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273 r o J a fa z a e l i Contemporary Iranian Feminisms d e f i n i t i o n s , n a r r at i v e s , a n d i d e n t i t Y This study, apart from being an academic project, has also been a personal journey. In contrast to feminist writers such as Mehrangiz Kar, Azadeh Kian, Shirin Ebadi, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, and Nayereh Tohidi, whose feminist consciousness is at times simultaneously linked to moments before, during, and after the Iranian Islamic Revolution, I am a child of the revolution. I grew up in the Islamic Republic of Iran during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88). At the age of three I became a martyr’s daughter,1 having lost my father during the war. I grew up in an all-female family, consisting of my mother, my sister, and me. I grew accustomed to my mother’s fights for our rights. She fought her family for an independent life. She fought my paternal grandfather for the guardianship of my sister and me.2 She fought male colleagues for her rights at work, and, above all, she fought her status as a war widow. She was one of a very few female university lecturers on horticulture at a time (1989–92) when horticulture was still an almost exclusively male subject.3 My mother personified the paradox that is the Islamic Republic. Veiled in a dark maghnae4 and wearing 11 f e m i n i s t i d e n t i t i e s 274 a long, dark manteau,5 she taught all-male classes. In one incident she had to ask a student’s armed bodyguard to leave the class. Later, the head of the faculty called her to let her know that she had literally disarmed one of the heads of Gilan Province’s6 sepah-e pasdaran.7 I was always fascinated with the clothes worn by my mother in photos from before the revolution, in contrast to her attire after it. Before, she wore seventies-style corduroy pants and even short skirts. After, a war widow, she veiled herself. She fought for a scholarship to Ireland, only to be informed six months after our arrival in Dublin that it was to be discontinued because Iranian law would not allow a single woman (whether widowed, unmarried, or divorced) to study abroad on government funds.8 Although I saw my mother as a powerful woman, I also became aware at an early age of the power dynamics that existed in the public institutions of Iran and the dependencies that they created and fostered. In the summer of 2003, I went back to Iran after eleven years to research my master’s thesis on family honor and women’s rights in Iran. We had left Iran for Ireland in October 1992 in order for my mother to pursue her PhD studies . On my return to Iran, I found that the country had changed considerably from the place I recalled eleven years before. The chador-enveloped women of my memories, emblems of 1979 Islamic revolution, had been replaced by young women whose faces were painted with makeup and who wore tight manteaux with ornamental scarves that spoke more of a desire for beauty than of propriety. War and moral slogans such as marg bar bi hejab (death to the hijab-less),9 and khaharam hejabe toe sangar ast (my sister, your hijab is a shelter from war),10 which were plentiful when I left Iran, had been replaced by billboards featuring advertisements for Sony, L.G., Casio, and more. That summer I attended courses on women’s studies in Tehran and interviewed an array of civil and women’s rights activists. Fascinated by the reform dynamics alive among women’s and youths’ networks, I returned to Iran again in the spring of 2004 for more research. I became engrossed in the Iranian women’s rights movement and wrote a paper dividing the movement into feminist subcategories: Islamic state feminists , Islamic nonstate feminists, Muslim feminists, and secular feminists. That paper was published in the Muslim World Journal of Human Rights in 2007.11 I have continued to expand on the research contained in that paper, and in this chapter I build on those early arguments and observations. I also expand the earlier research with interviews conducted with Iranian women’s rights [3.137.220.120...

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