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Based on extensive interviews and oral histories as well as archival sources, Women and the Islamic Republic challenges the dominant masculine theorizations of state-making in post-revolutionary Iran. Shirin Saeidi demonstrates that despite the Islamic Republic's non-democratic structures, multiple forms of citizenship have developed in post-revolutionary Iran. This finding destabilizes the binary formulation of democratization and authoritarianism which has not only dominated investigations of Iran, but also regime categorizations in political science more broadly. As non-elite Iranian women negotiate or engage with the state's gendered citizenry regime, the Islamic Republic is forced to remake, oftentimes haphazardly, its citizenry agenda. The book demonstrates how women remake their rights, responsibilities, and statuses during everyday life to condition the state-making process in Iran, showing women's everyday resistance to the state-making process.
List of contents
1. State formation and citizenship: an investigation beyond a eurocentric gaze; 2. Reflecting on an idealised past: memory and women's rights struggles in post-revolutionary Iran; 3. Revolutionary citizens: the confrontation of power and spiritual acts of citizenship from 1980–88; 4. The body in isolation: morality and reconstruction of the nation in wartime; 5. The aftermath of war: wives and daughters of martyrs, and the post-1988 state; 6. Iran's hezbollah and citizenship politics: the surprises of islamisation projects in post-2009 Iran; 7. Conclusion: gendered citizenship and conditioning of the state.
About the author
Shirin Saeidi is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Arkansas. She has published articles in journals including International Journal of Middle East Studies, International Studies Review, and Millennium: Journal of International Studies. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Citizenship Studies.
Summary
Based on extensive interviews and oral histories as well as archival sources, this book challenges the dominant masculine theorizations of state-making in post-revolutionary Iran. Offering a comprehensive study on citizenship formation, it reveals the centrality of non-elite women's participation in the process of citizenship formation.
