In the twenty-first century, marriage practices in the Islamic Republic of Iran have evolved rapidly as unfulfilled expectations of intimacy in marriages have caused an increase in divorce rates, and the tendency to postpone marriage and engage in unsanctioned sexual relationships. In the past decade, the emergence of white marriages, or cohabitation, has made these unsanctioned relationships more visible. This practice exacerbates what the state has long called a marriage crisis, and as a result, clerics and state actors publicly condemn white marriage because it violates Islamic principles. Still, some Iranians prefer this conjugal arrangement to sanctioned permanent or temporary marriages. While scholars of gender and sexual politics in post-revolutionary Iran have addressed temporary marriage, Iranian women’s mobilization of the law, and women’s negotiation of rights with the state through shari’a (Islamic law), they have yet to examine white marriage. Through an ethnographic analysis of narratives from clerics, legal experts, and practitioners of white marriage in Iran, this paper argues that through their everyday practices, white marriage practitioners have sparked a public discussion on the politics of intimacy and forced state actors and clerics to revisit legal and Islamic debates about gender. It also examines the relationship between Islamic jurisprudence and the civil legal code, and the implementation of the state’s hybrid laws that operate at the societal level, beyond the official discourse. At a time when state repression and gender oppression are used to justify either isolation or military intervention throughout the Middle East, this paper brings to light the co-constitutive power dynamic between the everyday and the normative, where white marriage practitioners indirectly engage with legal and religious state actors.

In this paper I discuss a complicated process through which the modernization project that followed the colonial encounter in Iran, transformed aesthetics of Iranian music. The state’s expansive institutionalization that began in Iran in the mid-nineteenth century, had far-reaching impact on various aspects of everyday life, including artistic and cultural discourse and products. I begin from an analysis of existing historical accounts of the past century and a half, but in order to offer an alternate narrative, I rely on the lived experiences of Iranian musicians and music scholars. I argue that musicians’ particular aesthetic choices such as instrumental tuning or the quality and placement of microtones in Iranian modes (g?shehs) are part of a broader debate over Iranian national identity, the artists’ relationship with the ‘West,’ and the various Iranian experiences of ‘being modern’ (Adelkhah 2000). I propose that modernization of Iranian music began in military and educational institutions precisely because those two were the disciplinary arms of a state that was practically run by colonial powers (Foucault 1975, 2008). The disciplining of musical practices and products is exemplified in the institutionalization of music pedagogy, the use of notation as a means of fixing the aural on paper, and the standardization of musical intervals and the production of instruments to name a few. In this paper I argue that such processes have shaped the aural aesthetics of Iranian music and the discourse from nomenclature and classification to pedagogy and creativity. Iranian musicians, then, are constantly negotiating the desire for an ‘authentic’ creative self with what it means to be a ‘modern’ musician in the world today. To understand whether and to what extent such disciplinary projects have succeeded in Iran, I examine Iran’s particular relationships with colonial powers, and the particularities of ‘being modern’ in Iran.

Video games are increasingly part of everyday life, impacting our shared social norms and values across the world. However, most studies on video games overlook the relationship between gaming and culture of the global south. This virtual ethnographic study will show how Iranian gamers from Tehran connect with one another in World of Warcraft (WoW), and in the gamer streaming platform of Twitch.TV, in order to explain the impact that online communities have on sentiment and belonging in transitional spaces (Boellstorff 2008). These transnational online platforms are liminal due to their ever-changing environments as a result of in-game patches, or updates to these platforms. Data will be gathered on gamers using the theoretical framework of affect. The proposed research will consist of participant-observation in an online setting. The findings of this project will contribute to critical debates in anthropology concerning affect and culture, specifically how culture is embodied in online games through the body’s active presence, embedding the gamer into the conditions of spectacle leading to a visceral moment (Berlant 2008, 846). Gamers are agents who embody a cultural encoding through their “projected online self” as they flow into mediated spaces with “performances, introjections, projections and moods” (Behrouzan 2016, 9). Iranian gamers in online worlds have an affective entanglement through moments of connecting and projecting their self into an online world. Their entanglement within the virtual creates a collective of ordinary people who then engage with one another for a promised or fantasized normativity (Stewart 2007, Berlant 2008, 2011, 2019). My research will uncover the everyday ordinary affects through the subtleties of online Iranian gamer experiences. I seek to conceptualize how the embodied subject negotiates their social and material subjectivity within online worlds (Dale 2005). Specifically, I will parse out subjectivity by exploring the unexplored tensions and intensities of Iranian gamer culture within contexts of toxic masculinity, gender, and labor (Ahmed 2004, 2010). In this vein, the virtual becomes flesh (Mottahedeh 2015, Deleuze 1989). Thus, I will attend to the broader rhythms or patterns of an intertwined transnational society by showing online games as an affective entanglement (Vannini and Taggart 2015, 156, Pederson 2013; 737). An entanglement, rather than a cognitive assemblage, perplexes the supposed immateriality of online spaces and places an embodied human in a virtual yet affective space (Hayles 2017).

My paper concentrates on women-only concerts of Iranian classical music in Tehran in order to examine female musicians’ conflicting attitudes towards performing in these homosocial spaces. Originating in the late 1990s (DeBano 2005), these concerts work within the boundaries of state-sanctioned gender segregations and offer exclusive performance opportunities to female vocalists who are banned from singing solo for mixed-gender audiences. Furthermore, they present viable financial options during a sharp decline in Iran’s music industry. Nevertheless, most female musicians, singers and instrumentalists alike, criticize these concerts, arguing that they create an illusion of a free performance space yet intensify the state-mandated gender segregation. Moreover, female instrumentalists, who can perform for the mixed-gender audiences, also contend that the controlled condition of these concerts, which forbids any audio or visual recording, prevents performers from showcasing their musical and technical mastery to their audiences beyond the concert hall. Hence, they prefer performing for mixed audiences, which could better contribute to their musical reputation. Building on my recent fieldwork in Tehran, my investigation of Iranian female musicians’ contrasting attitudes towards women-only concerts sheds light on the intersections of gender, economy, and musical authority in Iran. It further expands the ethnomusicological studies of women-only musical endeavours (e.g. Sandstrom 2000; DeBano 2009; Hayes 2010) and argues that although these concerts could noticeably contribute to women’s financial stability and independence, the refusal of female vocalists and instrumentalists to participate in these homosocial spaces becomes a source of empowerment.