ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 provides a historical account of everyday forms of resistance among ordinary Iranians in the post-revolutionary period. Using a Foucauldian approach to examining power and resistance, I show how, vis-à-vis the various arts, rationales and technologies of power employed by the Islamic Republic and its project of Islamist governmentality, resistance of this kind worked to challenge the social and political status quo. This in turn will showcase how, in post-revolutionary Iran, various procedures for enforcing conduct consistent with state-defined norms have, over time, become domains of sociopolitical struggle in their own right, sites of contestation where the authorities are often compelled to relax, and on occasion even abandon, rules and regulations that broad segments of society will not, and cannot, tolerate.
