On the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Republic, questions remain about the degree to which the 1979 revolution was able to create a fairer and more meritocratic society. Much current political discourse focuses on the rise of a new hereditary class of political and business elites. Yet, many scholars have also pointed out how policies implemented after the revolution, such as educational expansion, rising state employment and increased fiscal redistribution, brought down poverty and illiteracy rates and, in various ways, improved the relative position of disadvantaged groups such as the poor and women. Given these contrasting perspectives, I ask two questions. What are the chances for ordinary people in today’s Iran to experience upward class mobility? And are disadvantaged groups currently better situated to make use of opportunities, compared to the pre- and early-post-revolutionary past? To address these questions, the paper makes use of a novel dataset, the 2016 Iran Social Survey. The first of its kind in Iran, this large nationally-representative survey includes a range of questions on the social background of respondents as well as their parents and grandparents. I look at the degree to which individuals coming from lower social classes were able to move up in society in the post-revolutionary period in terms of jobs and educational credentials. On the one hand, I find that expansion in the absolute size of the educational system enabled lower classes, and particularly poor women growing up in the 1990s, to experience rapid upward mobility, relative to the more privileged. On the other hand, using conditional logit modelling, I argue that improvements in occupational mobility have been much more constraint. Similar to many developing and oil-rich countries, Iran’s labor market has reproduced a rigid occupational structure in the post-revolutionary period, making it hard for individuals from lower social classes to move up the ladder. I conclude by offering preliminary evidence that the revolution nonetheless put some lower classes, such as landless farmers, in a position to make better use of occupational opportunities.

This paper explores the construction of populist narratives on labour in post-revolutionary Iran. Through the analysis of official May Day speeches given by the leaders of the Islamic Republic between 1979 and 2009, it tracks and investigates the shifting meanings of the words “the people” and “the nation” when connected to workers. Drawing on primary sources in Persian and on field research conducted in Iran between 2017 and 2018, this paper shows how and why – from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – workers’ grievances were cast respectively under the Islamic and populist/nationalist umbrella. Moreover, it addresses the following questions: how did this process of discursive absorption work? Why did the IRI’s leaders resort to this expedient of appropriation? Gazing at the historical context as a terrain of discursive wars allows to better frame these issues. Following its foundation in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran, under the guidance of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, began a massive campaign geared to construct a morally guided imaginary of labor as a “religious obligation” and of workers as “holy warriors” for the nation engaged in a war with Iraq, under the auspices of Islam. In this paper, I argue that integral part of this endeavour was triggering a process of appropriation of May Day, which represented a historical symbol of the secular left, through the construction of new collective imaginaries for workers, seen as part of the community of believers. What happened almost thirty years later? Another crucial step was taken. By promising to give the revolution back to the downtrodden, the benefits of oil revenues to “the people,” and social justice to urban poor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the elections in 2005 against former president Rafsanjani. Social justice [edaalat-e ejtemai] for all human beings [ensan-ha] was a recurrent theme in the president’s rhetoric. Nevertheless, as this analysis explains, Ahmadinejad populist discourse over workers suffered of deep contradictions both in language and in facts, as labour strikes were harshly repressed. Finally, I argue that through the strategy of casting workers under the populist umbrella, Ahmadinejad de facto disempowered the workers’ potential as a class and deprived social justice of its historical meaning to labourers.

The historiography of the first decade following Iran’s 1979 revolution is dominated by the political rivalries and the war efforts at the top of the state. It is paramount, however, to complement this top-down view with histories that provide bottom-up perspectives on the social, political and economic transformations of the 1980s. This paper brings both perspectives together by looking at the relations between labour and state in the context of the Iranian oil industry. On the one hand, it argues that oil workers continued to mobilize after the fall of the monarchy, demanding not only better working conditions, but also direct participation in the management of the oil industry through their showras (councils). These demands were not only articulated within a socialist discourse, but also within an Islamist discourse. On the other hand, these demands and the showras were increasingly confronted by the post-revolutionary state as it tried to consolidate its power through mechanisms of repression and incorporation. By using archival documents, newspapers, the oil industry’s journals and oral history, this paper explores the changes in oil workers’ living conditions and demonstrates the endurance of their social and political mobilisation. Particular attention is given to the different discursive ways in which oil workers articulated their interests and imagined a post-revolutionary state. This leads to the demystification of the post-revolutionary state. It was neither the outcome of “Islam”, nor of the “oil curse”, but a contingent outcome of political contestation. The mechanisms through which the state consolidated its power can’t be reduced to repression; it also created social mobility, material benefits, ideological influence, symbols and discourses that incorporated parts of the aspirations of the subaltern classes. This contradictory process was reflected in the fate of the showras that lost their independence while being institutionalised through a new Labour Law.

The historic urban layout of Yazd, Iran, with its narrow partially-roofed alleys, appears as network of interior urban spaces. The only moments of exteriority occur through the larger urban plazas, known as tekyehs. Dating back to the pre-Islamic era, tekeyehs, like most urban spaces, are multifunctional and accommodate a range of public activities. But for centuries their main function has been hosting a very particular event that occurs only for a few days throughout the year, i.e. the mourning rituals of Muharram. To accommodate the grieving rituals, tekyehs are transformed to operate as a stage: The space is covered with a tensile fabric structure known as push, the walls are covered with black cloths decorated with scripture, the seating areas and the rooftop of the tekyeh are carpeted to easily seat the spectators, and the space is equipped with lighting and sound equipment to effectively host the event. The transformation of the space from multi-functional to program-specific, from a site for daily activities to an arena for sacred spectacle, and from exterior to interior also includes a shift from inclusive to segregated, in respect to gender. The tekyeh’s multilevel morphology allows for a vertical segregation of genders, in which the seating areas and the roof spaces are occupied by women who can easily see the performance without being seen. Unable to return the controlling gaze, the performing men feel conscious of and vulnerable to the female spectators, who enjoy a paradoxical position of power – excluded yet dominant, marginalized but still in control, pacified but not devoid of agency. Here, men, as objects of desire, try to attract feminine gaze through the visual pleasure of rhythmic movements of the male body, gestures of vulnerability displayed in their tears, and their portrayal of masculine strength through enduring pain. The three forces are complementary: identification with the performers’ pain brings a human dimension to the otherwise mechanical aesthetics of “mass ornament,” displayed in the geometric and calculated movement of the fragmented male body. The hyper-masculine exhibition of beaten hairy chests and moving sweaty arms telegraphs both desire and desirability with heteroerotic displays of affection, sympathy, and vulnerability framed within and against classical Persian and mystical Sufi formulations of homoerotic male love. In addition to this scopopholic dimension that exhibitionary format of sineh-zani in a tekyeh facilitates, the homosocial atmosphere of dastehs, as male-exclusive clubs, often provides opportunities for homosexual experimentation.