This week in North Philly Notes, Fae Chubin, author of Proper Women writes about intersection of gender oppression, ethnic discrimination, and class struggle.
The political culture of Iran in the 1980s does not bring to mind an era conducive to nourishing feminist sensibilities in young girls. The 1979 Islamic revolution ushered in a new era of religious fundamentalism. This, coupled with the U.S.-backed Iraqi invasion of Iran, swallowed the 80s—my childhood—in war and increasing political repression. Soon after its establishment, the Islamic government began imposing a series of patriarchal laws that significantly impacted the lives of the girls and women of my generation.
Yet, I grew up in a matriarchal household. My grandmother exuded authority as a respected mother of seven children, but more so because of her stature and coarse language—she made us, children and adults, blush uncomfortably any time she cussed. I reveled in her un-ladylike behavior, bragging about it among my friends. And then there were my mother and aunts, all educated and professional women. They instilled in me a sense of defiance against patriarchal expectations, not by articulating such critiques but by living autonomous lives, facilitated by their middle-class backgrounds.
By the time I entered college to study sociology at the University of Tehran, I had begun defying gender norms my mother and aunts upheld and enforced. My peers and I were a generation of young women caught between the religious impositions of an Islamic government and a global capitalist and cosmopolitan culture that promoted a sexually licentious lifestyle. We defied what we perceived as patriarchal impositions as we explored our bodies, sought pleasure, and participated in protests, all at great risk.
My feminist ideology and practice at that time were not unlike the one I have set to critique in Proper Women: Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in Iran. At the time, I had embraced Western liberal feminism, which tied gender oppression to religious thinking and imposed a colonial mentality that equated feminist progress with adopting Western cultural norms. I also embraced secularism, not interested in the potential of Islamic feminism or aware of the numerous ways by which gender oppression is reinforced in many secular frameworks. Although I participated in Marxist circles in college, my class and ethnic privileges limited my understanding of the intersection of gender oppression, ethnic discrimination, and class struggle.
By the time I set out to research feminist NGO activism in Iran, after five years of graduate studies in the US, I had developed a post-colonial and transnational feminist framework. I set forth to study the lives of impoverished Iranian and Afghan refugee women who participated in a “women’s empowerment” program run by a liberal and secular feminist NGO in Tehran. By this time, I had begun to understand gender oppression not simply as an outcome of religious thinking but as a global structural injustice facilitated by imperialism and neoliberal capitalism.
This theoretical framework propelled me to introduce an analysis of gender justice that did not facilitate Western imperialism or class- and race-based hierarchies. Western interventions have long been justified by constructing Middle Eastern women as ignorant, oppressed, and in need of a White savior, while portraying Western women as educated and liberated. In addition to challenging this imperialist outlook, I wanted to bring another (liberated vs. oppressed) dichotomy to light. I set out to illustrate how liberal middle-class feminism in Iran also produces a divide by constructing economically privileged, secular, and educated Iranian women as enlightened, responsible for saving their “backward,” traditional, and religious sisters. It is through this process that the agency, perspective, and lived experiences of marginalized women are undermined and ignored.
In Proper Women, I show the diligence, courage, and vision of middle-class Tehrani activists while questioning the popular and taken-for-granted notion of “women’s empowerment.” What makes a woman “empowered” and whose definition of empowerment prevails? I center the voices of marginalized women to showcase their well-articulated critique of liberal feminism and the importance of economic and racial justice for achieving women’s empowerment.
Filed under: cultural studies, Education, gender studies, political science, race and ethnicity, Religion, sexuality, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: activism, class, Education, female empowerment, femimism, gender, Iran, middle east, neoliberal capitalism, NGOs, oppression, pariarchy, Racial Justice, religion, repression, social justice, women | Leave a comment »
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