Iran

Citation:

Hepburn, Stephanie, and Rita J. Simon. 2013. HUMAN TRAFFICKING AROUND THE WORLD: HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT. New York: Columbia University Press.

Authors: Stephanie Hepburn, Rita J. Simon

Abstract:

An examination of human trafficking around the world including the following countries: United States, Japan, United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Colombia, Iraq, Syria, Canada, Italy, France, Iran, India, Niger, China, South Africa, Australia, United Kingdom, Chile, Germany, Poland, Mexico, Russia, and Brazil. (WorldCat)

Annotation:

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Part I: Work Visa Loopholes for Traffickers
1) United States
2) Japan
3) United Arab Emirates

Part II: Stateless Persons
4) Thailand
5) Israel & The Occupied Palestinian Territories

Part III: Unrest, displacement, and Who is in charge
6) Colombia
7) Iraq
8) Syria

Part IV: Conflation
9) Canada

Part V: Conflicting Agendas
10) Italy
11) France

Part VI: Gender Apartheid
12) Iran

Part VII: Social Hierarchy
13) India
14) Niger
15) China

Part VIII: Muti Murder
16) South Africa

Part IX: Hard-to-Prove Criterion and a slap on the wrist
17) Australia
18) United Kingdom
19) Chile
20) Germany

Part X: Transparent borders
21) Poland

Part XI: Fear Factor
22) Mexico

Part XII: Poverty and Economic Boom
23) Russia
24) Brazil

Conclusion

*Each Chapter follows the following format with some variations:

Introduction
As a destination
Internal trafficking
Trafficking abroad
What happens to victims after trafficking
What happens to traffickers
Internal efforts to decrease trafficking

Quotes:

"Devestation from a natural disaster...creates a sudden high demand for low-wage and largely unskilled labor. Disruption of the traditional labor supply leaves room for illicit contractors to move in, and new workers can be brought in unnoticed." (19)

"There continue to be more criminal convictions of sex traffickers than of forced-labor traffickers [However, this number of individuals victimized by forced labor may be increasing]." (32)

"Many experts state that the yakuza (organized crime) networks play a significant role in the smuggling and subsequent debt bondage of women--particularly women from China, Thailand, and Colombia--for forced prostitution in Japan. Determining the exact extent of yakuza involvement is difficult because of the covert nature of the sex industry. Consequently, the yakuza are able to minimize people's direct knowledge of their involvement...The yakuza networks work with organized crime groups from other nations, such as China, Russia, and Colombia." (49-50)

Topics: Economies, Gender, Women, Men, Girls, Boys, International Law, International Human Rights, Multi-National Corporations, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights, Sexual Violence, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, Sexual Slavery, Trafficking, Human Trafficking, Labor Trafficking, Sex Trafficking Regions: Africa, West Africa, Americas, Central America, North America, South America, Asia, East Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Oceania Countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Niger, Palestine / Occupied Palestinian Territories, Poland, Russian Federation, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States of America

Year: 2013

Citation:

Shahidian, Hammed. 1996. “Iranian Exiles and Sexual Politics: Issues of Gender Relations and Identity.” Journal of Refugee Studies 9 (1): 43-72.

Author: Hammed Shahidian

Abstract:

This paper argues that sexual politics among Iranian exiles is a continuation of silenced conflicts between the identities of political activists and social and organizational constraints in Iran. During the initial years of exile, Iran's political conditions remained the preoccupation of the expatriate activists. Later on, after the defeat of the left and its loss of ideological and organizational legitimacy, denied or postponed identities have found a chance to resurface. Sexual politics develops through relationships between individuals and their social environment. First of all, it entails rearrangements of gender power relations. Second, the redistribution of power evokes challenges from expatriates. Third, the host society provides the exiles both with a favourable environment to resolve these conflicts and with new limitations and challenges. Finally, ideological and political considerations also play an important role in this process. These tensions stem from an attempt on the part of leftist exiles, to re-evaluate their past practice of silencing the conflict between their emerging identity and organizational demands as well as an attempt, first and foremost on the part of female leftist exile, to forge new gender identity and gender relations.

Topics: Displacement & Migration, Gender, Gendered Power Relations Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 1996

Citation:

Rostami-Povey, Elaheh. 2001. “Feminist Contestations of Institutional Domains in Iran.” Feminist Review 69 (1): 44-72.

Author: Elaheh Rostami-Povey

Abstract:

Iranian Feminists outside Iran are divided on women's positions in Iran under the Islamic state. Some have argued that the process of Islamization has marginalized women. Others have argued that the dynamic nature of Shari'a interpretation and the debate among religious scholars in Iran have shaped the indigenous forms of feminist consciousness, feminisms and women's involvement in the process of change. This paper, based on field research, is challenging both views. It will be argued that the contradictions of the Islamic state and institutions led to the process of feminist consciousness. In the period 1990-2000, Muslim and secular feminists in Iran have found their own ways of coming together, making demands and pressurizing the State and institutions to reform laws and regulations in favour of women's rights. But women are divided by the nature of their diversity. As their alliance has challenged the limitation of the Islamic state, the breakdown of their alliance (2000-2001), could have a great impact not only on gender relations, but also on the process of democratization and secularization.

Topics: Feminisms, Gender, Women, Religion Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2001

Citation:

Moghissi, Haideh. 2008. "Islamic Cultural Nationalism and Gender Politics in Iran." Third World Quarterly 29 (3): 541-54.

Author: Haideh Moghissi

Abstract:

The ceaseless efforts of women to overcome gender barriers in post-revolutionary Iran that depicts that the developmentalist policies of the ancient regime in Iran have changed the self-image and expectations of women positively is discussed. Women have gathered confidence to challenge the Muslim reformists' stand regarding women's rights.

Topics: Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Nationalism, Political Participation, Religion, Rights, Women's Rights Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2008

Citation:

Bahreini, Raha. 2008. “From Perversion to Pathology: Discourses and Practices of Gender Policing in the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 5 (1): 1-51.

Author: Raha Bahreini

Abstract:

The Islamic Republic of Iran punishes homosexuality with death but it actively recognizes transsexuality, and partially funds sex change operations. This article aims to examine how this seemingly progressive stance on transsexuality is connected to the IRI's larger oppressive apparatus of gender. It will first provide an overview of the cultural politics of gender and sexuality under the Islamic Republic's rule, and will then discuss the confluence of religious and medical literatures that led the Islamic Republic to adopt its new discourse on transsexuality despite – or perhaps rather because of – its sex/gender politics. The article does not deny that this emerging discourse has been somewhat empowering for those transsexuals who genuinely desire surgical transformation. But empowering as it might have been for such transsexuals, the emerging discourse is still deeply troubling since it systematically regards homosexuality and more generally any sexual or gender non-conformity as unintelligible, perverse, and punishable by law, except for those willing to transform their "wrong bodies." The article will, therefore, demonstrate that the IRI's permission of transsexuality and sex change operations is motivated by a goal that is more about assimilating gender atypical individuals into the heteronormative order than about broadening horizons for sex/gender possibilities. The article ends by discussing how this discourse is making non-surgical trans/multi-gendered identity illegible and illegitimate not only as a publicly recognized possibility, but also with regard to transpersons' own self-perception and self-constitution of their gender and sexual subjectivity.

Keywords: homosexuality, Transgender, transsexual, the Islamic Republic of Iran, sex change surgery

Topics: Gender, Women, Men, Justice, LGBTQ, Religion, Sexuality Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2008

Citation:

Bayat, Asef. 2007. “A Women’s Non-Movement: What It Means to Be a Woman Activist in an Islamic State.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27 (1): 160-72.

Author: Asef Bayat

Topics: Feminisms, Gender, Women, Patriarchy, Religion, Rights, Women's Rights Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2007

Citation:

Moghadam, Valentine. 1995. “Gender and Revolutionary Transformation: Iran 1979 and East Central Europe 1989.” Gender and Society 9 (3): 328-58.

Author: Valentine Moghadam

Abstract:

The sociology of revolution has produced a prodigious body of scholarship that is nonetheless deficient in one area: attention to gender in the unfolding of revolutions and in the building of new states. Feminist scholars, however, have been attentive to women's participation in revolutions, the effects of revolutions on gender systems and women's positions, and how gender shapes revolutionary processes, including patterns of mobilization, revolutionary programs, and the policies of revolutionary states. This article discusses the literature on revolutions, presents a theoretical framework for the study of revolutions based on gender outcomes, and examines two cases of revolutionary transformation that conform to what I call the patriarchal model of revolution: Iran in 1979 and the 1989 revolutions in East Central Europe.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Feminisms, Gender, Women Regions: Africa, MENA, Asia, Middle East, Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe Countries: Iran

Year: 1995

Citation:

Efrati, Noga. 1999. “Productive or Reproductive? The Roles of Iraqi Women during the Iraq-Iran War.” Middle Eastern Studies 35 (2): 27–44.

Author: Noga Efrati

Topics: Armed Conflict, Economies, Gender, Women, Gender Roles, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Livelihoods Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran, Iraq

Year: 1999

Citation:

Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2011. "Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith: Transgender/sexuality in Contemporary Iran." Social Research: An International Quarterly 78 (2): 533-56.

Author: Afsaneh Najmabadi

Abstract:

This essay offers an account of the contemporary diagnostic and treatment procedures of transexuality in Iran, situating the official process in a discursive nexus that is engaged in establishing and securing a distinction between the acceptable “true” transexual and other categories that might be confused with it, most notably the wholly unacceptable category of the “true” homosexual. In this process, the category of transexual is made legible as an acceptable form of existence by the condensed working of the legal, the Islamic jurisprudential [fiqhi], the bio-medico-psycho-sexological, and the various contingents of the forces of coercion – which we often call “the state.” This nexus is as well constituted and authorized by transgender/sexuals’ practices of everyday life, self-definitions, and self-productions.

Topics: Gender, LGBTQ, Religion, Sexuality Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2011