Product Description: Blending social scientific theories about feminism, social movements, and culture with the specifics of the Iranian situation, this volume examines changes in the structure of patriarchy from the 1960s to the present by looking at domestic labor, employment, education, politics, culture, and sexuality...read more

Examining controversies that developed chiefly after the end of Iran-Iraq War and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, this study focuses on Islamic and secular feminisms, especially as they treat such issues as individuality, gender roles, sexuality, cultural authenticity, and interculturalism. Shahidian emphasizes challenges to governmental policies in daily life, Islamic reformist politics, and secular opposition. He investigates various ideological and political means that female activists employ to resist state policies and achieve legal benefits. Relying on reformist Islamic writings, oppositional literature, personal contacts with feminist authors and underground activists, Shahidian discusses how individuals experience and respond to coercive gender policies.Reformist bargaining with the patriarchy, which has secured for some women an active role in some spheres of life, diverts feminist attempts to alter gender relations in any fundamental way, Shahidian contends. In Iran, reformists have espoused an agenda that reflects the interests of middle- and upper-class, professional, gainfully employed, heterosexual (Muslim) women. Though weaker and less ideologically and organizationally consolidated than reformist women, many secular feminists have drawn attention to working women's rights, and have sought re-vision of such key issues as morality, sexuality, and the relations between individual and community. These activists and authors question the very assumptions of existing political culture and reject prioritizing socio-political objectives that relegate gender to peripheral significance.

Examining controversies that developed chiefly after the end of Iran-Iraq War and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, this study focuses on Islamic and secular feminisms, especially as they treat such issues as individuality, gender roles, sexuality, cultural authenticity, and interculturalism. Shahidian emphasizes challenges to governmental policies in daily life, Islamic reformist politics, and secular opposition. He investigates various ideological and political means that female activists employ to resist state policies and achieve legal benefits. Relying on reformist Islamic writings, oppositional literature, personal contacts with feminist authors and underground activists, Shahidian discusses how individuals experience and respond to coercive gender policies.Reformist bargaining with the patriarchy, which has secured for some women an active role in some spheres of life, diverts feminist attempts to alter gender relations in any fundamental way, Shahidian contends. In Iran, reformists have espoused an agenda that reflects the interests of middle- and upper-class, professional, gainfully employed, heterosexual (Muslim) women. Though weaker and less ideologically and organizationally consolidated than reformist women, many secular feminists have drawn attention to working women's rights, and have sought re-vision of such key issues as morality, sexuality, and the relations between individual and community. These activists and authors question the very assumptions of existing political culture and reject prioritizing socio-political objectives that relegate gender to peripheral significance.

Product Description: Western women’s involvement in Persia dates from the mid-nineteenth century, when female adventurers and missionaries first encountered their veiled Muslim “sisters.” Twentieth-century Western and state-sponsored Iranian feminists continued to use the image of the veiled woman as the embodiment of backwardness...read more

Minoo Moallem challenges the mainstream stereotypical representation of Islam and Muslims as backward, fanatical, and premodern by showing how Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism are by-products of modernity. Writing with a deep personal and scholarly concern for recent Iranian history, Moallem refers to the gendered notions of brother and sister as keys to understanding the invention of the Islamic ummat as a modern fraternal community. Using magazines, novels, and films, she offers a feminist transnational analysis of contemporary Iranian culture that questions dominant binaries of modern and traditional, West and East, secular and religious, and civilized and barbaric.Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister responds to a number of important questions raised in connection with 9/11. The author considers how veiling intersects with other identity markers in nation-state building and modern formations of gendered citizenship. She shows how Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism are fed by a hybrid blend of images and myths of both pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran, as well as globally circulated patriarchal ideologies.

Product Description: Book by Shahidian, Hammed (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Examining controversies that developed chiefly after the end of Iran-Iraq War and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, this study focuses on Islamic and secular feminisms, especially as they treat such issues as individuality, gender roles, sexuality, cultural authenticity, and interculturalism...read more

Product Description: Blending social scientific theories about feminism, social movements, and culture with the specifics of the Iranian situation, this volume examines changes in the structure of patriarchy from the 1960s to the present by looking at domestic labor, employment, education, politics, culture, and sexuality...read more

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Women presented the first effective challenge to the Islamic regime and the clerical authority in post-revolutionary Iran. Women's activism in support of their legal rights and personal freedom, however, did not develop into a strong movement against the rising fundamentalism...read more