The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran - Softcover

Osanloo, Arzoo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691135479 ISBN 13: 9780691135472

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

In The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran, Arzoo Osanloo explores how Iranian women understand their rights. After the 1979 revolution, Iranian leaders transformed the state into an Islamic republic. At that time, the country's leaders used a renewed discourse of women's rights to symbolize a shift away from the excesses of Western liberalism. Osanloo reveals that the postrevolutionary republic blended practices of a liberal republic with Islamic principles of equality. Her ethnographic study illustrates how women's claims of rights emerge from a hybrid discourse that draws on both liberal individualism and Islamic ideals. Osanloo takes the reader on a journey through numerous sites where rights are being produced--including Qur'anic reading groups, Tehran's family court, and law offices--as she sheds light on the fluid and constructed nature of women's perceptions of rights. In doing so, Osanloo unravels simplistic dichotomies between so-called liberal, universal rights and insular, local culture. The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran casts light on a contemporary non-Western understanding of the meaning behind liberal rights, and raises questions about the misunderstood relationship between modernity and Islam.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Arzoo Osanloo is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and in Law, Societies, and Justice Program at the University of Washington. Previously, she worked as a human rights attorney, practicing asylum and immigration law.

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"Osanloo's original argument is that despite official rejection by the Islamic Republic of a discourse of rights as Western, liberal notions of rights are almost hegemonic in Iran today. Through wonderful fieldwork in Tehran's family court, lawyers' offices, and even the Islamic Human Rights Commission, she reveals how this has come about. She analyzes not only the force of the international politics of rights for a country that tied women's status to national identity, but also the surprising ways that Iran's unique system of civic-religious law has produced women with a keen sense of themselves as rights-bearing subjects. This is legal anthropology at its best and an extraordinary contribution to Middle East gender studies."--Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt

"Struggles for women's rights in the Muslim world are too often seen as a simple conflict between Islam and modernity. Osanloo's illuminating study of postrevolutionary Iran shows how women have articulated a much richer approach to advancing their political rights. They have developed a repertoire of claims that draws simultaneously on the state's republican foundations, the ideology of Islamic government, and the discourse of international human rights. The book is a highly original and important contribution to our understanding of the politics of contemporary Iran and to global debates about the rights of women."--Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University

"Osanloo examines a topic of great significance: the way the Iranian legal system has developed since the revolution to incorporate both the former civil codes and the newer ideas of human rights in ways that benefit women. This will be a widely read and valuable book."--Sally E. Merry, New York University

"This engaging book is original and groundbreaking in providing analysis and understanding for one of the most talked about yet neglected areas of research in Iran, the Middle East, and the North African region. It will open new directions for further research with important practical implications for women and human rights, Islamic or otherwise."--Homa Hoodfar, Concordia University

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The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran

By Arzoo Osanloo

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13547-2

Contents

Preface..............................................................................................ixAcknowledgments......................................................................................xviiIntroduction Human Rights and Cultural Practice.....................................................1Chapter One A Genealogy of "Women's Rights" in Iran.................................................20Chapter Two Producing States: Women's Participation and the Dialogics of Rights.....................42Chapter Three Qur'anic Meetings: "Doing the Cultural Work"..........................................75Chapter Four Courting Rights: Rights Talk in Islamico-Civil Family Court............................108Chapter Five Practice and Effect: Writing/Righting the Law..........................................138Chapter Six Human Rights: The Politics and Prose of Discursive Sites................................166Conclusion "Women's Rights" as Exhibition at the Brink of War.......................................200Appendix The Iranian Marriage Contract..............................................................209Notes................................................................................................211Glossary.............................................................................................227Bibliography.........................................................................................231Index................................................................................................251

Chapter One

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.

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. 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 (Elyachar 2005), and human rights (Afkhami 1995). As a trope of nation-building, gender constitutes legal categories, such as citizenship, while nation-states, in turn, shape gender systems (Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem 1999; Joseph 2000; Joseph and Slyomovics 2001). In this vein, Charrad (2001) studies the gendered effects of the intersection between national legal codes and kin-based paradigms of social control. Postcolonial studies of nationalism reveal how women's status and the sacred role of domesticity are related to and in conversation with imperialist calls to "save women" from their male kin (Chatterjee 1993; Spivak 1987, 1988). Their insights have allowed for increased attention to global and transnational influences, including secularism, feminism, human rights, and neoliberal economic policies (Abu-Lughod 1998, 2002; Elyachar 2005; Hatem 1998; Hoodfar 1997; Moallem 1999). These later clarifications situate understandings of terms, whether "citizenship" or "freedom," by placing them in historical and political context (Altorki 2000; Mahmood 2005; Osanloo 2006a). The post-9/11 flurry of attention to the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia brought with it explorations of women's roles in international and political contexts, especially with regard to Islamic piety and modernity (Deeb 2006), geopolitics (Hirschkind and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691135479
• ISBN 13: 9780691135472
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 282
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland