ABSTRACT
On my return to Iran in 2003 and 2004 I found it helpful to devise a rubric of feminist types as a way of ordering and making sense of the women’s movement in Iran at that time. The types I identified were Islamic state feminists, Islamic non-state feminists, Muslim feminists and secular feminists. 1 This section expands and builds upon those early arguments and observations about categories of feminism, and supplements them with interviews conducted with Iranian women’s rights activists. 2 In the interviews some of the interviewees happily identified themselves as either Islamic or secular feminists; others disagreed with such categorizations, stating that these were labels primarily used by academics which have now become politicized. 3 Some of the interviewees offered other self-labels such as radical, socialist, liberal, modern thinker ( no andish ) or pragmatist ( amalgara ) 4 feminists.
possible groupings, I contend they remain important as tools to address the multiple power dynamics and dependencies at work in contemporary Iran. 5
