The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran

CHAPTER ONE: A Genealogy of “Women’s Rights” in Iran

C H A P T E R O N E A Genealogy of “Women’s Rights” in Iran THE CONCERN WITH “women’s rights” in Iran, as elsewhere in the Muslim Middle East, has been a persistent trope of modernity. This genealogical exploration of women’s rights attempts to situate the research question in broader historical processes that consider the power relations inherent in the approach to research or interpretation (Foucault 1977). The aim is not simply to address biases we bring to our subject matter, but also to consider how research questions and terms are shaped through contingent political and historical formations. To make sense of such terms, it is important to consider their significance in ever-changing contexts. The following discussion is not intended to be an exhaustive account of the scholarly literature on women’s rights in the Iran but offers a glimpse of how rights talk in this context emerges through a dialogical engagement, through political and scholarly efforts. WOMEN'S RIGHTS: TROPE AND CONSEQUENCE Nashat (2004) categorized the approaches to women’s rights in Iran as either Western secular feminist, Islamic apologist, or a third kind of approach in which Islam is seen as not opposed to women’s rights and equality . I seek a different approach: I consider how rights are discourses embedded in and in dialogue with multiple ideologies while at the same time they are also hegemonic. This approach not only considers how notions of rights are constructed but indeed contemplates how and why concerns with “women’s rights” emerge locally and transnationally as legitimating tropes of modern law and state institutions derived from liberal and Muslim values. I do not search for the origin of the women’s rights movements, but rather trace rights formations through an analysis that considers the shifting tensions underlying hegemonic forces through which claims to rights manifest. Women’s rights talk is always changing insofar as it is intertextual —it cannot be understood out of the historical, political, and social contexts, and it occurs as a dialogue among multiple voices, that is, it is dialogical. Understanding rights in this way, it becomes apparent that the scholarship on women’s rights in Iran is part of broader discussions about rights throughout the world. A Genealogy of “Women’s Rights” in Iran • 21 In Iran, as elsewhere in the Muslim MENA region, the role and status of women have been subjects of much scholarly research and debate, particularly since the early 1970s.1 Such studies have illuminated women’s varying positions in different sectors of society (Beck and Keddie 1978), adding the oft-forgotten component of gender to early historiographic records written by scholars who did not have access to women, and clarifying or rebuking stereotypes of women’s status in the Middle East. Historians explored formulations of women’s roles according to sacred sources (Ahmed 1992; Mernissi 1991); the role of patriarchy in producing historical records and in studies of gender in the region (Keddie and Baron 1991; Nashat and Tucker 1999); and women’s status before the rise of Islam in the region (Spellberg 1994; Stowasser 1994). Women’s legal histories added an analysis of gender to the law, legal records, and legal practices both before the period of state building and after, especially in the Ottoman region (Peirce 2003; Thompson 2000; Tucker 1998). In addition to historically grounded research, anthropological monographs gave ethnographic detail in contexts where little or no previous research existed, due in part to the lack of access by male scholars to these sectors of the societies (Abu-Lughod 1986; Delaney 1991; Fernea 1965; Friedl 1989). The interventions of Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes (1991) exposed the latent biases in research methodologies and showed how research methods are already colored by a set of assumptions about the subject of study. It is not only the researcher who brings bias to her field of study but often the categories of study that we take for granted or as self-evident are in fact shaped through historical and political contingencies. For instance, women’s roles were redefined in the context of nation-building after World War II and the fall of the Ottoman Empire (Kandiyoti 1991a; Moghadam 1993) and during wars for independence (Cherifati-Merabtine 1991; Peteet 1991), and in defining the postindependence state (Brand 1998; Joseph 2000). After independence, women’s roles continued to be reshaped in connection with modernization (Moghadam 1994a, 1994b, 2005), development...