Women and the Islamic Republic
How Gendered Citizenship Conditions the Iranian State

A study of citizenship formation in post-1979 Iran, examining the centrality of non-elite women's participation in the process.

Shirin Saeidi (Author)

9781316515761, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 January 2022

288 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.48 kg

'Women and the Islamic Republic is a compelling account of how the Iran-Iraq war shaped the rights, roles, and responsibilities of non-elite Iranian women, a topic that has eluded much scholarship. Drawing from a unique archive, Saeidi underscores the importance of women's voices in shaping the post-revolutionary state and the meaning of citizenship.' Arzoo Osanloo, University of Washington

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.

1. State formation and citizenship: an investigation beyond a eurocentric gaze
2. Reflecting on an idealised past: memory and women's rights struggles in post-revolutionary Iran
3. Revolutionary citizens: the confrontation of power and spiritual acts of citizenship from 1980–88
4. The body in isolation: morality and reconstruction of the nation in wartime
5. The aftermath of war: wives and daughters of martyrs, and the post-1988 state
6. Iran's hezbollah and citizenship politics: the surprises of islamisation projects in post-2009 Iran
7. Conclusion: gendered citizenship and conditioning of the state.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC], Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]