Abstract
This paper will draw from and contribute to scholarly discourses on the representation and visibility of gender and sexuality in Muslim majority societies; particularly, it seeks to contribute to the idea of how Islamist patriarchal norms are challenged in globally accessible, virtual civil society via sites for civil discourses in cyberspace. I will explore the semipublic discourse around family planning, gender roles of the nuclear family and human sexuality in a web-series titled ‘Sexual Intelligence’ (kherad-e jensi) for the case of Iran. This series is currently shared via a state sanctioned video-sharing site, aparat.com. Some of my research questions I will explore in through the study of these videos are as follows: in what ways does this discourse challenge traditional-patriarchal gendered roles for women within both the institutions of family and the state? What roles have women played in Iranian state-society relations over the last four decades (since the Islamic Revolution) to allow for this discourse? What are apparent rules for discourse around gender and sexuality on state-sanctioned digital media like aparat.com and in what ways are these discourses being challenged by a generation of intellectuals? Some preliminary hypotheses/findings of these inquiries involve how the leftist-Islamist and intellectual Islamist movement, including some figures who are under house arrest or in exile (i.e. Zahra Rahnavard, Mohammad Khatami, Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar) have laid the ground for discourses like what is seen in kherad-e jensi to not only be possible, but within the rules of civil discourse under the Islamic Republic. The findings of this paper corroborate Asef Bayat’s theory of post-Islamist civil society emerging in contexts where Islamists have managed to institutionalize and seize control of the state, a theory wherein he also theorizes that the women’s rights movement acts as one of the primary drivers of post-Islamist thought. While little evidence shows that the viewpoints of women’s rights discourse is prominently featured in ‘Sexual Intelligence’ web-series, we expect to see marginal representation for the views of conventional-revolutionary-Khomeinist and leftist-Islamist ideas to be featured, with some intellectual-Islamist discourse-inspired ones marginally seen as well. The results of this paper will allow me to form the grounds for a case comparison to another Muslim majority societies with a somewhat less institutionalized Islamist movement and active civil discourse on a state-sanctioned social media, video sharing and/or vlogging platforms.
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