Women and the Islamic Republic: How Gendered Citizenship Conditions the Iranian State (Cambridge Middle East Studies, Series Number 66)

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. "Women and the Islamic Republic's central argument is simple: If we shift our gaze from institutions and elite political contestations to everyday encounters, we can see how the Islamic Republic's hybrid governance structure produces citizens who cross, abide, and (at times) manipulate the state's formal boundaries. This pushes the post-revolutionary state toward a balancing act to pacify its female population"-- Provided by publisher. 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.