Tied up in Tehran : Women, social change and the politics of daily life

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Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach and based on extensive field work experience, the book project Tied Up in Tehran addresses one of the key paradoxes of contemporary Iran: women’s fragmented experiences of shaping a modern, urban identity in a postrevolutionary state that has explicitly Islamicized public institutions, space, and rhetoric, while also providing the conditions to enable women to emerge from the traditional private realm and engage actively as social and political agents. Although immediately after the 1979 Revolution the Iranian state tried to enforce a domestic, private, and religiously-defined traditional role for women, over subsequent decades both society and the state have become more accepting of women’s public participation in education, politics, and the workforce, and accustomed to their presence in mixed public spaces. Now, the argument in the Islamic Republic is not over whether women should be part of public life, it is over how they, and the youth of both sexes, should comport themselves as public and private citizens. In order to examine this gendered process of fundamental transformation within a highly politicized Muslim society and Islamic state, Tied Up in Tehran focuses on women’s public and private lives in the capital city, and the shifting dynamics of quotidian urban life: daily relations in the family, in the workplace, in the street, and on the body.