ABSTRACT
Is it possible to imagine optimistically a future for feminism in Iran? Recent intellectual and cultural developments and the remarkable blooming of women’s creative productions in Iran over the past decade make this query less fanciful than it may appear at first. Sixteen years after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, not only have women not disappeared, they have an unmistakably active presence in public life. For a secular feminist, it is very tempting to claim that Iranian women have achieved all this despite the Islamic Republic and even against Islam as the dominant discourse in the country. 1 Indeed, for some women it has been this deep existential sense of proving themselves against all odds that has become the creative energy of their productions. Yet it is not only oppositional reactive energy that accounts for this creative outpouring. The rise of the Islamic movement in the 1970s in Iran signified the emergence of a new political sociability and the dominance of a new discourse, within which Woman, standing for culture, occupied a central position. In this paradigm, the imperialist domination of Muslim societies was seen to have been achieved not through military or economic supremacy, as earlier generations of nationalists and socialists had argued, but through the undermining of religion and culture, and that undermining was achieved through women. Woman became bearer of the burden of cultural destruction. 2 This centrality of gender to the construction of an Islamic political discourse turned what had been marginal, postponed, and illegitimate into something central, immediate, and authentic. The “women question” acquired urgency, not only for the discontented, but even more so for the supporters of the new order and for women and men who had power. In particular, women in sympathy with and as supporters of the Islamic Republic were placed in a position to take responsibility for its misogyny: to deny it, to justify it, to challenge it, to oppose it, but not to ignore it. Moreover, the Islamic Republic’s claim that its kind of polity is the ideal solution for all societal problems has put it in a continuous contestation with feminism as far as women’s issues are concerned. It exists under the pressure of outdoing feminism. 3
