Rethinking Gender, Ethnicity and Religion in Iran: An Intersectional Approach to National Identity

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Covering the Pahlavi modern nation-state as well as the Islamic regime, this book examines the crucial shifts that affected Sunnite and subaltern women once Shiism became the state religion after the Iranian Revolution. Focusing on women in the Baluchistan and Golestan provinces of Iran, Azadeh Kian analyses and explores issues of cultural racialization, ethno-centrism, Shia centrism, and patriarchal and chauvinistic ideologies in Iranian society propagated by the state and sustained by its policies. Based on quantitative and qualitative surveys taken throughout Iran, comprised of over 7,000 married women and 100 interviews with a sample of Sunnite and subaltern Persian women, Kian reveals how social hierarchy and power relations based on gender, class, ethnicity and religion operate. She argues that women have been at the heart of the process of national and ethnic re-construction as women, as potential mothers, are expected to reproduce national and ethnic boundaries. Kian argues that by examining the family institution as a site of power, analysing family dynamics as well as womens everyday lives, the politics of ordinary Iranians and the relationship between state and society can be better understood. Kian argues that the time is ripe to achieve a non-hegemonic definition of Iranian national identity, through acknowledgement of gender, class, ethnic, and religious diversity and plurality of experiences of oppression and injustice.

Reviews

Azadeh Kian offers a path-breaking, brilliant feminist analysis of nationalism in Iran. Her rich, innovative reading displaces dominant presuppositions, categories, foci and methods. Kian makes central otherwise habitually invisible subaltern Iranian women, and gender, class, religious and ethnic relations of power. She ingeniously combines previously unheard womens narratives from her fieldwork, and quantitative data. * Professor Paola Bacchetta, University of California, Berkeley, USA *
Of the many interesting insights into how Gender, Ethnicity and Religion in Iran intersect, the most valuable is in the detailed historical background that links the formation of Iran as a nation and the push for modernity all the way to the Islamic Republic and its problems with ethnic minorities and women today. * Professor Emerita Erika Friedl, Western Michigan University, USA and Author of 'Religion and Daily Life in the Mountains of Iran.' *
Azadeh Kian offers a fresh critical look at the category of woman in the Iranian context by analysing gender, class, ethnicity and religion, and reminding us once again that womanhood is not a homogenous category. This timely contribution considers the power structures existing among women within the patriarchally shaped society which so far has largely been neglected. * Mastoureh Fathi, Lecturer in Sociology, University College Cork, Ireland *

Author Bio

Azadeh Kian is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the Universit Paris Cit, France. She is also Director of the Center for Gender and Feminist Studies and Research and its journal Les Cahiers du CEDREF, and former Director of the Social Science Department (2017-2021) at the Universit Paris Cit.