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Bodies talking: Iranian Women and Taboo Technologies in Contemporary Iran
Abstract
Thirty-two years after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, clothing restrictions in advertisement fell in line with compulsory hejab ordinances. Though the first two years of the revolution offered some flexibility on what parts of the female form were appropriate to display, no longer would the depiction of women's bodies be tolerated so as to promote their attractiveness and thus entice desire from the onlooker. In recent years, the promotion of attractive bodies has turned into a government-regulated display of purposefully disfigured mannequins lining the storefronts in Tehran. Through the ubiquity of images of this dismembered form, what manifests is a normalizing, ideological project in which a woman’s body is automatically deprived of its “scandal.” Recent scholarship has attempted to describe this process of scandalization as a possible outcome of the construction of femininity, sisterhood, and morality in post-revolutionary Iran (Moallem, 2005; Najmabadi, 2005). Often, in discussion of gender, sex and body as they relate to Iran, scholars have grappled over how Islamic fundamentalism and globalization factor into the portrait of the decadent, female body, in which Islamist revolutionary ideals supposedly merged to form a binary logic of female and male subjectivities onto the Iranian populace (Najmabadi, 2005). There is even rapid debate among scholars over the dilemmas of citizenship and whether or not intimate relations and intimacy participate in its elaboration (Mahdavi, 2007). Yet, lost within this discourse is concrete, sociological work on how women imagine and experience their “taboo” bodies. Do Iranian women even perceive of their bodies as scandalous? Moreover, how is the “scandalous” body spoken about and experienced in contemporary Iran? What literature and even sources of inspiration—economic, religious, and/or secular— do Iranian women consult to construct body image and beauty ideals? This paper endeavors to explore the conclusions and arguments that Iranian women living inside Iran have come to articulate and imagine their bodies. Through interviews; reviewing government policies on beauty and body; and analyzing print advertisements and journals, this paper hopes to contribute valuable ethnographic literature on how the "taboo" body comes to be appropriated and challenged into everyday life—from Iranian women’s perspectives. The paper hopes to provide a new matrix into some of the political, legal, medical, technological, cultural, religious, and consumerist values and practices that participate in both idealizing and fracturing the Iranian woman and her body.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
None