Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran

Abstract

Transdisciplinary and brilliantly ethnographic, Women in Place is divided into three main case studies: Iran’s buses, parks, and football. In each, the ‘place of women’ is historicized, examined, and analysed exploring the formation, challenge, and change within state policies and women’s lived experiences. Through this, Women in Place offers a powerful intervention inviting us to re-think Iran, Islamism, and gender within the modern world. Not unlike other colonial and post-colonial contexts, the Iranian regime has sought to construct its identity – its ‘Islamic identity’ – on the bodies of ‘its’ women. This ‘Islamicness’, Women in Place argues, is primarily manufactured through mandatory hijab and gender segregation across buses, football stadiums, parks, and various institutions and spaces. Analysing the everyday lived experiences of women on whose bodies this unfolds, Shahrokni offers an in-depth analysis of the Islamic state itself. From public and personal safety, to health and wellbeing, to Islamic morality, and to national security, a large variety of different discourses are shown to have been mobilized by the Iranian state to justify and sell its various policies around the ‘women question’ over its 40-year history. Throughout, the state appears to create problems to then fashions itself as providing the solutions to these very problems including through a reformulation of such crises in a depoliticizing manner, for example, through technical or medical frames. Shahrokni’s analysis demonstrates the complexity of these discourses and, more importantly perhaps, the internal contradictions within and among them. The Iranian state accordingly emerges as ‘a flexible yet fragile’ heterogeneous body (p. 120) that has gone from revolutionary zeal to bureaucratic management. A pursuit of ‘balance’ and an attempt at ‘compromise’ here emerge as a key paradigm where the bodies of Iranian women persist as key sites upon which various political struggles are played. At times, these political struggles are within the state and among its various factions, but at others, it is with various non-state actors, such as the religious establishment, as well as international government and non-governmental bodies and organizations from Fédération internationale de football association 1158884 ISS0010.1177/02685809231158884International SociologyReviews: Sociology of Gender review-article2023