6

Oppositional Consciousness and Solidarities

I walked behind everyone with Barmak as the class quietly moved from the second floor to the backyard, where Shirin had promised a game was awaiting us. Barmak, Shirin, and Hamid, all college-educated, middle class, and in their mid-twenties, taught a community development class at ALLY and believed in the importance of educating the young women on a range of social issues. Barmak began explaining the activity to me as we walked down the stairs. He was excited about implementing a pedagogical technique his colleague had discovered by searching for effective in-class activities online. “Everyone forms a straight line with an arm’s length between them. We read a series of statements, and you step forward if the statement is true about you,” Barmak enthusiastically explained. “Oh, I know what you are talking about!” I exclaimed. “We do this activity in our sociology classes.” Barmak’s description had reminded me of the “privilege walk” activity in which students are forced to confront their class and racial privileges by taking a step forward each time a statement about a privilege that applies to them is read. Our conversation broke as we reached the backyard, and I began to wonder how such an activity would be useful or doable among a group of marginalized women who surely did not need a lesson in privilege. I soon found out that Shirin had made a few important changes. She walked past all of us standing in line and whispered a random character in our ear. I got a “thirty-four-year-old female doctor living in Tehran.” Negar, an Afghan client standing next to me, told me that she got “a rural girl in poverty with illiterate parents.” We were instructed to step forward if any of the statements read were achievable by our characters. The statements were about our ability to live alone, to choose our career based on interest, to date or marry for love, to travel alone, and other scenarios that reflected the hopes and dreams I had often heard the young women express.

At the end of the game, with some of us in the front and others many steps back, Shirin asked everyone in the back to share what they felt toward people standing in the front. “Revenge and anger,” Saeede, one of the Afghan clients, said, standing all the way in the back near the wall of the small backyard. There was a sadness and a sense of resentment in her eyes and in those of the other clients for whom the activity seemed to have brought up a range of unpleasant emotions. Shirin, Barmak, and Hamid invited everyone to sit in a circle on the ground to have a conversation about the activity. “Some people move forward in life because of the conditions in their lives, and those who are left behind tend to judge them and have ill feelings toward them,” Shirin said to problematize Saeede’s feeling and discuss what we should take away from the activity. “Those who have more in life might have worked harder, it’s not always because haghe kasi ro khordan [they have impinged on someone’s rights],” Hamid said to add to the point Shirin was trying to make. Shirin pointed out that during the activity, two clients who were assigned the same character had ended up in different places and that this difference reflected their varying perceptions of their abilities and that perception alone—and believing in oneself—can determine how far a person can go in life.

I sat there listening to the conclusions drawn by Shirin and Hamid, disappointed with where the conversation had gone. While I had previously seen the activity played out in the United States to counter meritocratic assumptions about advancement, I was shocked to hear the activity used to ask impoverished women to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and to lose their anger over inequalities they witnessed and lived daily. I was not, however, completely unaware of why Shirin and other teachers had chosen an activity to deny the importance of their own privileges. Their decision to appropriate the activity, in fact, can be better understood in the context of larger class tensions at the organization between the impoverished ethnic-minority clients and the middle-class Tehrani staff. Having paid particular attention to the contentious interactions between the two groups, I had found that clients were increasingly losing patience with the staff, whose point of view often reflected their privileged social positions—privileges the young women were now quick to bring to the attention of their middle-class teachers. As clients continued to problematize staff’s privileged standpoint, the staff had found it necessary to further deny their own privilege to legitimize their role as “helpers.”

In this chapter, I show how the tension between the marginalized clients and the middle-class staff of ALLY was shaped by the growing oppositional consciousness of ALLY’s clients and the unwillingness of the staff to problematize their own privilege. By doing so, I demonstrate the agency of marginalized women, who are often assumed to be passive recipients of services within the context of empowerment programs. Instead, marginalized women can play an important role in shaping the dynamics, the organizational narratives, and the outcome of women’s empowerment programs. While the impact of such programs are often discussed in relation to their content, the processes of program development and implementation can be contentious and changing due to varying and conflicting approaches to empowerment by staff and clients. Given that the role of the marginalized clients of these programs in shaping organizational dynamics is rarely explored, this chapter pays particular attention to the oppositional narratives and the disruptions created by clients in the process of service delivery. Faced with the staff’s growing resistance to recognizing their own privileges, clients used ALLY’s organizational resources to develop their own critique of class and ethnic inequality.

Classless Comrades

Shirin, Hamid, and Barmak were not oblivious to the middle-class privileges they enjoyed in comparison to the impoverished clients of ALLY. They were critical of social inequalities of gender, class, and ethnicity and passionately advocated for the young women, who they believed were victims of an unjust economic and social system. They were also aware that their contentious interactions with the women were due to the wide social and economic gaps that separated their worlds. This awareness explains the position taken by the staff in the “privilege walk” activity described earlier. Hamid, for instance, had explicitly referred to the growing tension between the clients and the staff as emanating from their different social standings:

For a while, the girls’ view of ALLY was not good. Their view was that these are a bunch of rich people and we are all poor. So [they thought to themselves], “It is their responsibility to help us. The organization must give us money and support us.” This was a common view. (Hamid, Teacher)

Hamid’s understanding of clients’ negative perception of the staff was shared by Shirin and Barmak, who had taken it upon themselves to “help” clients abandon their “negative” views. Shirin told me that the girls carry a deep-seated sense of hostility toward the upper and middle class, as they believe those who are rich must have impinged on someone’s rights. I had also noticed that a lack of trust toward the intentions and the advice of the staff had shaped many of the contentious relationships at ALLY. The teachers believed trust could develop between the clients and the privileged staff if friendships grew and the similarities between the struggles of the two groups were seen.

One group of the girls . . . had a very negative view of society, and their perception of us was that you are a group of people who don’t know anything about our pains, who have never had any problems and don’t know where we live. But this got a lot better [after they took our classes]. You can kinda see the big distance between the girls and the staff at ALLY. They see that a lot of the staff don’t live in Iran, and traveling abroad is a really big deal for the girls. I think some change happened in the groups we worked with, and this feeling has lessened in them. One of the reasons is that we tried to be friends with the girls, and they saw that we’re not people who have no problems, and we are not working here because we are bored with our carefree lives. Sometimes we share our issues with them intentionally. Sahar [one of the teachers] was saying that she doesn’t have a TV or laptop at home; she was telling them that she lives in such a circumstance, and the girls couldn’t believe it! They were like, “How is it possible for anyone to live like that?” One of the good things that came out of these friendships is that the girls’ views changed. . . . They see themselves as separated from the society and see everyone in the society as their enemy. But this gets better by being here and by being friends with the staff. (Hamid, Teacher)

Like Hamid, many of ALLY’s employees believed in the importance of changing the negative views of the subaltern women toward the upper and middle classes, who they saw as bach-e pooldar (rich kids, or born in wealth). Since the staff members were often challenged and undermined by the young women, who pointed to their privileged standpoint, many began denying their own privilege and demanding to be seen as equally struggling with daily life. For example, Ava told me that she found it necessary to tell the clients that as a woman, she also suffered from many inequalities, otherwise the clients would not give her advice any legitimacy if they saw her as privileged. I was told many times about the need to make the young women realize that “everyone has problems” and that the staff is not bad for having it good.

The collective narrative of the organization that insisted on the goodness of the ordinary middle and upper classes, however, was continuously challenged by clients. Although misfortunes experienced by the staff were shared with the clients, the women rarely acknowledged those instances as legitimate struggles. While Sahar did not have a TV or laptop at home, she was often absent due to her long vacations in Europe, about which stories were often shared with clients. When I was alone with the young women, I found that the staff and their efforts to undermine their own privileges were often mocked. One such source of humor was Hamid’s usual reference to the hardship he endured during sarbazi (two-year mandatory military service for young men in Iran) to claim that he understood the poverty and harsh living conditions of the young women. The women were frustrated with such remarks, as they believed that temporary deprivation and poverty were two distinct experiences that could not be compared. “Aww, whatever we say, you bring up sarbazi!” one of the young women said to Hamid as he once again mentioned sarbazi to argue that he understood the harsh living conditions of an Afghan client who was speaking of the challenges of growing up in rural Afghanistan during war. I could see that many of the young women were trying to hold back laughter as they exchanged playful glances with one another. While at times clients responded to such stories of “struggles” with kind yet sneering smiles, they also sometimes problematized the staff’s class privilege out loud and in their presence.

I spent a great deal of time in Hamid’s class with a group of clients who seemed to have formed close and meaningful friendships over the years. Negar and Sepideh were two of those friends. While both struggled to study for konkoor (Iran’s competitive university entrance exam), Sepideh had to deal with the extra pressure of not knowing whether she would ever be able to attend college; as an Afghan, she would have to pay quite a lot for the education that is free to Iranians. Like many other clients, Negar, coming from a poor and conservative household, had asked me once or twice whether I could help her figure out a way to leave Iran. Being “tired of everything and everyone,” she said she “just want[s] to get away from this life.”

When I entered the class that day, the two were flipping through an old issue of Vogue and discussing the outfits they believed they might be able to sew if they could get their hands on the right fabrics. I sat across from Sepideh and watched her eyes move from one page to the other as she scanned the glamorous images of beautiful women in expensive clothes. I noticed a growing sadness on her face.

SEPIDEH: I cannot believe that God is just! When I look at what others have and what I don’t have. We [my family and I] have had so much bad luck in the last few years, I just can’t believe that this is a just world, and I can’t figure out why things are like this. I mean, some people have so much that they don’t know what to do with, and then there are those who have nothing! Nothing! A healthy body doesn’t satisfy me. I think people should have more than that. When you don’t have money you don’t have anything!

NEGAR: You know what? I don’t buy what people tell me here [about inequality]. When you ask the roshanfekr [intellectuals], they say bright stars come out of the darkness. When you ask the religious people, they say God gives you suffering to hear you call him, or some say he’s testing your faith!

SEPIDEH: Some say you see bad if you have done bad! Everyone is trying to tojih [justify] this for us, and I don’t accept any of these!

It was difficult not to notice the strong us versus them divide in the way Negar and Sepideh were describing the accounts of the powerful other to which they would not succumb. Sitting on the other side of the table, it was also easy to see that Hamid and I were positioned in the camp of the other. Aware of such dividing practices and not willing to accept them, Hamid felt compelled, as he told me later, to undermine the clients’ account by speaking of suffering as universal and classless. “We might think some people don’t have any problems, but we really don’t have any idea what others are struggling with,” Hamid said after he shared the story of the time his younger brother was left in critical condition at the hospital for a month following an accident. “At that moment, it didn’t matter what economic class we belonged to, I was willing to give everything to have my brother back.”

“This is not what I meant,” Sepideh responded with an irritated voice. “The people I’m talking about have these kinds of problems too!”

I knew I was witnessing yet another familiar give-and-take between the clients and the staff, with the former group forcing an acknowledgment of privilege and the latter fighting it with universal accounts of human suffering to legitimize themselves. “I think everyone is asking us to kenar biyaym [be OK] with injustice,” Sepideh concluded, refusing to accept that all humans suffer the same and that the problems of a middle-class Tehrani man like Hamid could be compared to hers.

The clients showed a solid awareness of the class divide present at ALLY and believed that the staff’s privilege was the source of their inability to comprehend the complexity of the struggles they endured. Staff members, including Hamid, were not oblivious to the devastating daily struggles of the young women. Their refusal to acknowledge their privilege stemmed from their collective assessment of “appropriate” response to those clients who did not trust or value their advice. The clients’ suspicions about the intentions of the staff added to their very Marxist analysis of power in which the ruling class (the rich and the religious) justify inequality had made the upper- and middle-class staff determined to have a sense of legitimacy in the eyes of the clients. That is why they shared their own personal struggles, although they often looked rather petty in comparison. While employees were occupied with legitimizing their position, the clients were successfully developing class-based solidarities and oppositional standpoints. Daily conversations and interactions with the middle- and upper-class employees at ALLY, where inequalities (albeit mostly of gender) were commonly discussed, had sensitized clients to social inequalities that deprived them of the relatively dignified life their privileged teachers were living. To develop an articulated critique of such inequality, the young women utilized organizational resources, such as creative writing, community development, or poetry classes as well as workshops on women’s rights and effective communication.

Resisting Cultural Reductionism and Building Oppositional Solidarities

Afghan girls have experienced sexual abuse a lot more than the Iranian girls. Because in the context of their families, they think that relationships can be this way, that my brother can touch certain parts of my body, or that my brother-in-law can look at me a certain way or can make sexual innuendos. (Mina, Social Worker)

The depth of the problems is not different for the Iranian and Afghan girls. Rape is in both populations, but the perspectives are different. An Iranian girl would react to this experience much faster than an Afghan girl. . . . Afghan girls, to the contrary, have the same issues but have never had any space to dare to speak and argue with their family members. . . . Iranians are more active because of their living circumstances. If their life circumstances or the social norms do not allow them to do something, they still do their shenanigans and fight with their families; but not Afghans. Because the patriarchal conditions governing the lives of Afghans are very different. . . . If an Afghan girl says that she has a boyfriend, the reactions might be very severe, but not as much in Iranian families. They are not that sensitive. Even if the argument escalates and there is some physical fighting, it will be fighting on both sides, the Iranian girl is going to physically fight back. But in Afghan families, it’s very one-sided. One does the beating and the other one just takes it. (Azar, Social Worker)

ALLY’s middle-class staff often explained gendered social problems such as domestic violence, sexual violence, and child marriage as a reflection of faghr-e farhangi (cultural poverty), which the poor and ethnic minorities struggled with. This cultural poverty was seen as especially severe in the Afghan culture. Azar, Mina, and other Iranian workers explained the widespread problems of sexual and domestic violence in Afghan communities as being rooted in Afghan’s deeply patriarchal culture. While no doubt many aspects of Afghan (and most other) culture(s) are patriarchal, dominant accounts fail to explain the persistence of patriarchal control among Afghans due to the country’s long history of colonial violence, war, and political instability or the material, educational, and legal deprivation that Afghans have long grappled with in both Afghanistan and Iran. Azar’s and Mina’s comments reflected the hegemony of cultural reductionist explanations of gender oppression in the Middle East (Bahramitash and Kazemipour 2006), where culture is assumed to be overdeterminist and unchanging and have an independent existence from other social institutions. Without references to these interdependencies, remarks such as those of Azar and Mina inadvertently reproduce discriminatory ethnic discourses that find Afghan culture as fundamentally violent and misogynist and Afghan women as particularly passive and oppressed. Under the hegemony of cultural reductionist discourses, many of ALLY’s staff and administrators interpreted problems such as domestic violence and sexual violence as the effects of cultural poverty rather than as the structural effects of poverty and social exclusion. Numerous studies have demonstrated the effects of economic and social inequalities on behavioral violence (Garbarino 1999; Gilligan 2001; Crenshaw 1991). Violence in men’s immediate social environment, frustration by the inability to provide food, poor living conditions and overcrowding, substance abuse, low levels of schooling, and other effects of poverty have been found to aggravate violence (Gonzales de Olarte and Llosa 1999; Evans 2005). This is not to suggest that the problem of violence against women will be resolved by the eradication of poverty; rather, the effect of poverty and precarious masculinity should be understood as intersecting and not separate categories of analysis.

While staff and clients often agreed on the patriarchal character of many cultural norms and ideologies, in many other instances, the employees’ cultural reductionism resulted in tensions between the two groups. My field notes documenting the classes and workshops at ALLY were filled with contentious dialogues between the teachers and the clients over the analyses of gender oppression provided by the staff. The clients expressed resentment toward those accounts in which gender oppression was reduced to matters of culture while intersecting class and ethnic inequalities remained unchallenged. In one workshop, the clients were given the chance to discuss a topic of their choice. “Which matters the most—knowledge or money?” was the topic proposed by Kobra, a sixteen-year-old Afghan client, and most requested by the class. Considering the organizational narratives that emphasized knowledge and education and the reality of clients’ daily life, in which money was the defining factor, the women’s interest in this question was less than startling. “Why do you think money is such a pursued value?” Reza, ALLY’s art therapy teacher, asked to facilitate the conversation. “Dominance,” Armaghan, an eighteen-year-old Afghan client, responded assuredly. “Money allows some groups to dominate others,” she continued.

“I personally don’t care much for money,” Kobra chimed in. Her response appeared to me to be an effort to separate herself from those who wished to dominate others. Hearing her remark, Reza probed Kobra to concede if she would marry a poor man knowing that he might not be able to afford to take their sick child to the hospital in the future. “My father has said he’ll not marry off his daughter for less than twenty million tomans [US$5,000 at the time],” Kobra said to point to the relatively firm financial status of her future husband. An artist in his forties who had lived most of his life in Europe, Reza was quite puzzled by Kobra’s remark. Reading the apparent confusion on his face, clients jumped in to explain Kobra’s statement as a reference to the tradition of shirbaha.¹ While this tradition is mostly abandoned and primarily entails providing a small and symbolic gift to the bride’s family in Iran, the practice persists in the Afghan culture and often requires the groom to give a large sum of money to the bride’s family in exchange for their blessing.

Following the organizational agenda of problematizing the patriarchal character of traditions and culture, Reza used this opportunity as a teachable moment: “So what we are doing here is treating women as goods that can be sold. And the gray-bearded sheep make those decisions about how much a woman’s worth is.” While some of the clients laughed at the reference to the “gray-bearded sheep,” others’ faces soured in offense upon hearing a disparaging remark about the men in their lives. Still others were unhappy about what they saw as a simplistic account of gender oppression. “A father who is a worker with a wage barely enough to keep his family alive cannot afford to disregard this money or the tradition. Rich people can, but we can’t!” said Zahra, an eighteen-year-old recently engaged Afghan client, rejecting the dominant assumption that traditions such as shirbaha persist due to men’s misogynist views rather than the necessity of maintaining such economic transactions for the survival of the poor.

Following the heated debate that ensued, Reza wrote the word Agahi (awareness) in bold letters on the board and turned toward the class to further argue that ignorance is the ultimate cause of women’s suffering. “I have the awareness,” Kobra responded with an irritated voice, “but I’m facing bigger struggles in society.” For Zahra and Kobra, the economic struggles of the families who continued to follow the tradition remained the main culprit, and to them, Reza’s comments represented the economic privilege of the middle and upper classes, who disregarded such traditional practices for their patriarchal character while vilifying the impoverished Afghans for not as easily surrendering their misogyny. Reza was not unaware of the economic challenges of ALLY’s clients and deeply sympathized with their struggles. Yet culturally reductionist discourses that emphasize education and consciousness-raising can be especially appealing when NGO actors feel helpless in addressing structural inequalities that fall outside their circle of influence. As the exchange between Reza and the young women suggests, the subaltern women demonstrated a strong class consciousness and an intersectional understanding of inequality in which their gender oppression was deeply linked to their class and ethnic oppression. They did not leave the mainstream feminist accounts of their own oppression unchallenged and continuously offered their own understanding of gender inequality, which prioritized economic justice.

Solutions to social problems such as child labor and child marriage were other points of contention between the two groups. Staff often spoke of such issues as moshkelat-e farhangi (cultural problems) and suggested that educational campaigns about children’s human rights would deter families from sending their children to work. The young women, however, rejected these accounts, which vilified the poor by portraying them as ignorant and in need of lessons in morality. In one class on community development, for instance, the teachers described women’s unpaid labor at home and child labor as instances of slavery. While clients happily agreed that women’s unpaid labor at home is an example of exploitation, they strongly rejected children’s work as an instance of abuse. Barmak, Hamid, and Shirin pointed to children’s inability to consent and the fact that the money earned is collected by their guardians to solidify their argument. “You can’t really say that! The father might know better how to spend the money,” asserted Neda, one of the Iranian clients. Others insisted that children’s work might be the only way for families to survive. While working children were spoken of in the third person by both groups, the clients’ comments in different classes had revealed to me that many had worked as children or had young siblings who were currently working. It seemed that clients’ rejection of these arguments was an effort to restore the dignity of their own families and social class, who are often vilified for making choices the middle class are not forced to make. Clients, both Iranian and Afghan, insisted that child labor and child marriage are the problems of the impoverished not due to lack of awareness or morality but due to lack of choice. The economic necessity of sending children to work, even as beggars, or the financial necessity of marrying off one’s young children because of an inability to provide for them were problems emphasized by many of the young women.

While a number of the Afghan and Iranian women were vocal about the class privilege of the staff and often mocked them behind their back for not recognizing their privileged views, Afghan women also saw ethnic marginalization as deeply interlinked with their gender oppression. The interaction of a group of Afghan and Iranian clients in a workshop revealed the Afghan women’s growing oppositional ethnic solidarities at ALLY. As often happened in such workshops, clients were asked to suggest a topic, and the topic with the most votes was chosen. Among the suggested subjects of discussion were love, jealousy, discrimination, bigotry, and freedom of choice. The topic of immigration was also brought up and sparked huge interest among Afghan women. Maryam, a seventeen-year-old Iranian woman, however, protested the topic with a dispassionate voice, claiming that she was tired of discussing a topic she knew nothing about. While the teacher vouched for the importance of discussing immigration and reminded Maryam of her privilege, Maryam’s comment seemed to have dampened the Afghan women’s excitement. With one more vote than “immigration,” the topic of tahghir shodan (being degraded) was chosen.

The teacher asked clients to share an instance of being degraded to begin the conversation. Soheila, an Afghan client who had suggested the topic, began to uncomfortably recount the ways her sister and boyfriend spoke to her in a degrading way. It was not long before many Afghan clients jumped in to share their own experiences of degradation and being disrespected as Afghans in Iran. “They tell us we’re only good for washing toilets,” Zahra, one of the Afghan women, said. “They always tell us: ‘Shut up, who do you think you are to open your mouth?’” Armine, another Afghan woman, said of the time she participated in a heated debate on the subway. One by one, Afghan clients chimed in and shared their own experiences. Nooshin said angrily that each time she objected to men who sexually harassed her on the street, their answer was, “Shut up, you dirty Afghani, we can do whatever we want to your kind.” Narges told the story of the day she and her friends refused to take the numbers of a group of boys who were flirting with them. She recounted that their refusal was followed by the boys’ loud verbal harassment, which included racial slurs. “People who were watching wouldn’t have stayed silent if the boys were doing that to Iranian girls,” Narges said; others nodded their heads in her support. Other Afghan clients suggested that the police never investigated rape and sexual violence when the victims were Afghan, unlike when Iranian women were concerned. While two Iranian clients disagreed with the Afghan women’s statements by claiming that they themselves had been subjected to degradation in public, the Afghan clients were quick to remind them that while women were subjected to many forms of discrimination, Afghan women’s oppression was compounded by their ethnic oppression.

By demarcating their experiences of gender oppression from those of Iranian women, Afghan women insisted on the intersectional character of their victimization. The interaction I just described also demonstrates the development of an ethnic oppositional consciousness among ALLY’s Afghan clients in interaction with their middle-class Iranian staff and fellow impoverished Iranian clients. My observation of clients’ conversations around family dynamics revealed that this ethnic consciousness did not always represent the view of the Afghan communities the clients came from. Afghan women at ALLY often talked about their never-ending conversations with their families about Afghans’ human rights and the difficulty of convincing them that they are as rightful and deserving as Iranians. The decades-long history of xenophobia against Afghans and nationalist propaganda has resulted in the internalization of oppressive ethnic ideologies among Afghan communities. ALLY’s organizational discourses, while focused on women’s rights and gender equality, had provided clients with the opportunity to develop a well-articulated oppositional and intersectional gender, ethnic, and class consciousness.

In many cases, the staff did a great job of engaging clients with a range of topics concerning community involvement, social inequality, gender and ethnic discrimination, and other social problems. It would be wrong to suggest that the clients’ experience at ALLY was that of marginalization by workers who were oblivious to their own privileges. While the clients were critical of certain aspects of ALLY’s empowerment program, they had used the organizational and educational resources to develop and articulate their own critiques. In fact, it appeared that their oppositional class consciousness and commitment to ethnic equality were developed as they began to apply the framework of women’s rights and gender equality, widely discussed at the organization, to other forms of inequalities they were experiencing. As they developed and articulated their opinions of class and ethnic privilege, the staff and the organization got the brunt of the critiques.

Lauren G. Leve’s (2007) ethnographic study of the rural revolution in Nepal demonstrates a similar dynamic. Leve’s study reveals that rural women’s support and large-scale involvement in the Maoist movement was the result of their politicization through their participation in development programs that had a neoliberal agenda. The literacy and development courses offered, however, contributed to women’s political awareness and their eventual opposition to neoliberal policies. This book’s study, similar to Leve’s, demonstrates that the content of development or empowerment programs is not uncritically adopted and that the oppositional consciousness of subaltern women is formed “based on morally grounded ideas about social personhood . . . not the culturally disembedded valorizations of autonomy, agency, and choice that most models presume” (Leve 2007: 127–128).

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