Iran

Citation:

Ahmadi, Shaherzad R. 2018. "'In My Eyes He Was a Man': Poor and Working-Class Boy Soldiers in the Iran-Iraq War." Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 14 (2): 174-192.

Author: Shaherzad R. Ahmadi

Abstract:

During the Pahlavi period in Iran (1925–79), poor and working-class families were more likely to expect young sons to work to support the household. These boys, in turn, were more autonomous. Middle-class families, on the other hand, protected and controlled boys. Researchers have assumed that religious zealotry was the primary inspiration for boys to enlist in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, ignoring the ways in which class inflected boyhood. While religious fervor may have been a motivation for some of the poor and working-class Iranian boys (between ten and fourteen) who enlisted, the expectation that they work took precedence. Moreover, at least some of these boys were eager to participate in war-front masculine homosociality rather than remain in feminized domestic spaces. This study analyzes biographies, census data, newspaper accounts, and original oral history interviews.

Keywords: Iran-Iraq War, childhood, boy soldiers, Pahlavi Iran, class

Topics: Age, Youth, Armed Conflict, Class, Combatants, Child Soldiers, Male Combatants, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2018

Citation:

Gordan, Arielle. 2021. "From Guerilla Girls to Zainabs: Reassessing the Figure of the "Militant Woman" in the Iranian Revolution." Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 17 (1): 64-95.

Author: Arielle Gordon

Abstract:

Scholars have long accounted for representations of women in the Iranian Revolution by categorically classifying them as “devout mothers” or “heroic sisters,” embodied respectively in the Shiʾi archetypes of Fatima and Zainab. However, a closer look at images of militant women finds them residing within the traditions of their time, as part and parcel of an era of liberation movements in which the idiom of the female fighter featured prominently. This article takes a transnational look at tropes of women’s militancy and traces how they filtered into Iranian revolutionary culture. Finally, it contends that only with the consolidation of Khomeini’s power and the start of the Iran-Iraq War is this figure renamed Zainab and sustained as a central icon of the Islamic Republic.

Keywords: visual culture, revolution, transnationalism, representation, 'gender'

Topics: Armed Conflict, National Liberation Wars, Combatants, Female Combatants, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Religion Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran, Iraq

Year: 2021

Citation:

Chaguri, Mariana Miggiolaro, and Flávia X. M. Paniz. 2019. "Women's War: Gender Activism in the Vietnam War and in the Wars for Kurdish Autonomy." Sociologia & Antropologia 9 (3): 895-918.

Authors: Mariana Miggiolaro Chaguri, Flávia X. M. Paniz

Abstract:

ENGLISH ABSTRACT:
This paper debates women’s activism in two events: the Vietnam War (1954-1975) and the historical Kurdish struggle for autonomy (known as “Kurdish question”). We hypothesize that the reorganization of gender roles during the conflicts marks the meanings of wars and configures what we call a woman for the times of war, that is, a woman who transits across the spaces of public confrontation, armed conflict and domesticity. The approach outlined here is structured into three parts: the first and the second ones present aspects of both conflicts by pointing to possible convergences and differences between them; we also present the variety of networks of participation and activism of women in both cases. In the third and final part, we discuss the interfaces among the production of gender, war, and ideas, crossing a manifold of narratives, experiences, and stories that reveal different dimensions of wars and nations, and the diversity of the regimes of ideas that attached to them.

PORTUGUESE ABSTRACT:
Este artigo problematiza a participação e debate o ativismo de mulheres em dois eventos: a Guerra do Vietnã (1954-1975) e as guerras pelo Curdistão (1923 em diante). Como hipótese, sustentamos que tais lutas podem ser lidas a partir do esforço comum de tornar inteligível e nomear um conjunto variado de experiências que, reorganizadas a partir ou em função do conflito armado, produzem novas mediações entre gênero e nação. O artigo está dividido em três partes: nas duas primeiras, são apresentados aspectos dos dois conflitos apontando eventuais convergências e diferenças; na sequência, observam-se as variadas formas de participação e de ativismo de mulheres existentes nos dois casos; finalmente, são debatidas as interfaces entre a produção do gênero, da guerra e das ideias, percorrendo uma multiplicidade de narrativas, experiências e relatos que apontam para a dimensão heterogênea das guerras, das nações e, portanto, do regime de ideias que deve acompanhá-las.

Keywords: gender, war, nation and nationalism, post-colonial feminism, gênero, guerra, nação e nacionalismo, feminismo pós-colonial

Topics: Armed Conflict, National Liberation Wars, Civil Society, Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Nationalism Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia Countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Vietnam

Year: 2019

Citation:

Seddighi, Hamed, and Ibrahim Salmani. 2019. "Gender Differences in Children Mental Health Disorders after Earthquakes in Iran: A Systematic Review." Journal of Community Health Research 8 (1): 54-64.

Authors: Hamed Seddighi, Ibrahim Salmani

Abstract:

Keywords: children, mental health, earthquake, natural disaster, PTSD, gender

Topics: Age, Youth, Environment, Environmental Disasters, Gender, Health, Mental Health, PTSD Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2019

Citation:

Goli, Imaneh, Maryam Omidi Najafabadi, and Farhad Lashgarara. 2020. "Where Are We Standing and Where Should We Be Going? Gender and Climate Change Adaptation Behavior." Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 33: 187-218.

Authors: Imaneh Goli, Maryam Omidi Najafabadi, Farhad Lashgarara

Abstract:

Climate change poses as one of the greatest ethical challenges of the contemporary era and which is rapidly affecting all sectors and ecosystems, including natural ecosystems and human and social environments. The impacts on human societies, and societies’ ability to mitigate and adapt to these changes and to adhere to ethical principles are influenced by various factors, including gender. Therefore, this study aimed to design a model of climate change adaptation behavior among rice farmers in Mazandaran Province, northern Iran, based on gender analysis (IUCN, UNDP and GGCA in Training manual on gender and climate change, 2009) and using the developed model of protection motivation theory (Bockarjova and Steg in Glob Environ Change 28:276–288, 2014). For this purpose, 173 female and 233 male rice farmers in Mazandaran Province were selected through stratified random sampling. The results showed that threat and coping appraisal had positive and significant effects on climate change adaptation behavior in both groups. Additionally, men’s and women’s perceived severity had the greatest impact on threat appraisal, and response costs had the greatest impact on their coping appraisal of climate change. Given that climate change adaptation behavior has been largely dependent on the development of ethical principles and the behavior of men and women toward climate change and based on the research findings, some suggestions are recommended at the mega (international), macro (governmental and legislative), meso (related organizations) and micro (rice farmers) levels for male and female rice farmers to adapt to the climate change phenomenon.

Topics: Agriculture, Environment, Climate Change, Gender, Gender Analysis Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2020

Citation:

Moghadam, Valentine M. 2013. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Author: Valentine M. Moghadam

Annotation:

Topics: Democracy / Democratization, Development, Economies, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Livelihoods, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Religion Regions: Africa, MENA, North Africa, Asia, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan, Iran

Year: 2013

Citation:

Bagheri, Nazgol. 2019. “Tehran’s Subway: Gender, Mobility, and the Adaptation of the ‘Proper’ Muslim Woman.” Social & Cultural Geography 20 (3): 304–22.

Author: Nazgol Bagheri

Abstract:

Tehran’s subway, the most affordable means of public transportation in the city, offers a useful context to study the relationship between women’s spatial mobility, the construction of self, and social production of space. This study focuses on Line 1 of Tehran’s subway that connects Tehran’s Bala Shahr (Northern Tehran) and Paeen Shahr (Southern Tehran) neighborhoods. This study draws upon 46 semi-structured interviews with women who were using subway Line 1 in the fall and winter of 2012. The average hour-long interviews examine how women’s emotional states as well as their perceptions of self and space vary as they traverse the city on Line 1. Representing a cultural as well as a spatial transect through the city, the perceptions of women on subway’s Line 1 convey the repudiation of the state’s attempt to promote a singular Muslim female identity. The findings suggest that similar to women’s perception of space, their gendered identities are constantly changing through the enhanced mobility that is facilitated by Tehran’s subway system. In contrast to what is presumed in the West, with a simple change in their hijab style or make-up, Iranian women innovatively negotiate contrasting spaces.

Annotation:

Topics: Gender, Women, Infrastructure, Transportation Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2019

Citation:

Särmä, Saara. 2014. “Junk Feminism and Nuclear Wannabes: Collaging Parodies of Iran and North Korea.” PhD diss., Tampere University.

Author: Saara Särmä

Abstract:

Nuclear weapons have been a great source of intense negative sentiments, mainly fear, over the past 70 years. The intensity of these sentiments has fluctuated over the decades as the relative positions of and the relations between nuclear weapons states have shifted and changed. This doctoral dissertation deals with a different register of sentiments, equally familiar, but not often associated with the issue. It turns to sentiments that are more positive and examines laughter’s role in world politics. It focuses on the actors located at the bottom of the global nuclear order, namely nuclear wannabes. The global nuclear order is a hierarchy institutionalized in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which divides the world into nuclear haves and have-nots. Nuclear wannabes are those states that want to move from have-not to have by acquiring nuclear arsenals, i.e. Iran and North Korea. The dissertation explores (loosely western) everyday understandings of nuclear wannabes and argues that the global nuclear order is reproduced in humorous everyday representations of these states. It takes the internet and social media seriously as sites where everyday understandings are constituted. It argues that the knowledges produced in and through the internet are increasingly anecdotal and fragmented, and that humor and laughter play a role in the knowledge production and circulation. It looks at how laughter at actors depicted in internet parodies orders the global nuclear hierarchy, in particular, and orders the international more broadly. Furthermore, it examines the boundary conditions created by this laugher. The work situates theoretically in the transdisciplinary field of Feminist International Relations and sees gender as relational, performative, and hierarchical. To engage with the fragmented mode of knowledge and random collection of “stuff” (research material) an art based methodology is developed. Junk feminist collaging experiments with a playful mode of doing research, which advocates for openness and creativity in research; for modes of writing and expression that disrupt the hierarchical relationship with the author and the reader; and for doing research by making art. The collages created during the research process and presented as part of this dissertation are a unique intervention. This intervention challenges the priority of text over images in conventional academic modes of presenting research and invites the reader/viewer to participate actively in meaning making. The collages visualize the ways in which nuclear wannabes are gendered and sexualized, as these processes are central to the creation, recreation and maintenance of the hierarchical international order.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Feminisms, Gender, Weapons /Arms, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Regions: MENA, Asia, East Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran, North Korea

Year: 2014

Citation:

Särmä, Saara. 2012. “Feminist Interdisciplinarity and Gendered Parodies of Nuclear Iran.” In Global and Regional Problems: Towards an Interdisciplinary Study, edited by Pami Aalto,  Vilho Harle, and Sami Moisio, 151-170. Surrey: Ashgate. 

Author: Saara Särmä

Annotation:

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Feminisms, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Femininity/ies, Weapons /Arms, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2012