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7 Fatemeh,Zeynab,andEmergingDiscourses onGender Like most regions of the world, Iran witnessed the emergence of a new discourse on gender during the twentieth century. While some aspects of this discourse can be traced back to social and political trends in the late Qajar period, it did not achieve full force until the Pahlavi era. It is useful to think of the chronology of this period as consisting of four phases. The period 1925–41 marks the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi, during which Iranian society underwent a modernist process of nation-building characterized by the development of a strong central government that promoted a comprehensive process of social, political , and economic transformation. This was followed by a period of weaker monarchy or political decentralization in 1941–53, accompanied by a short-lived flourishing of liberal nationalist sentiments in and around the circles of government power. The years 1960–78 mark the main period of social transformation under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. During this time there was a relative shift from a political context in which there was effectively one modernist political discourse dominated by the state to one in which this discourse was progressively supplanted by an opposition discourse dominated by diverse opposition groups. The decades following the 1978–79 revolution were characterized by a period of revolutionary consolidation, accompanied by a revolutionary religious discourse that was often dominated by the state. This chapter focuses on the years leading up to and following the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79. Reza Shah Pahlavi, and later his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, introduced radical changes in the conceptualization of gender roles in society. For example, they encouraged women’s education and employment as long as it was within the boundaries set by the state. Women similarly entered government service in all sorts of new capacities, including the police force and the Literacy Corps, and some schools 113 became coeducational. The new Iranian woman was represented as being a mirror image of the “liberated” Western woman. While the most dramatic changes can be seen in the roles of women, this analysis is not restricted to women exclusively. The concern here is with gender, which includes men as well as women. This distinction is important because throughout all of these phases the social transformation of male gender ideals has been somewhat different from that of female gender ideals. The dominant thread of discourse on the social ideals of male behavior (as opposed to political ideals) has consistently redefined male gender ideals (with some minor variations) along the Western “modernist” model. This is despite the changes in regimes and discourses that occurred from the 1920s through the 1990s. With the rise in prominence of the religious oppositional discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, the political roles of men were redefined along more overtly activist or revolutionary political lines. Thus, in contradistinction to the Pahlavi model of Westernization, oppositional discourse argued that the proper social roles for men were not fundamentally different from those professed by most Western liberals and nationalists, except that Iranians need to follow Islamic laws and norms of behavior. At the same time, their political roles became more and more politically activist in nature. The discourse on the female gender, however, was quite different: the social norms of female behavior proposed within this discourse distinctly contradicted most Western liberal conceptions of female social roles. The oppositional discourse stressed the idea that the only way for women to resist the Pahlavi program was to oppose transformations of female gender roles in society. This entailed the acceptance of restricted definitions of female gender roles, which, in turn, were reified as being “traditional” or “Islamic.” During the Pahlavi regime, the traditional feminine conception of womanhood managed to survive precariously in an environment in which there was an aggressive promotion by the state of a Western model of womanhood. Aslow process of transformation of discourses on gender, which can be traced back to the Qajar era, took on a more pronounced character in the middle of the Pahlavi era and culminated in an oppositional discourse on gender. In its final stages, this discourse was characterized by the reification of a “traditionalized” conception of womanhood by religious opposition groups. The Pahlavi model of womanhood was progressively associated 114 Fatemeh,Zeynab,andEmergingDiscoursesonGender with the corrupting influence of the West. One of the best examples of the effective articulation of the concept of Gharbzadegi (or West-toxication ) was in Jalal Al-e Ahmad...

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