Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire: Young Iranian Women Today

In evaluating women’s position in the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran, it is important to look at the social, as opposed to the legal, aspects of citizenship. In the decades following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iranian society has become resolutely more modern, despite the public face of elderly tradition presented by its clerical political elite. This modernization enhanced trends that were already evident before the revolution. In 1978–1979, for the first time more Iranians lived in cities than in the countryside, and nearly half the population could read and write. The number of births per family rose in the early years of the revolution, but by 1986 the fertility rate peaked, and then began a dramatic decline. The transition to a predominantly youthful, urban, literate society has continued, despite the impression of enduring generational stability projected by its mostly aging political leadership. As the geographer Bernard Hourcade puts it, the “sons of the Shah” carried out the revolution, and for the most part they still dominate formal politics. But post-revolutionary society is predominantly composed of the “sons and daughters of Khomeini.” These younger generations have had a radically different experience of social development, not only in terms of state ideology, but also in terms of demographic change. [1] Underneath the surface, Iranian society is evolving, on its own terms, and in unexpected directions. What does this evolution mean for young women, the “daughters of Khomeini”? Women have seen dramatic improvements in levels of literacy and education and in control over fertility. Yet women’s rights as legal and political citizens remain curtailed, and their rate of participation in the formal work force surprisingly low. The “daughters of Khomeini” are not sequestered in the private home. They share with their male peers access to education and frustration with the economic and political barriers their generation must surmount. They also share with young men annoyance at the Islamic Republic’s attempts to segregate the sexes and impose an arid public morality, partly in the form of mandatory “Islamic dress” for women. Many young women have famously discarded the black chador in favor of ever more snug-fitting manteaux and ever more colorful headscarves. Along with this looser adherence to veiling (bad hejab) has come a set of looser attitudes toward social and sexual freedoms. Yet, particularly in the social and sexual arenas, the decline of traditional patriarchy has not meant the end of gender discrimination

Topographies of liberal thought: Rand and Arendt and race

This chapter compares arguments on de-segregation in American schools, especially the 1957 ‘Little Rock incident’, as forwarded by Ayn Rand and Hannah Arendt. Both came out against moves to promote integration in classrooms, and through contrasting what might seem their aligned positions, this chapter draws out the wider stakes involved a comparative reading of their work. Central to this project, and central also to recent ‘alt-right’ contributions to debates on ‘liberalism’, are questions of topography. What are the demarcations that must be called upon when separating a celebrated theorist such as Arendt from a seemingly peripheral and problematic thinker such as Rand? And how might the difficulties involved in corralling these two impact on the kind of physical and social separations that are evoked and evaded within their racist discourse, and any subsequent critical responses to this

Imaginaries of Europe: Technologies of gender, economies of power

This article explores some of the ways in which ideas about and attempts to construct a European identity and sense of belonging inscribe an imaginary of Europe that is exclusionary and elitist. It suggests that the symbolic figure of 'the immigrant woman' is a container category that simultaneously signifies the non-European and tests and destabilizes claims to Europe's essential characteristics. It also argues that traces of this imaginary of Europe can be found in feminist scholarship on global care chains and that the spatial category of 'the domestic' is the invisible seam that ties this scholarship to the hegemonic imaginary of Europe