this analysis. Instead, the goal of this institutional ethnography (Smith 2005) is to uncover the larger institutional relations that necessitate certain practices of advocacy as opposed to nonresonant or costly ones. Particularly, I ask: How did the workers of the organization perceive the means and effects of their advocacy for the organization’s marginalized clients? And what were the cultural and political discourses shaping and constraining their attempts for identity politics?

Advocacy for Bare Life

Some of the girls come from Behzisti.¹ When we talked to one of the social workers at Behzisti, she said these girls are society’s residue. People who work at Behzisti think that society is working and is creating some waste or leftovers. Like when you build a table and there is some wood or paint leftover, you have to dispose of them somewhere so you don’t see them, so they won’t bother anyone, like disposing garbage so you don’t have to smell it. . . . The outlook of people who come here, even the educated ones, is that these are street girls, they think runaway girls are spoiled and roam on the street and we have picked them up. They don’t have a good social status. (Omid, Managing Director)

Omid shared these remarks with an indignant expression on his face as he recounted how the stigmatized social status of clients as “runaway girls” or “prostitutes” had introduced numerous challenges to ALLY’s advocacy and fundraising practices. The stigmatization of sexual relations outside marriage, sexual victimization, and sex work reflects patriarchal discourses that often shame and blame women. Yet, the stigmatization of ALLY’s clients was not solely due to their marginalized gender and sexual identities but also to their lower economic class and, for many, their ethnic and national identity. This matrix of domination (Collins 2000) experienced by ALLY’s young clients, marginalized at the intersection of their class, gender, and ethnic identities with a stigmatized sexual history, had assigned many the status of bare life.

In his theory of biopolitics, Italian philosopher and political thinker Agamben (1995, 2005) argues that the figure of homo sacer in modern politics allows for the elimination of those social groups who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system (2005: 2). These groups of people are abandoned due to the incapacity or unwillingness of the state to regulate or police certain types of violence (Pratt 2005). The growing number of refugees not claimed by any state, missing sex workers whose cases often remain uninvestigated, and the unprosecuted violence against undocumented workers are all examples of states of exception as gendered and racial processes (Pratt 2005) in which certain lives are abandoned. Those constructed as bare life, stripped of their legal status and political life, exist in a state of deprivation (of legal rights as well as material resources) where cultural and political discourses define their exclusion as legitimate and their lives as unworthy of living.

With the operation of sanctioned and institutional relations defining ALLY’s clients as bare life, the organization’s advocacy required attempts for identity construction to transform clients’ status from zoë, a mere biological life, to bios, a qualified and proper form of life (Agamben 1995). The staff’s attempts to showcase and recount clients’ potential and capabilities find meaning in relation to the cultural and political discourses that define belonging and worth. Rather than engaging in rights advocacy by drawing from universal conceptions of human rights, the staff organized efforts and resources toward providing clients with tools and opportunities for artistic, intellectual, or literary self-expression. Their emphasis on clients’ capabilities (both in practice and narrative) were strategic practices of identity politics that aimed to challenge clients’ stigmatized identities with an organized effort toward portraying them as capable and endowed.

As you can see, we have many capable girls that are doing great in clothing design. We have girls who have shown so much potential in [mastering] the English language that they have become teaching assistants. We have girls that are operators, with such competence. This shows that we wanted to discover talents, and this is a talent agency. (Fatemeh, Foreign Affairs Personnel)

Something interesting is that I didn’t used to appreciate the Afghan society the way I do now. Many people harass and offend them. But I realized what a talented and hardworking group of people they are. One of the things that happen for the girls in this journey is that they discover their talents. This is the biggest gift you can give someone; look how much talent you have, and you didn’t even know! (Omid, Managing Director)

These narratives, commonly shared by the staff with ALLY’s guests and potential sponsors, suggest two things. For one, they show ALLY’s attempts at problematizing subjugating cultural assumptions about impoverished minorities that paint them as unskilled, unqualified, talentless, and indolent. Second, they provide a picture of ALLY as an intervening organization that transforms clients’ lives by simply providing them with opportunities for self-development that the clients were previously deprived of due to their unjust social locations.

Emphasizing marginalized groups’ potential for becoming can turn them into “the object[s] of aid and protection” (Agamben 1995). “Bare life (as defined in conflict or emergency aid/development zones) is life in the precipice of potentiality—as a living corpse ‘in need’ of rebirth to bios through outside intervention” (Fluri 2012: 40). ALLY’s politics of empowerment was an attempt to reject the isolation and abandonment of bare life by providing marginalized women with a level of care that demonstrates the potentiality of bare life for becoming “proper.” Yet, such intervention efforts are not free of criticisms. Jennifer Fluri (2012), for instance, has demonstrated how international workers at aid agencies and NGOs in post-Taliban Afghanistan justified receiving aid dollars by reducing Afghan lives to bare life and pathologizing them as incompetent, childlike, and lacking capacity. By creating rescue narratives about the suffering of helpless Afghans if foreign intervention did not exist—and at times accumulating capital with “best-selling” books about the trauma and abuse of Afghan women—international aid workers continued to position capitalist modernity as a prime method for rescuing bare life. They constructed Afghan lives as being in need of transformation into proper life while defining proper life by their subjective claims and politicized perspectives (Fluri 2012). Here, I recognize Fluri’s critique of NGOs that transform marginalized women’s bodies into symbolic sites of protection that are in need of saving. But I argue that ALLY’s politics of empowerment, while subjectively defining bios (as explained in Chapter 5), did not reduce clients to bare life. By emphasizing the transformation of the clients (into artists, teachers, fashion designers, and poets), they could argue for the potentiality of rebirth through aid, thus justifying their fundraising practices. Their claims for the necessity of social intervention, however, were also a critique of unjust social structures that had left clients in need of intervention. By attending to the needs, desires, talents, and passions of the clients, who were socially and politically abandoned, they had engaged in the radical and political task of caring while recognizing the agency of the women who relied on their resources. To support, honor, and empower the vulnerabilities of the clients was to protest the socially and historically constructed discourses of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality that portrayed clients as devoid of value.

While identity politics in the West is also characterized by showcasing the capabilities and worth of marginalized groups (the feminist movement has emphasized women’s equal capabilities, and advocacy for refugees has entailed discussions of their social and economic contributions), conceptualizing the marginality of ALLY’s clients as bare life allows us to better envision the necessity of insisting on their capabilities above all. Using the rhetoric of capabilities to challenge clients’ stigmatized social status was a form of identity politics capable of challenging multiple and intersectional systems of gender, class, sexual, and ethnic inequality without reducing identity politics to advocacy for one stigmatized identity. Theories of intersectionality, in fact, were constructed to reject practices of identity politics that had failed to consider the variations of the struggles of their constituency along the lines of their multiple marginalized identities. Advocacy for social groups subjugated at the intersection of various systems of inequality required repertoire and framing practices distinct from those practiced by large-scale political movements, which often emphasize one identity at the expense of others. By moving from a human rights approach to an empowerment approach to advocacy, the staff could challenge public assumptions about clients and problematize the injustices suffered by them without drawing from the rights framework that often emphasizes a singular identity.

The Inaccessibility of Rights

Women’s rights and children’s rights are political in Iran. Always remember this! Whenever there is a discussion of rights, it becomes political. So, we can’t easily work on these issues, neither women’s rights nor children’s rights. But considering the external obstacles, we can create an education plan that won’t cause us any trouble even if it leaks outside. But [it can only work] slowly. . . . I always say right is something you take, no one gives it to you. I have always taught people that you have to go and take your right and don’t give up. But keep in mind that you don’t have to die taking it either. [Do it in a way] so you don’t end up in jail or you don’t have to emigrate. (Fatemeh, Foreign Affairs Personnel)

In our interview, Fatemeh, who identifies as a women’s rights activist, recounted stories of her activism and her numerous quarrels with state officials before joining ALLY. Wary of government repression if ALLY’s program leaked out, she approached me the first day of my fieldwork to ask about the nature of my research and caution me about the implications of my writings. That day, I met Fatemeh in an orientation class, where she told a group of newly admitted clients about the importance of knowing and demanding their rights as women. “This is a country where they have impinged on your rights,” she told the young women. “You need to speak loud and clear with your chin up, so you can take your right,” she said, standing tall in front of the class, with a fierce and commanding posture. After the session, she asked me if the content of my work could be read by her before being published. Behind ALLY’s closed doors, the staff and clients freely spoke of their rights, criticized the government, and critiqued a multitude of inequalities shaping Iran’s social and political life. These conversations resembled the contentious talks and oppositional speech acts identified by Hank Johnston (2005, 2006) as common in repressive states and in spaces away from the surveillance of authorities (such as coffee shops, book clubs, small circles of friends, or informally structured groups and organizations). In particular, resistant contention is common to repressive states where actor constitution requires innovative actions for claims-making to open spaces for the formation and emergence of collective action.

While contentious talks were common at ALLY’s women’s empowerment program behind closed doors, the organization’s public image was nonthreatening and apolitical; its focus was on providing impoverished women with opportunities for self-realization and personal growth. It was thus logical for ALLY’s staff to caution me about the implications of my writings if they were to make public what was meant to remain behind closed doors. Encouraging women to know and demand their rights, several employees told me, is perceived as “dangerous business” by the government. The implications of engaging in identity politics by the evocation of women’s rights were also described by Fatemeh as imprisonment or forced migration. Her remark about the necessity of creating an educational program that would not “cause trouble” demonstrates the perceived need for taking an approach to advocacy that refrains from using the politicized rhetoric of “rights.”

The concept of political opportunity structure (POS) (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001) in the social movement literature emphasizes the importance of context. By identifying factors exogenous to social movements, POS points to the dimensions of the political environment that affect the methods and strategies employed by movements (McAdam 1982; Kitschelt 1986; Tarrow 1994; McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996) as well as the framing strategies available to activists (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988). 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 (Moghadam and Gheytanchi 2010). The increasing political repression as hard-liners take control of the state, the imprisonment of women’s rights activists on charges of spying for Western governments or spreading propaganda, and the bolstering of the Iranian state’s security apparatus resulting from the U.S. government’s rhetorical war on Iran have limited the opportunities for women’s rights advocacy in Iran.

ALLY’s purposeful dismissal of the rights rhetoric in favor of emphasizing clients’ capabilities reflected the absence of political opportunities for rights advocacy in Iran. Identity political movements often link marginalized identities (e.g., women, sexual or racial minorities, etc.) to a “universal” conception of human rights. And in most humanitarian work, these universal conceptions of rights are called on to transform “victims into sites of ‘humanitarian’ biopolitics” (Fluri 2012: 12). But this repertoire of identity politics—group identity formation and rights-claiming—has faced backlash in contexts where liberal discourses of individual rights conflict with national political norms. In the context of Iran, the liberal discourse of rights-seeking has been subjected to state repression when seen as an ideological threat to political Islam.

As explained in Chapter 2, in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution, the provisional government and revolutionary forces denied the legitimacy of rights talk for women as the tool of “Western imperialist” forces (Osanloo 2006). By the 1980s, a form of Islamic feminism had emerged in Iran that motivated a vocal women’s movement to use the framework of rights-seeking, “but now a hybrid notion of rights informed by both civil legality and Islamic principles” (Osanloo 2012). Osanloo’s ethnographic research demonstrates the presence of “rights talk” among Iranian women who utilize this discourse to articulate their experiences. Rights talk in Iran, however, experienced a setback with the presidency of conservative candidate Ahmadinejad (2005–2013), who criticized the rights language in favor of emphasizing relational identities (Osanloo 2012). Within this historical and political context, “knowledge about rights in Iran is dynamic, intersubjective, and relational, while it is also politicized by the state” (Osanloo 2012: 503).

Unlike the frameworks of human rights or women’s rights, which were politically charged, presenting ALLY’s intervention in terms of discovering and managing talents would paint its work as benevolent and unthreatening. By focusing on capabilities as inherent to marginalized women and empowerment as a process whereby such capabilities are actualized, ALLY depicted its clients as worthwhile recipients of social services and its own activities as carrying the potentiality of rebirth. Hence, the organizational narrative of capabilities reflected the opportunities and cultural discourses available to ALLY for advocacy and identity politics.

The framing practices utilized by ALLY’s staff did not merely reflect the limitations imposed by cultural and political discourses; they also reflected a shared set of beliefs about the effectiveness and desirability of certain advocacy practices as opposed to others. Many of my interviewees distinguished ALLY’s work from the activities of the larger women’s movement in Iran to explain their deviation from conventional practices of identity politics. Investing in clients’ intellectual and social growth and educating the public about the impoverished women’s potentials and capabilities, they believed, were effective measures for a gradual yet guaranteed transformation in the mainstream culture. ALLY’s workers prioritized gradual and grassroots “cultural transformation” carried out by NGOs over top-down legal and institutional change demanded through large-scale protest.

Mobilization of Culture

[We are] not like the women’s movement in the sense of holding banners and talking about taking your rights, because I think that doesn’t make sense. Because it’s just an action, and if that core belief is not behind it, nothing will change. Even if the law changes—OK, for example, look at Egypt. It’s been a hundred years, not really a hundred years, but it’s been a long time since the female circumcision law was put in place, but it’s still prevalent because there has been no attitude change. It’s correct that law is very important, but the law is not useful without a core change inside and in your consciousness; otherwise, it will all continue [to remain the same]. So we decided to start at the grassroots level and build a foundation, to work with kids in their teenage years. And everyone was asking me why don’t you bring little kids instead? I said no, because these girls are very capable and I really believe in them, and why [should I abandon them] if this group of people has already been marginalized and no one cares about them? (Maryam, Founder)

I had asked Maryam to share her thoughts on ALLY’s place within the larger women’s movement in Iran. Her response demonstrates her vision for ALLY as an instrument of social change while distinguishing its work from conventional practices of protest movements. By deemphasizing the importance of top-down legal and structural changes, she advocated for a grassroots cultural change through empowering marginalized women. “If Iran is to change,” she told me in the same interview, “women play a key role. . . . If you want to change a patriarchal society, mothers must be empowered.” Her belief in the young women’s potential for transforming Iran was also evident in her quick rebuttal to those accounts that rendered as inconsequential ALLY’s investment in those who were imagined as already past their prime age for change. Quick to deploy the rhetoric of capability, she spoke of ALLY’s clients as worthy recipients of aid when confronted with the idea of investing in children as better conduits of social change. Other staff at ALLY similarly criticized society’s desire for quick, forceful, and top-down social change while insisting on the power of gradual cultural transformation:

I always say change is like a drop of water in a pond, it has a ripple effect, and the impact expands from the person to family and from the family to society. You can definitely make a positive impact on social trends by changing perspectives. It won’t happen quickly. Look! I was reading about women’s history in Europe; it took three hundred years before women could get into the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra only twenty years ago. . . . We don’t have any voice today, but our voice will come out tomorrow when our girls stand up and say ‘We are here!’ Then you will see [the impact of] our work. Cultural work is like running water, it infiltrates slowly. Cultural work is not a one-night thing. (Fatemeh, Foreign Affairs Personnel)

I heard similar stories and analogies from other administrators, who remained hopeful about the social impact of ALLY if it were to be seen as a gradual and long-term approach to cultural change. In a way, they envisioned a future possibility of collective action and social change should a critical mass (Oliver, Marwell, and Teixeira 1985) develop. First used as a loose metaphor by social movement activists and scholars, critical mass theory has become central to theories of social movement, explaining change as emanating from the activity of “a small segment of the population that chooses to make big contributions to the collective action while the majority do little or nothing” (Oliver, Marwell, and Teixeira 1985: 524). Investment in ALLY’s clients as “agents of social change,” seen through the framework of critical mass theory, meant that wide social change could occur if a significant number of marginalized women internalized and embraced the feminist values of the organization and passed them on to the larger community. Clients were explicitly spoken of as “agents of change” and “mothers of the next generation” who carried the potential of disrupting the cycle of patriarchal control:

What I understand about ALLY’s objective is that we don’t concern ourselves with the past generation. Our focus is on maintaining the girls’ mental health in their families. Our emphasis is on the next generations, since these are the future women and mothers of this society or whatever society they live in. [Our goal is to stop] these views . . . [from being] transferred linearly to their children or in their marriages. . . . We teach them that this is a vicious cycle. If you get trapped in it, you will be just like your mom and your daughter will be just like you. . . . The focus is on the next generation. (Mina, Social Worker)

Social change, according to ALLY’s workers, was a slow and gradual process carried out through investment in the knowledge and consciousness of marginalized groups. The impact of clients on the next generation was seen as a force capable of impacting the larger community and society in due time. This investment was also discussed in terms of reducing the cost of the social abandonment of marginalized groups and their subsequent manipulation by the state apparatus.

I don’t think it’s good that there are some people in society who have no opportunity or chance for growth and they become the elements that the society has to pay for later. For example, I strongly believe that here and in Karamooz² we are reducing [the number of] those who are subject to governmental manipulation . . . groups such as Basij³ often manipulate and use those groups who are economically suffering [to do their dirty work] in exchange for little money . . . to have a better society, it’s absolutely crucial to not have a radicalized social group, people who hate other social classes due to no exposure to them. (Hamid, Teacher)

Hamid’s statement reveals the intention of ALLY’s workers—whether to empower women as mothers or to protect the impoverished from political exploitation—to invest in marginalized groups who otherwise would be subject to control and exploitation. They envisioned social change as emanating from consciousness-raising in the context of NGOs. Trust in their ability to create long-lasting cultural change was evident in Hamid’s statement:

Because of the activities of NGOs and other groups and individuals over the last few years, society’s outlook to issues of working children, minorities, or women has gotten a lot better. There is still a long way to go, I won’t deny that, but it’s gotten better. For example, I remember in the past when you saw a father beating his child, this was seen as a normal thing. But it’s not like this anymore, people who are aware will say, “What are you doing? It’s your child but you have no right to beat them!” Or when it comes to working children on the streets, now disrespectful or insulting behaviors have lessened a lot. . . . I think a big part of it is due to NGOs and their cultural work. (Hamid, Teacher)

The narratives of ALLY’s workers reflected an optimistic outlook toward NGOs and their impact on cultural trends as well as on the governmental institutions with which ALLY’s clients often dealt. Through tireless advocacy for its clients, ALLY was favorably known among the police forces and judges who were responsible for handling clients’ cases. Prior to ALLY’s advocacy, the cases of juvenile delinquents were referred to correctional facilities, where they were often mishandled, but now, the prosecutors and police were quick to refer such cases to ALLY, Fatemeh told me in her office as she ended a positive phone conversation with a prosecutor handling a client’s case. This, according to Fatemeh, revealed a significant attitude change and growing respect for impoverished and abused young women among officials and responsible agencies.

While many of the staff at times spoke despondently about the social impact of a small NGO, they continued to construct narratives of hope in which gradual cultural change cultivated by NGOs such as ALLY would transform the future of the Iranian society when enough people formed a critical mass. The inability of the organization to engage in rights-claiming or to form organized protests did not prevent employees from envisioning change as emanating from alternative strategies. My participants believed in the impact of NGOs, however gradual and small, on governmental institutions such as law enforcement agencies or the judiciary system. ALLY’s investment in clients’ talents was also seen as critical to helping clients develop an agentic self, one that is capable of demanding change in the absence of expected cultural shifts:

When their talent blossoms, the person who used to get beaten up going down the street, when she learns how to play the piano, she is not the same person. No matter what you do, she won’t go back to that old mindset. Because she has changed, and she has self-confidence. She will change from a beaten-up person to one that says, “I am a human, I have something to say, I am an artist!” (Omid, Managing Director)

Identity Politics and Political Context

Rather than assuming the absence of identity politics when rights advocacy is repressed, this study demands that we trace social actors’ desires, perceptions, and actions to methods of identity politics that defy our conceptual frameworks. Emphasizing or investing in the capabilities of marginalized groups is not placed at the center of identity political advocacy in the West (while capabilities are surely discussed within these movements, the rhetorical emphasis remains on recognizing marginalized groups’ “equal rights”). ALLY’s departure from conventional identity political mobilization tactics demonstrates a creative utilization of frames, resources, and opportunities for identity construction.

In this chapter, I have argued that limited political opportunity for rights advocacy in Iran, among other factors, has resulted in the emergence of a distinct form of identity politics carried out by NGOs that adopt unique advocacy frames to avoid surveillance and repression by authorities. Since this chapter examines the availability of political opportunities for identity politics under the authoritarian state of Iran in comparison to “liberal democracies,” where identity political movements have grown substantially over the last few decades, it is important to complicate this comparison by noting the limitations of the democratic/authoritarian binary often reinforced in such discussions. While Western countries are often labeled as democratic, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page’s (2014) study has demonstrated that average American citizens and mass-based interest groups have little to no independent influence on public policy, even though Americans enjoy regular contested elections and freedom of the press. The control of the economic elite over American politics and elections represents an oligarchical political system rather than a democracy by most measures. Authoritarian practices are not unique to those governments labeled as “authoritarian.” The increasing militarized response of the police in the United States and Europe toward mass protests, the arrest and imprisonment of whistleblowers, and the enactment of laws that criminalize anti-pipeline and environmental activists as ecoterrorists are clear examples of how political activism is not free of consequence in Western “liberal democracies.”

Constructing Iran as an authoritarian country where democracy is absent also has its own limitations. Liberal principles and democratic practices in Iran are simultaneously present and highly restricted. High public turnouts for presidential elections in which the ruling elite exercises a great deal of power, citizen participation in associations, volunteer networks, and nongovernmental organizations, and the presence of a courageous and harassed press demonstrate a public engagement with democratic practices for building a civil society under an authoritarian government. Hence, democratic practices can exist within authoritarian contexts, as Lisa Wedeen’s (2007) study on qat chews as a form of deliberative democracy in prewar Yemen demonstrates. Wedeen also reveals that democratic practices are not inherently liberal. In Iran, while many of the public’s demands are liberal in nature—demands for freedom of choice, freedom of expression, and gender equality—not all are articulated within a liberal framework. While the Islamic Republic of Iran rejects such liberal principles as individual right and liberty in favor of Islamic principles, it has not been repressive of all liberal values and rights talk. Osanloo’s (2009) research points to the formation of legitimized rights talk in the postrevolution state because of the state’s blended Islamic and civil institutions. The “West versus the Rest” dichotomy is therefore inadequate for understanding the great diversity of political conceptions of personhood and rights across cultural contexts.

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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.