Transgression in Narration: The Lives of Iranian Women in Cyberspace

Since 1979, Iranian society has been living under a triple set of standards of urf, sharia, and modernity. An important field of superposition and contradiction among these standards is the gender issue and how to control women and their sexuality in the private and the public spheres. In the past two decades, gradual transgressions of urf and sharia have become a sign of modernity and resistance for many women and young people who wish to generate changes in their situation. Since 2001, the trend of willfully neglected veiling (bad-hejabi) in physical space has been accompanied by the virtual unveiling of women bloggers in cyberspace. Through their personal narration, women bloggers transgress several sociocultural boundaries. The strategy of women in both spaces is the same: to become more visible, to speak out, and to create a new identity closer to their “inner self.”