Diasporic Body-Memory Politics: Sexualized Public Gender-Role Surveillance in Post-Revolutionary and Post-War Iran
Date
2022-08-12
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0000-0002-9354-6517
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
The nationalist Islamization project has become one of the Iranian Islamic Republic’s longest-standing goals, grounded in efforts to rule women’s bodies, beginning right after the revolution in 1979. Islamization aims to eradicate secularizing approaches to gender socialization in Iranian society by regulating women's clothing and intimate-sexual relationships as a symbol of nationalism, building a substantive weapons arsenal, and making alternative international allies in resistance to western imperialisms. Under the banner of sacred values, Islamicist authorities stake their nationalist claims by surveilling and thereby invading and marking women’s and girls’ bodies and lives with their interpretations, interrogations, and controlled aspirations, leaving a residue of structured psycho-social affects and embodied memories.
Three diasporic Iranian women from the 1980s generation agreed to co-explore how the Islamicist government’s male-dominated, female interrogative culture have affected their lives. Drawing upon collective memory work (CMW), the study examines specific co-selected surveillance practices that mark women and girls as vulnerable in Iran’s public and private spaces. Participants engaged in five virtual, three-hour meetings over a period of six weeks, followed by collaborative work on written memories, before developing a collective biography in the form of a virtual ethnodrama. The Persian term, toroma, is used here to trace the unique normalization of interrogative gender surveillance and related forms of violence after the Islamic revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war. The results demonstrate the willful production of an alienated female body, detached from its agency under hegemonic Islamicist practices of monitoring gender power markers and intimate relationships. The variable alignments between private patriarchal families and public governance approaches have produced an Islamicization of sexualities, with distorting complexities in social relations that pass toromas across generations in ways that can resurface in the diaspora.
Description
Keywords
Collective Memory Work, Diasporic Iranian Women
Citation
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity
Program
Women's and Gender Studies