Introduction

“I wouldn’t live in this country for a second if it wasn’t for my girls,”¹ Marva told me as she recounted her decision to leave Canada, where she had lived for nearly two decades, to take on her current position in Tehran as the codirector of ALLY,² a nongovernmental organization (NGO) seeking to empower young, marginalized women. She had decided to return to Iran with the conviction that she could play an important role in the unfortunate lives of the impoverished and exploited young women who had found refuge and hope at ALLY and its women’s empowerment program. Marva’s confident wittiness and commanding presence solidified her reputation as the mama bear of the organization. As I shadowed her during the first day of my fieldwork, I noticed the close bond she shared with many of the young women, who greeted her with funny anecdotes, random hugs, and spontaneous smiles. Shadowing Marva also meant hastily moving between the two buildings of ALLY, attending multiple meetings, and watching her get on and off the phone every few minutes to manage the crises she faced daily. That day, I watched Marva navigate the unexpected and growing conflicts among the staff, particularly over the recent performances of The Vagina Monologues that some workers were resisting as culturally alien. I noticed her compassion for and frustration with the young teenage women in the organization’s dormitory whose history of trauma had complicated their relationships with the staff as well as her fears about the court hearing of one the clients accused of adultery following her sexual assault, which had kept everyone on their toes. “This is a labor of love. You get tired, you get disappointed, but you come back the next day full of energy, ready to do it all over again,” Marva told me with an exasperated yet hopeful tone.

After a long, hot, and chaotic day, Marva was finally free to sit down with me for a chat and a short break. Before heading up to her office on the third floor, I noticed a wall covered with the pictures of young children and heard the sound of aws and ohs as young women gathered to look back and forth at the pictures and the faces of their teachers. Acknowledging my curiosity with a smile, Marva signaled for me to follow her upstairs, where I knew she would tell me more about the wall that had sparked everyone’s interest. When we reached the third floor, Marva dropped the headscarf from her head while airing her clothes, hoping for a breeze from the room’s open window. She made us coffee and asked me to join her on the small balcony adjacent to her office, where small plants decorated her humble resting spot. The anonymous baby pictures on the wall belonged to the staff and clients, and the guessing game of which picture belonged to whom had been Marva’s idea, she told me as she lit a cigarette and offered me one. Seeing their teachers, social workers, psychologists, managing directors, and fellow clients as children, Marva thought, could help “bring everyone closer and ease the tensions.” That day, I had not understood Marva’s reference to the tensions in need of remedy, but only a few weeks of my ethnographic study would reveal the complexity of staff/client relationships. While I could tell that the clients felt love and gratitude toward the organization’s staff, observing the class dynamics and spending alone time with them had shown me the other side of this relationship—the marginalized clients’ growing critique of the privileged views of the middle-class staff, who they did not believe understood the multifaceted challenges of the poverty and ethnic marginalization they endured.

Marva’s desire for reconnection was reflected in her game, which demanded acknowledging the child inside, an image seemingly free of the divisive markers of social class and status. But after seeing the wall covered by the staff’s pictures and not that of the clients, Marva had realized the game had proven “insensitive.” She had not considered, up until then, that many of the impoverished, refugee, or orphaned young women simply did not have a picture of their childhood. “It’s a constant struggle,” Marva told me, acknowledging the importance of being self-reflexive in spaces like ALLY. Sitting on the balcony floor, Marva pointed to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the book she said she was trying to find time to get through. She opened up about the challenges of figuring out how to respond to clients’ complaints, how to manage growing conflicts between the staff, and how to incorporate clients’ voices in the program when she did not agree with them.

It was a struggle to manage the competing worldviews, unexpected grievances, and unintended consequences of a growing program with limited resources. ALLY’s women’s empowerment program was developed by a group of highly educated Iranian administrators who lived or had previously lived in Europe or North America. The program implementation was carried out by a more locally grounded middle-class staff who served young, impoverished ethnic-minority and many Afghan refugee women whose definition of empowerment did not always align with that of the administrators or the staff. It soon became clear to me that many tensions at ALLY reflected the different subjectivities of the cosmopolitan administrators, middle-class staff, and impoverished clients, whose varying class, ethnic, and national identities had shaped their understandings of oppression and justice.

ALLY struggled not only with its contentious internal dynamics but also with the challenges of running a feminist project in Iran, where the government has long been hostile to feminist initiatives and articulations of women’s rights outside the government-sanctioned Islamic framework. As a liberal and secular women’s empowerment program centered on gender equality and sexual self-determination, ALLY’s program encountered a plethora of challenges in its advocacy. These challenges reflected the contentious and politicized character of feminist activism in Iran, the association of feminism with Westernization, the entanglement of the discourses of progress with class politics, and a societal desire for engaging in the culturally authentic reform witnessed in many postcolonial nations.

While I had initially chosen the organization simply as a fieldwork site where I could gain access to marginalized women, soon ALLY became more than a recruiting site for my research project. Fairly early, I began to see the organization itself as a unique and productive space for examining the intersectional inequality lived by its impoverished ethnic-minority noncitizen clients and the need for political intersectionality as manifested within the program’s content and internal dynamics. ALLY, in fact, offered an ideal context to observe how different ideas concerning zan-e tavanmand (an empowered woman), the role of religion in women’s subordination or emancipation, and the importance of individual autonomy and sexual self-determination for women’s empowerment are negotiated by women and men of varying class, ethnic, and national backgrounds. Ally was a site of contestation on which various battles about feminism and progress were fought.

My curiosity about the workings of this NGO stemmed from the limitations I had noticed in previous studies on women’s lives in Iran that examined either the patriarchal policies of the Islamic government or the heroic defiance of women’s rights activists in the face of state repression. This limitation has left open the question of how women of varying class and ethnic backgrounds, with different ties to the global stage, develop and contest feminist discourses. While political Islam and a lack of political opportunities have captured the attention of most studies on gender advocacy in Iran, it is imperative to study feminist activism in relation to class and ethnic politics and activists’ transnational connections. Previous studies have shown the role of middle-class and elite women in shaping the feminist discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the Middle East as well as the problematic narratives of progress and emancipation that reinforced elite women’s higher social status vis-à-vis other women (see Abu-Lughod 1998). Many studies on feminist activism, however, have failed to consider the voices of non-elite women and their role in the development and the contestation of feminist discourses. While it is important to appreciate the courage and vision of cosmopolitan middle-class feminists, it is critical to examine how their feminist projects entangle with class and ethnic politics and imperialist discourses to produce subjugating effects.

Examining feminist advocacy through this lens can answer important questions concerning how “women’s empowerment” is imagined and how efforts to empower women are received: Why do well-intentioned efforts to “empower” marginalized women fail to gain purchase among the intended beneficiaries, even when such programs are formulated and implemented by local women? In any given context, whose voice dominates debates about gender oppression, and how does their involvement consolidate class projects and identities? How do ideas and practices considered modern and progressive and taken up by the local elite usher in emancipation while facilitating other social hierarchies?

Women-led NGOs and empowerment programs across the world grapple with similar questions and contentious dynamics, especially as they seek transnational connections and solidarities. The dualism of local versus Western feminisms has erased the heterogeneity of local subjectivities and has failed to capture the complex relationship between gender, class, and power. Moving beyond these simplistic conceptual frameworks requires asking different questions regarding women’s empowerment—questions that consider the unequal social and economic standing of cosmopolitan NGO activists and their marginalized service recipients. These complexities demand that we examine gender politics alongside the axis of class and the dynamic interplay between local and Western discourses through which calls for “women’s awakening” has been historically shaped.

In postcolonial contexts where accusations of cultural imperialism and counternarratives of cultural authenticity are hard to escape, attempts to transform women’s lives are characterized as either indigenous or foreign. The East versus West dichotomy has left its mark on feminist scholarship when indigenous feminism is seen in stark contrast to Western feminism. However, the origin of feminism cannot be found in a culturally pure location untouched by external elements (Ahmed 1992; Barden 2005). The link between Western and non-Western societies has long been assumed to be a one-way process in which liberal ideas of emancipation and individual freedom originate in the West and are then exported to the rest of the world. This problematic narrative assumes that Westerners are the only actors on the global stage while ignoring the progress and resistance that lie within non-Western societies (Povey 2016). While scholars have studied the marginalizing effects of Western feminism, the local efforts have been presumed to be free from subjugating assumptions and practices. This book challenges the binary of local and global by highlighting the deep entanglement of Western discourses of progress with middle-class and ethnic discourses of respectability in Iran as they shape women’s empowerment efforts.

Transnational Feminism as “Justice-Enhancing” Praxis

Any examination of self-proclaimed feminist interventions and initiatives necessitates an assessment of conceptual frameworks tied to feminism, particularly the value placed on individualism, autonomy, and secularism in hegemonic feminist discourses. The global dominance of an imperialist, missionary Western feminism has led many scholars to formulate transnational feminisms that are anti-imperialist. The complicity of feminism in imperialist agenda has been examined in the context of the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and how the feminist framework of women’s liberation from oppressive cultural and political structures was used to justify the U.S. militaristic agenda in the region. The complicity of feminism in imperialism has also been discussed in relation to the neoliberal agenda of international institutions and transnational corporations that have co-opted feminism by presenting it in terms of “investing in women.” Neoliberal feminism places the responsibility of overcoming poverty and social ills on individuals and claims that women’s inclusion in free market capitalism is key to their empowerment (Eisenstein 2017). Given the complicity of hegemonic feminism in imperialist agenda, how can we envision a feminist initiative, activated through transnational connections, that does not reproduce imperialism?

Serene J. Khader (2019b) has argued that key to developing an anti-imperialist transnational feminism is separating universalism from universalist features that result in imperialism. Since dominant conceptions of feminism tie this movement to Western liberal values of autonomy, equality, and individualism (often dressed as “universal human rights”), the challenge is to envision a transnational feminism without the kind of universalism that reproduces imperialism. While feminism requires normative commitment, Khader argues, the types of values that missionary and imperialist feminists embrace (i.e., individualism, equality, and anti-traditionalism) are unnecessary for and unrelated to feminism. As bell hooks (2000) proposed in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, feminism cannot be a fight for the equality of men and women but is a movement to end sexist oppression without overlooking intersecting systems of oppression such as racism, classism, and imperialism. Gender equality without racial and economic justice can only deliver equality for white bourgeois women. If we define feminism as opposition to sexist oppression and oppression as a social system that subordinates one social group to another (Frye 1983), then we can articulate a feminism that does not need to be tied to the values of autonomy, individuality, or equality.

Individualism, for instance, is often seen as central to both feminism and to neoliberal imperialism. Individualism is tied to feminist objectives when the subordination of women’s individual interests to the needs of their family members, community, and nation is concerned. Given that women’s value has been historically tied to their relation to others, it is argued that women’s liberation can only be achieved by embracing individualism and separation from relations that deny women’s personhood. Mainstream Western feminisms emphasize a type of independence individualism that sees women’s financial independence as necessary for their liberation from oppressive gender relations. Naila Kabeer (1994), for instance, asserted that women’s ability to earn an income reduces their attachment to roles dictated by custom. This argument posits that women’s economic independence would undo traditionalism and make women count as persons. This understanding of individualism underlies the structure of many women’s empowerment programs, which encourage their clients’ economic independence through vocational training.

The necessity of individualism for women’s liberation has been critiqued by noting the importance of familial and communal relations for women’s well-being. A persuasive argument in American feminist political theory is that the liberal value of individuality devalues women’s and men’s experiences of dependency and relationship (Jaggar 1985; Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000). Neoliberalism encourages individualism and defines development as empowering individual women, resulting perversely in a “feminization of responsibility” (Chant 2006, 2008; Khader 2019a). As Khader has argued (2019b), feminist assumptions that tie women’s emancipation to their economic independence can be traced back to ideological suppositions that associate capitalism with liberation from tradition.

Anti-traditionalism is another contested feminist value. Secular feminism advocates for autonomy through the rejection of the traditional dictates of society. Secular feminists have long argued that loosening women’s ties to their culture and religion would allow them to question patriarchal cultural norms as an important step toward ending sexist oppression. This approach implies that living by modern Western cultural norms is the only morally just and ideal scenario for women because the West’s association with modernity assumes a lack of adherence to traditions and rituals. Women of non-Western cultures, meanwhile, are seen as “prisoners” of their inherently patriarchal cultures. The “imperialist associational damage” of anti-traditionalism (Khader 2019b) is evident in how it resorts to constructing non-Western cultures as particularly patriarchal and how it justifies imperialist agenda through the imposition of Western cultural norms. By linking sexism to traditional cultural norms, this feminist perspective ignores historical, social, and political contexts as well as transnational structural injustices—such as neocolonialism and neoliberalism—that harm women.

The necessity of anti-traditionalism for feminism is often argued on the grounds that patriarchal norms are frequently justified with claims that they are traditional or religious. Consequently, it is argued that secularism and the adoption of a crude comprehensive liberalism are the only ways of achieving the feminist goals of ending gender oppression. While scholars such as Saba Mahmood (2005) have argued that moral judgments cannot be separated from imperialist concepts of progress and backwardness and suggested that we abandon normative judgments, Khader (2019b) posits that feminism does have genuine normative requirements. She argues, however, that anti-traditional autonomy (rejecting culture and religion) is not required for feminism. While feminism challenges those traditional dictates and practices that promote sexist oppression, it is the content of some traditional dictates that requires opposition and not their source as inherited external dictates. Khader emphasizes that sexism is an effect of social practices and that many sexist practices are new (unrelated to traditions) and are, in fact, justified on anti-traditionalist grounds. Meanwhile, Islamic feminist social movements and other feminist traditions in organized religions show that antisexism can be articulated within religious and traditionalist frameworks.

Khader asserts that Western feminists often assume that there is a single standard of justice (justice monism) and that this standard is best expressed in Western Enlightenment ideals and particular conceptions of individualism, choice, and freedom. Khader envisions “transnational feminisms as a justice-enhancing praxis that aims at reducing or eliminating sexist oppression” (2019b: 7) rather than advocating for gender equality or non-traditionalism. She argues for a nonideal universalist approach that examines priorities and strategies for challenging sexist oppression in their particular contexts. For instance, complementarian gender systems in which men’s and women’s distinct roles are thought to complement each other might not be a feminist ideal for those who see women’s liberation in gender equality but might be the best option for increasing women’s well-being in some contexts. In this perspective, commitment to “justice-enhancing” feminist practices serves women more than commitment to some just ideal. Feminist activists’ commitment to ideals of sexual self-determination and anti-traditionalism as necessary for women’s empowerment, such as I observed at ALLY, at times results in interventions that further ostracize and disempower their marginalized clients. Activists’ insistence on their feminist ideals in the face of their unintended disempowering consequences reveals the global hegemony of a missionary feminism rooted in justice monism.

Khader maintains that developing a transnational anti-imperialist feminist approach necessitates the acquisition of rich empirical and contextual knowledge and attention to structural injustices. My analysis of ALLY and its women’s empowerment program aligns with Khader’s anti-imperialist normative framework and makes use of her two epistemic prescriptions. First, this book makes visible oppressive global structures by rejecting culturally reductionist analyses of gender that locate non-Western women’s oppression in their culture and religion. Second, I bring attention to context to demonstrate that feminist efforts should be aimed at improving conditions for women’s lives rather than meeting some ideal standard of equality or freedom. This approach avoids viewing Western moral judgments as objective and unmotivated by interests to instead advocate for a kind of moral judgment that examines issues as political strategies in which choices are conditioned and constrained by power relations (McLaren 2021).

Margaret A. McLaren (2019) and other scholars (Bunch 1995; Petchetsky 2002) have noted the tendency of feminists from the Global North to emphasize the (lack of) legal and political rights of women in the Global South while ignoring or minimizing their economic and social concerns. Yet women’s well-being is inseparable from their economic and social rights and the transnational structures of neoliberalism and militarism. A transnational feminist framework (McLaren 2019) does not isolate sexist oppression from class, caste, racial, ethnic, and religious oppression and therefore recognizes the importance of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991) for an anti-imperialist transnational feminism. In this view, feminism “is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion and material desires. . . . Feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression directs our attention to systems of domination and the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression” (hooks 2000: 31).

This book offers an intersectional and transnational analysis of feminism in Iran by bringing multiple fields of study—postcolonial feminism, women’s development literature, and Iran’s gender studies—in conversation with one another. The convergence of these fields in this study reveals an inextricable connection between Iran’s contemporary liberal feminism and the colonial discourses of progress that tie anti-traditionalism to women’s liberation. This book delineates the challenges faced by well-intentioned activists whose loyalty to feminist principles of independence, equality, sexual autonomy, and anti-traditionalism complicated their objective of empowering marginalized women. Examining Iran’s class and ethnic discourses of respectability alongside hegemonic accounts of “women’s development” reveals why empowerment at ALLY was linked to embodying anti-traditionalism in lifestyle and fostering a middle-class habitus in impoverished ethnic-minority women. This book demonstrates that, like most feminist NGOs, ALLY was at once both an agent of class discipline and regulation and an empowering and enlightening institution.

What Lies Ahead

The title of this book, Proper Women, has two meanings. First, it represents the attempts of empowerment programs to cultivate in marginalized and impoverished women a sense of propriety defined by middle-class discourses of proper mannerism, modes of feeling, patterns of speech, and schemes of perception. The cultivation of a middle-class habitus (Bourdieu 1990) was seen as an indication of empowerment at ALLY because it allowed inclusion in middle-class spaces and, hence, class mobility. Yet, it also constructed the poor as lacking proper culture, education, and an enlightened perspective necessary for emancipation. The other meaning of the title references Giorgio Agamben’s (1995) theory of biopolitics and the concept of “proper life.” Agamben (2005: 2) reveals the construction of the figure of homo sacer or “bare life” in modern politics that allows the elimination “of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.” These groups of people, rendered as bare life, are abandoned due to the incapacity or unwillingness of the state to regulate or police certain types of violence (Pratt 2005). Development and aid programs regard bare life as being on the precipice of potentiality—the potential to transform into a normative way of living, or what Agamben calls the “proper life.” Proper Women brings attention to the regulatory discourses that constructed ALLY’s clients as bare life and the organization’s efforts to prove the potential of bare life to become proper.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of ALLY—the different aspects of its women’s empowerment program, the feminist sensibilities of the founder and the administrators—and my methodological approach to studying the organization. Chapter 2 places the stories of the organization’s clients in the sociopolitical context of Iran and explains the gender, class, and ethnic discourses that render their marginalized lives as bare life. This chapter provides an overview of the history of the development of feminist discourses in Iran alongside colonial and class politics while examining the gender politics of the Islamic government, the immigration policies of the state toward Afghans, and Iran’s repressive political climate. I also explain the process of NGO-ization in Iran, where, increasingly, issues of collective concern are transformed into projects addressed by NGOs like ALLY.

Chapter 3 offers a transnational feminist analysis of ALLY’s women’s empowerment program by revealing the liberal conceptions of choice, agency, and anti-traditionalism that shaped its tenets. The adoption of a liberal and secular feminist framework that emphasizes women’s sexual autonomy and anti-traditionalism had unintended consequences for the organization’s clients, who reported an increasing sense of helplessness. In this chapter, I show how middle-class activists’ liberal conception of agency inadvertently erased the agency of the marginalized clients, and why their rights-based advocacy did not equip the subaltern women with a framework of gender justice that would find currency in their communities. The contentious relationship between the cosmopolitan and local elite over the practicality of advocacy for sexual autonomy among marginalized women reveals that notions of “foreign” versus “culturally authentic” reform are central to feminist debates in Iran and globally circulating “women’s rights packages” are always contested in accordance with local norms and the dominant definitions of proper cultural progress.

ALLY’s politics of empowerment refused the isolation and abandonment of bare life by providing marginalized women with a level of care that demarcates the potentiality of bare life for becoming “proper.” Chapter 4 explores this concept and its place within aid/development zones and empowerment programs. ALLY attempted its advocacy for marginalized women through the framework of capabilities rather than rights. The adoption of this framework reveals three interconnected conditions: The limited political opportunity for rights advocacy in Iran, the perceived need to emphasize clients’ capabilities to counter stigmatizing discourses, and the staff’s perception of social change, which entailed prioritizing gradual cultural change through a “critical mass” framework (Oliver, Marwell, and Teixeira 1985).

Chapter 5 demonstrates how staff prioritized granting clients the cultural capital necessary for inclusion in middle-class spaces. This chapter reveals the ever-present and less acknowledged discourses of class as they shape individuals’ definition of success, position the poor (clients) in relation to the economically privileged (staff)—particularly in terms of “lacking” culture, taste, and social skills—and define empowerment as the development of a middle-class identity and cultural capital in the poor. Given the hegemony of middle-class discourses, the organization directed resources toward cultivating a middle-class habitus in impoverished clients through the exploration of various hobbies and vocations. Such training required extending the length of the program—much to clients’ dissatisfaction. As staff took pleasure and pride in providing marginalized women with artistic and intellectual opportunities they saw as empowering, the basic needs, vulnerabilities, and susceptibilities of the impoverished women were overlooked.

Chapters 6 and 7 take us to the world of the impoverished, ethnic-minority female clients of ALLY and their responses to the organization’s empowerment program. In Chapter 6, class tensions are explored in relation to the middle-class staff’s refusal to acknowledge their privileges in a context where the clients insisted on the importance of recognizing class as significant to relationships at ALLY and fundamental to the employees’ ability to offer proper help. This class tension also encompassed clients’ resentment and resistance toward those feminist accounts that lacked recognition of the interlocking forces of class, ethnic, and gender marginalization. The staff’s liberal feminism, cultural reductionism, and inability to effectively problematize class and ethnic privilege, while frustrating the clients, had the unintended consequence of nurturing a strong oppositional class consciousness and ethnic solidarities among the young women. This chapter reveals that the outcomes of women’s empowerment programs should not be studied solely in relation to the agenda and objectives set by the administrators and the staff; they should also be examined in relation to the subjectivities and the agency of service recipients.

Chapter 7 demonstrates that, despite their clear oppositional class and ethnic consciousness, many young women emulated the middle-class norms of respectable femininity through their choice of attire, demeanor, rhetorical strategies, and lifestyle in order to develop a dignified habitus in a highly stratified society. Rather than analyzing the young women’s trendy and immodest Western-inspired style or their premarital sexual practices as a form of resistance against a repressive moral order (as previous studies have argued) or as an indication of embracing the secular and liberal feminist values advocated at the organization (as ALLY’s staff interpreted), I examine these women’s transformation in appearance and lifestyle as a performance of middle-class privilege that could grant them “symbolic economies” (Bettie 2014) and facilitate their class mobility.

In the concluding chapter, I argue for the necessity of a glocal, intersectional, and anti-imperialist analysis of empowerment by reviewing the book’s findings and examining the definitions of power on which women’s em(power)ment programs are constructed. I propose potential directions for future research and encourage feminist activists to consider the advantages of a justice-enhancing practice as opposed to justice monism.