Conclusion

Moving, we confront the realities of choice and location. Within complex and ever shifting realms of power relations, do we position ourselves on the side of colonizing mentality? Or do we continue to stand in political resistance with the oppressed, ready to offer our ways of seeing and theorizing, of making culture, toward that revolutionary effort which seeks to create space where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible? The choice is crucial.

—BELL HOOKS, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness”

In 2016, as I worked on the initial drafts of these chapters, I came across the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund’s (UNICEF) campaign for International Women’s Day. The campaign entailed releasing what was referred to as a “harrowing” video to “highlight the horror of underage marriage” in an effort to “help eliminate” it (Blott 2016). The bride in the video, a blonde girl in her early teens, is dressed in a white wedding gown while being pampered and prepared for her expensive wedding ceremony in a high-end club. The young bride is shown in snapshots as being occupied with her coloring book as her teddy bear lays on her wedding veil. Walking alone down the aisle, passing teary-eyed family and relatives, she is married to an older man and innocently looks him in the eyes, unaware of the horrific fate that will soon follow. The predatory hand of the groom moves gently on the shoulders of the young child, reminding the audience of the “grim reality faced by millions of girls around the world” (Blott 2016). Various online articles spoke of the power of this video in highlighting the horror of child marriage by replicating a high-end Western wedding.

As I watched the video, I wondered why raising awareness about underage marriage in the Global South required erasing the race and the class of the young girls to whom the video attempts to bring attention. I thought about the implications of this erasure for feminist efforts that are keen on refusing to acknowledge the connection between child marriage and poverty, when the persistence of the practice among the most impoverished populations of the Global South points to its strong linkage with economic and political instability, conditions shaped and maintained by the centuries-long racial-colonial Western domination. The colonial mentality of such international feminist efforts channeled toward “educating” the non-white people of the Global South about the horrors of their cultural practices—horrors so easily recognizable in the “civilized” Western eyes—continues to dominate international institutions and their women’s empowerment campaigns. As I examined ALLY’s program and its emphasis on education and consciousness-raising, I knew it was important to delineate the deep entanglement between Iran’s middle-class liberal feminism and the globally circulating women’s empowerment agenda that continues to problematize gender oppression irrespective of its intersecting class, racial, and global political dimensions.

It is no doubt that women’s empowerment has become the buzzword of our era. The term is widely used by transnational institutions such as the UN and the World Bank, by local and grassroots initiatives such as ALLY, by corporations that claim to empower women by exploiting their labor, and even in commercials that sell beauty products. However, the phrase has come under scrutiny due to its commonplace and paradoxical use by diverse and contradictory institutions that have conflicting agendas (Parpart, Rai, and Staudt 2002). Discussions of co-optation have compelled scholars and activists to question the comfort taken in the popular notion of empowerment and to examine more critically the assumptions underpinning women’s empowerment programs. In this book, I have outlined the complex ways middle-class and ethnic discourses of respectability entangle with liberal feminist discourses of “progress” and “backwardness” and place the blame of gender oppression on “cultural poverty.” As activists design and implement empowerment programs, they inadvertently bring an array of disciplinary discourses into their emancipatory agenda. As they model UN programs and draw from women’s rights packages to define the constitutive elements of empowerment, these organizations allow liberal assumptions about agency being a rejection of culture and tradition to dominate their assessment of progress. As they experience class as a relational construct and perceive poverty through a deficit model, they construct the poor as being in need of guidance by the enlightened middle class.

Depending on the definition of the term power—on which em(power)ment programs are founded—the agenda of an organization can take a variety of directions. In most modern definitions, empowerment implies the ability to exert power over people, resources, and institutions (Held et al. 1999). Empowerment is also defined as the ability to make things happen, which is why it has become the watchword for transformative and progressive agendas seeking to create more egalitarian and equitable systems (Parpart, Rai, and Staudt 2002). Other scholars (Battiwala 1994; Kabeer 1999) have questioned Marxist and liberal definitions that emphasize power over resources and the processes of decision-making. In a feminist analysis of power that goes beyond formal and institutional definitions, these scholars define empowerment as “more than participation in decision-making; it must also include the processes that lead people to perceive themselves as able and entitled to make decisions” (Rowlands 1997: 14).

In the 1970s and more so in the 1980s, the gender and development approach highlighted the role of culture and socioeconomic inequalities in women’s subordination and their subsequent disempowerment. This approach, however, was largely determined by Western notions of development (Hirshman 1995). In Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspective, Gita Sen and Caren Grown (1987) show that poor women’s subordination in the Global South is not the result of a backwardness or underdevelopment from which they could be rescued by progressive projects and programs. The root of the problem, they argued, is in the fundamentally exploitative global relations of power enforced by Western governments and international institutions that portray women’s subordination as rooted in their cultures rather than the effects of militaristic neoliberalism. Government-sponsored women’s empowerment programs, however, continue to offer courses on family, health care, food, nutrition, sewing, and crafts, which are reformist and conservative rather than transformative (Ityavyar and Obiajunwa 1992). Critics of these programs argue that without linking the topics that are covered to the dynamics associated with patriarchy, sexuality, colonialism, and power, the knowledge transmitted is not likely to be empowering (Stromquist 2002).

The failure of top-down, mainstream, and state-led development programs resulted in the adoption of alternative models of empowerment that emphasize learning from the poor, engaging in direct democracy, and grassroots participation within local communities. Women-led NGOs like ALLY that cater to adult women are key examples of grassroots mobilization around gender issues. These NGOs attempt to question patriarchal ideologies and to provide women with safe spaces to collectively question their social status. By providing workshops on topics relevant to women’s advancement, such as domestic violence, legal rights, reproductive health, and politics, these organizations have claimed to provide women with a variety of empowering opportunities. My analysis of the unacknowledged class and ethnic discourses that shaped ALLY’s program is meant to reveal how, even within grassroots and local initiatives with emancipatory agendas, regulatory discourses shape the definition of empowerment and position middle-class women as the enlightened saviors of poor women. Within a women’s empowerment program, a defiant attitude toward patriarchal cultural norms without a similar interrogation of the subjugating discourses of class and ethnicity can disempower subaltern women whose investment in their own survival is perceived as “lacking a sense of social responsibility,” whose progress is measured by performing middle-class femininity, and whose experiences of class and ethnic marginalization become invalidated by universal and reductive accounts of gender oppression.

This study aligns with more recent studies in the women’s development literature (see Merry 2006; Lewis and Mosse 2006; Sharma 2008; Levitt and Merry 2009; Thayer 2010; Radhakrishnan 2015) that are concerned with examining the impact of neoliberal discourses on local initiatives. These studies investigate the responses of local actors to global discourses, the adaptation and translation processes involved, and the relations of power and privilege inside development programs. My study connects the women’s development literature with that on transnational feminisms to reveal the hegemony and the shortcomings of a liberal and secular feminist framework in ALLY’s program that was translated by cosmopolitan and middle-class NGO workers with access to the global stage. I have shown that cosmopolitan activists’ liberal conception of feminism constructed religious women as disempowered others by assuming that rejecting culture and religion is necessary for developing an autonomous personhood. With its emphasis on individual rights, the organization failed to provide subaltern women with a framework of gender justice that would find currency in their communities, resulting in the further stigmatization of clients who experienced a backlash when utilizing this liberal framework to advocate for themselves. The relationship between the cosmopolitan and local elite over the practicality of advocacy for sexual autonomy among marginalized women revealed a contentious dynamic central to postcolonial contexts whereby Western cultural products are translated as universal values by cosmopolitan actors and are contested by local elite, who emphasize the importance of context and resonance. By showcasing the challenges of implementing ALLY’s liberal and secular feminist program, I hope to encourage activists to consider the value of a justice-enhancing feminist practice and a nonideal universalist approach (Khader 2019b). This transnational and anti-imperialist feminism recognizes the ethnocentrism in assuming that traditions outside the West are inherently patriarchal and that Western cultural forms are the only moral and viable choice for women. This imperialist outlook is the reason why missionary feminists are unable to recognize how wearing hejab can be empowering or how an Islamic feminist framework can better empower some Muslim women to seek justice in their social environment. Justice-enhancing feminist practice recognizes the nonidealness of social conditions and the significance of the context and historical specificity that shape those conditions. This approach recognizes women’s intersecting class and ethnic struggles and examines priorities and strategies for reducing and eliminating sexist oppression instead of committing to an ideal of equal rights in the face of its theoretical and practical shortcomings. Without radically transforming global economic and political structures that reproduce class and racial hierarchies, a definition of feminism as equality between men and women can only privilege white bourgeois women. “Which men do women want to be equal to? Do women share a common vision of what equality means?” (hooks 1984: 18).

I have also argued that the potential and outcome of women’s empowerment programs should not be solely measured by their unspoken regulatory practices or their overstated emancipatory objectives. In examining the transformation ALLY’s clients experienced, I have revealed the limitation of theorizing women’s transformed lifestyle as an indication of the development of a liberal outlook when the symbolic economy of adopting a cosmopolitan lifestyle among poor and ethnic minorities is overlooked. Meanwhile, marginalized clients resist and defy the stigmatizing effects of culturally reductionist accounts of gender oppression that undermine transnational structural injustices. For instance, clients utilized the intellectually nurturing space of ALLY to articulate an intersectional critique of the organization’s program, to form class and ethnic solidarities, and to enforce an understanding of class and ethnic privilege on NGO workers. Future research can benefit from exploring the potential of subaltern resistance for transforming the world of the middle-class and cosmopolitan activists who often perceive education and consciousness-raising as unidirectional.

Despite more attention being paid to women’s development programs implemented in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the growing number of women’s empowerment programs designed by states or NGOs in the Middle East have not gotten similar theoretical or empirical attention. Studies on gender in the Middle East continue to focus on Islamism, governments’ patriarchal gender policies, or women’s political campaigns. In this book, I have examined the impact of the state’s repressive policies on the advocacy practices of ALLY, particularly as they shaped ALLY’s capabilities-oriented approach to identity politics. However, I hope to have shown that focusing on state policies when examining women’s lives leaves out important sites and contexts for examining gender relations and feminist discourses. Women-led NGOs and women’s empowerment programs are dynamic sites not only for studying the transnational processes of translation and contestation of globally hegemonic discourses in local settings but also for examining the interplay between gender, class, and ethnic subjectivities in contexts where the NGO directors and their clients are of vastly different class and ethnic backgrounds.

Any analysis of feminism and gender inequality in Iran that remains ambivalent regarding the role of class, ethnic politics, and transnational connections in shaping feminist agenda or the everyday practices of women fails to account for the lives of the majority of poor, working-class, shahrestani, immigrant, refugee, and non-Persian ethnic groups of women whose struggles cannot be analytically separated from class, ethnic, and imperial oppression. While the perspectives of the secular, middle-class, and educated Tehrani women like the staff and administrators of ALLY remain at the center of scholarship on feminism in Iran, I hope that this book offers an alternative perspective by revealing the standpoint of subaltern women for whom empowerment is grounded within struggles for social and economic justice rather than a liberal conception of autonomy and choice, as hegemonic feminist models presume.