The #MeToo Movement in Iran

The #MeToo Movement in Iran
Author: Claudia Yaghoobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2023-08-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0755647262

The Iranian #MeToo movement was a crucial form of resistance, with ordinary Iranian women sharing their experiences of sexual harassment and assault in the public sphere of digital media. This is the first book of its kind providing a comprehensive analysis of the Iranian #MeToo movement. Based on archival, empirical, ethnographic, literary and cultural research, the contributors discuss the abuse of women and society's responses to it. Contextualizing the historical framework of Iranian MeToo activism within larger Iranian feminist movements, as well as the historical background within the context of Middle East, the contributors address how the privileged position of men who have been outed as rapists, helps them to aggregate social, political, sexual, and economic capital through various networks in order to delegitimize the narratives of survivors. The volume also covers the intersections of various systems of oppression specifically highlighting marginalized voices. The contributors highlight the power dynamics within digital feminist networks in Iran and its unique attributes due to political, social, and religious structures. The volume ends with a chapter focusing on cultural productions, specifically cinematic works, through which some filmmakers have challenged normalizations of sexual harassment by offering alternative discourses which have arguably paved the way for the #MeToo in Iran movement.

The #MeToo Movement in Iran

The #MeToo Movement in Iran
Author: Claudia Yaghoobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2023-08-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0755647270

The Iranian #MeToo movement was a crucial form of resistance, with ordinary Iranian women sharing their experiences of sexual harassment and assault in the public sphere of digital media. This is the first book of its kind providing a comprehensive analysis of the Iranian #MeToo movement. Based on archival, empirical, ethnographic, literary and cultural research, the contributors discuss the abuse of women and society's responses to it. Contextualizing the historical framework of Iranian MeToo activism within larger Iranian feminist movements, as well as the historical background within the context of Middle East, the contributors address how the privileged position of men who have been outed as rapists, helps them to aggregate social, political, sexual, and economic capital through various networks in order to delegitimize the narratives of survivors. The volume also covers the intersections of various systems of oppression specifically highlighting marginalized voices. The contributors highlight the power dynamics within digital feminist networks in Iran and its unique attributes due to political, social, and religious structures. The volume ends with a chapter focusing on cultural productions, specifically cinematic works, through which some filmmakers have challenged normalizations of sexual harassment by offering alternative discourses which have arguably paved the way for the #MeToo in Iran movement.

The Other #MeToos

The Other #MeToos
Author: Iqra Shagufta Cheema
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2023
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0197619878

"To bring more awareness to the revolutionary international impact of #MeToo, The Other #MeToos brings together chapters that look at specific iterations of the #MeToo movement across multiple communities, cultures, and countries. Going beyond gender, the book takes into account the intersectional assemblage of location, history, religion, ethnicity, race, class, and neoliberal aspects that inform #MeToo and its place in local and transnational feminisms. From Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Tunisia, and Morocco to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to South Africa to Latin America to South Korea, Japan, and China to Czech Republic - #MeToo has inspired local movements and hashtag trends as well as transnational and collective hashtags like #MosqueMeToo. Therefore, by making feminism mainstream, it has rendered possible international feminist solidarities unlike any other feminist movement that precedes it. It is critical to document this defining feminist moment of #MeToo and its variants to acknowledge the diversity and multidimensionality of transnational feminisms, along with looking at the various ways they have been changed by the #MeToo, internationally. To that argument, the contributions in this collection examine, analyze, and interrogate the reception, translation, and adaptation of #MeToo in their local, indigenous, minoritized, othered, and/or postcolonial contexts. Overall, The Other #MeToos highlights the adaptation, translation, and impact of #MeToo in non-Western, postcolonial, minoritized, and othered locales to expand the larger discourse and praxes of the #MeToo movement beyond its Americentric focus to explore other feminist possibilities that the movement has enabled"--

Women and Power in the Middle East

Women and Power in the Middle East
Author: Suad Joseph
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2011-10-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812206908

The seventeen essays in Women and Power in the Middle East analyze the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that shape gender systems in the Middle East and North Africa. Published at different times in Middle East Report, the journal of the Middle East Research and Information Project, the essays document empirically the similarities and differences in the gendering of relations of power in twelve countries—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran. Together they seek to build a framework for understanding broad patterns of gender in the Arab-Islamic world. Challenging questions are addressed throughout. What roles have women played in politics in this region? When and why are women politically mobilized, and which women? Does the nature and impact of their mobilization differ if it is initiated by the state, nationalist movements, revolutionary parties, or spontaneous revolt? And what happens to women when those agents of mobilization win or lose? In investigating these and other issues, the essays take a look at the impact of rapid social change in the Arab-Islamic world. They also analyze Arab disillusionment with the radical nationalisms of the 1950s and 1960s and with leftist ideologies, as well as the rise of political Islamist movements. Indeed the essays present rich new approaches to assessing what political participation has meant for women in this region and how emerging national states there have dealt with organized efforts by women to influence the institutions that govern their lives. Designed for courses in Middle East, women's, and cultural studies, Women and Power in the Middle East offers to both students and scholars an excellent introduction to the study of gender in the Arab-Islamic world.

Electronic Iran

Electronic Iran
Author: Niki Akhavan
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2013-12-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813561949

Electronic Iran introduces the concept of the Iranian Internet, a framework that captures interlinked, transnational networks of virtual and offline spaces. Taking her cues from early Internet ethnographies that stress the importance of treating the Internet as both a site and product of cultural production, accounts in media studies that highlight the continuities between old and new media, and a range of works that have made critical interventions in the field of Iranian studies, Niki Akhavan traces key developments and confronts conventional wisdom about digital media in general, and contemporary Iranian culture and politics in particular. Akhavan focuses largely on the years between 1998 and 2012 to reveal a diverse and combative virtual landscape where both geographically and ideologically dispersed individuals and groups deployed Internet technologies to variously construct, defend, and challenge narratives of Iranian national identity, society, and politics. While it tempers celebratory claims that have dominated assessments of the Iranian Internet, Electronic Iran is ultimately optimistic in its outlook. As it exposes and assesses overlooked aspects of the Iranian Internet, the book sketches a more complete map of its dynamic landscape, and suggests that the transformative powers of digital media can only be developed and understood if attention is paid to both the specificities of new technologies as well as the local and transnational contexts in which they appear.

Women and Equality in Iran

Women and Equality in Iran
Author: Leila Alikarami
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2019-05-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1788318862

Iran's continued retention of discriminatory laws stands in stark contrast to the advances Iranian women have made in other spheres since the Revolution in 1979. Leila Alikarami here aims to determine the extent to which the actions of women's rights activists have led to a significant change in their legal status. She argues that while Iranian women have not yet obtained legal equality, the gender bias of the Iranian legal system has been successfully challenged and has lost its legitimacy. More pertinently, the social context has become more prepared to accommodate legal rights for women. Highlighting the key challenges that proponents of gender equality face in the Muslim context, Alikarami attempts to ascertain the causes of Iran's failure to ratify the CEDAW and questions whether and to what extent interpretations of Islamic principles prevent Iran from doing so. Applying feminist legal theory to contemporary Iran, Alikarami's approach re-evaluates the underlying principles that have shaped the struggle for equal rights between the sexes.

Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror

Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror
Author: Afarin Majidi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2017-12-18
Genre:
ISBN: 9781538059456

Earning an MFA in writing at the New School, working at Rolling Stone magazine, and being courted by an editor at a prestigious publishing house-Afarin Majidi should be thrilled with the direction her life is taking as she turns thirty. Instead, she is spiraling into the depths of madness as she seeks love and acceptance in an Islamophobic society. After colleagues at the magazine drug and rape her, she's left with an unfinished novel. She turns to a former professor, James Lasdun, with whom she develops a toxic obsession. Majidi is the woman he calls "Nasreen" in his memoir, Give Me Everything You Have. Raw and honest, Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror is a haunting meditation on identity, misogyny, violence, and mental illness.

The Good Girl Stripped Bare

The Good Girl Stripped Bare
Author: Tracey Spicer
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2017-05-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1460707265

From bogan to boned and beyond -- a full-frontal 'femoir' by one of Australia's best-loved journalists From bogan to boned and beyond – a full-frontal femoir Tracey Spicer was always the good girl. Inspired by Jana Wendt, this bogan from the Brisbane backwaters waded through the 'cruel and shallow money trench' of television to land a dream role: national news anchor for a commercial network. But the journalist found that, for women, TV was less about news and more about helmet hair, masses of makeup and fatuous fashion, in an era when bosses told you to 'stick your tits out', 'lose two inches off your arse', and 'quit before you're too long in the tooth'. Still, Tracey plastered on a smile and did what she was told. But when she was sacked by email after having a baby, this good girl turned 'bad', taking legal action against the network for pregnancy discrimination. In this frank and funny 'femoir' - part memoir, part manifesto - Tracey 'sheconstructs' the structural barriers facing women in the workplace and encourages us all to shake off the shackles of the good girl. "Glows with the wisdom of a woman who has learned essential truths about love, life and happiness" - Caroline Overington "Wickedly witty and wonderfully wise" - Wendy Harmer "Fiercely smart and ferociously funny" - Benjamin Law

Third World Protest

Third World Protest
Author: Rahul Rao
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2010-07-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0191614106

If boundaries protect us from threats, how should we think about the boundaries of states in a world where threats to human rights emanate from both outside the state and the state itself? Arguing that attitudes towards boundaries are premised on assumptions about the locus of threats to vital interests, Rahul Rao digs beneath two major normative orientations towards boundaries-cosmopolitanism and nationalism-which structure thinking on questions of public policy and identity. Insofar as the Third World is concerned, hegemonic versions of both orientations are underpinned by simplistic imageries of threat. In the cosmopolitan gaze, political and economic crises in the Third World are attributed mainly to factors internal to the Third World state with the international playing the role of heroic saviour. In Third World nationalist imagery, the international is portrayed as a realm of neo-imperialist predation from which the domestic has to be secured. Both images capture widely held intuitions about the sources of threats to human rights, but each by itself provides a resolutely partial inventory of these threats. By juxtaposing critical accounts of both discourses, Rao argues that protest sensibilities in the current conjuncture must be critical of hegemonic variants of both cosmopolitanism and nationalism. The second half of the book illustrates what such a critique might look like. Journeying through the writings of James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, the activism of 'anti-globalisation' protesters, and the dilemmas of queer rights activists, Rao demonstrates that important currents of Third World protest have long battled against both the international and the domestic, in a manner that combines nationalist and cosmopolitan sensibilities.

The Lonely War

The Lonely War
Author: Nazila Fathi
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2014-10-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0465040926

In the summer of 2009, as she was covering the popular uprisings in Tehran for the New York Times, Iranian journalist Nazila Fathi received a phone call. "They have given your photo to snipers," a government source warned her. Soon after, with undercover agents closing in, Fathi fled the country with her husband and two children, beginning a life of exile. In The Lonely War, Fathi interweaves her story with that of the country she left behind, showing how Iran is locked in a battle between hardliners and reformers that dates back to the country's 1979 revolution. Fathi was nine years old when that uprising replaced the Iranian shah with a radical Islamic regime. Her father, an official at a government ministry, was fired for wearing a necktie and knowing English; to support his family he was forced to labor in an orchard hundreds of miles from Tehran. At the same time, the family's destitute, uneducated housekeeper was able to retire and purchase a modern apartment -- all because her family supported the new regime. As Fathi shows, changes like these caused decades of inequality -- especially for the poor and for women -- to vanish overnight. Yet a new breed of tyranny took its place, as she discovered when she began her journalistic career. Fathi quickly confronted the upper limits of opportunity for women in the new Iran and earned the enmity of the country's ruthless intelligence service. But while she and many other Iranians have fled for the safety of the West, millions of their middleclass countrymen -- many of them the same people whom the regime once lifted out of poverty -- continue pushing for more personal freedoms and a renewed relationship with the outside world. Drawing on over two decades of reporting and extensive interviews with both ordinary Iranians and high-level officials before and since her departure, Fathi describes Iran's awakening alongside her own, revealing how moderates are steadily retaking the country.