Misreading Feminism & Women’s Rights in Tehran: Beyond Chadors, Ninjabis, & Secular Fantasies

 It is nearly impossible to read any article about Iranian women and not spend the entire time rolling your eyes. Historically, the Western media has tended to make liberal use of Orientalist and infantilizing depictions of Iranian women as, alternatively, trapped in the harems of their turbaned overseers (a historically pre-1979 trope applied liberally to all Middle Eastern women) or militantly crazed and clad in black “traditional garb” (a post-1979 trope specific to Iranian, and later Islamist, women)

Since 9/11, meanwhile, these depictions have become increasingly politicized within the War on Terror “white men saving brown women from brown men” paradigm (so brilliantly identified by Gayatri Spivak & explored by, among others, Saba Mahmood & Lila Abu Lughod). Despite the increase in rightwing rhetoric calling for war on Iran, however, the charge that Iranian women are mistreated and must be saved (like their Afghan sisters, as NATO and some neo-colonial minded collaborators at Amnesty International would have you believe) has not quite caught on.

See the Full Article   AJAM MEDIA COLLECTIVE