Populism And Feminism In Iran

Women presented the first effective challenge to the Islamic regime and the clerical authority in post-revolutionary Iran. Women's activism in support of their legal rights and personal freedom, however, did not develop into a strong movement against the rising fundamentalism. The Iranian socialists did not support women's autonomous organizations. The convergence of the Left's populism with Islamic populism, and the influence of the Iranian/Shiite political culture that promotes male authority and female submission, could not reconcile with women's claims to individual rights, choice, and personal freedom and their struggle for autonomy and self-determination in private or public life.

This book looks at how Iranian women struggled for their legal rights and personal freedoms and how Iranian socialists refused to support the autonomous women's organizations.

This book examines the women's movement in Iran and its role in contesting gender relations since the 1979 revolution. Looking at examples from politics, law, employment, environment, media and religion and the struggle for democracy, this book demonstrates how material conditions have important social and political consequences for the lives of women in Iran and exposes the need to challenge the dominant theoretical perspectives on gender and Islam. A truly fascinating insider's look at the experiences of Iranian women as academics, political and civil society activists, this book counters the often inaccurate and misleading stereotyping of Iranian women to present a vibrant and diverse picture of these women's lives. A welcome and unique addition to the vibrant and growing literature on women, Islam, development, democracy and feminisms.

Shedding new light on the sources and character of Iran's 1979 Revolution, Manochehr Dorraj explores the genesis and development of popular movements and dissent in Iranian history. Dorraj draws on Iran's pre-Islamic religious culture and on its legacy of Islamic folk heroes and the millenarian movements, as well as on more recent history, to illuminate current events. His investigation of the peculiarities of Islam, of populism, and of Iranian social development is a major contribution to the ongoing debate regarding the essence of the Iranian revolution and, more generally, the political dynamics underlying social change in the Middle East.

This book is a history of women's voices on the radio in two of South America's most important early radio markets. It explores what it meant to hear female voices on the radio and asks readers to consider gender in its aural and sonic dimensions.

While research in right-wing populism has recently been blossoming, a systematic study of the intersection of right-wing populism and gender is still missing, even though gender issues are ubiquitous in discourses of the radical right ranging from »ethnosexism« against immigrants, to »anti-genderism.« This volume shows that the intersectionality of gender, race and class is constitutional for radical right discourse. From different European perspectives, the contributions investigate the ways in which gender is used as a meta-language, strategic tool and »affective bridge« for ordering and hierarchizing political objectives in the discourse of the diverse actors of the »right-wing complex.«

Were the thirteen essays Michel Foucault wrote in 1978–1979 endorsing the Iranian Revolution an aberration of his earlier work or an inevitable pitfall of his stance on Enlightenment rationality, as critics have long alleged? Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that the critics are wrong. He declares that Foucault recognized that Iranians were at a threshold and were considering if it were possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the European Enlightenment. Foucault in Iran centers not only on the significance of the great thinker’s writings on the revolution but also on the profound mark the event left on his later lectures on ethics, spirituality, and fearless speech. Contemporary events since 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Arab Uprisings have made Foucault’s essays on the Iranian Revolution more relevant than ever. Ghamari-Tabrizi illustrates how Foucault saw in the revolution an instance of his antiteleological philosophy: here was an event that did not fit into the normative progressive discourses of history. What attracted him to the Iranian Revolution was precisely its ambiguity. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this interdisciplinary work will spark a lively debate in its insistence that what informed Foucault’s writing was not an effort to understand Islamism but, rather, his conviction that Enlightenment rationality has not closed the gate of unknown possibilities for human societies.

Why were urban women veiled in the early 1900s, unveiled from 1936 to 1979, and reveiled after the 1979 revolution? This question forms the basis of Hamideh Sedghi's original and unprecedented contribution to politics and Middle Eastern studies. Using primary and secondary sources, Sedghi offers new knowledge on women's agency in relation to state power. In this rigorous analysis she places contention over women at the centre of the political struggle between secular and religious forces and demonstrates that control over women's identities, sexuality, and labor has been central to the consolidation of state power. Sedghi links politics and culture with economics to present an integrated analysis of the private and public lives of different classes of women and their modes of resistance to state power.