This paper will analyze the conflicted and paradoxical legacies of the Iran Iraq war on Iranian polity and society. On the one hand, the war played a major role in consolidating the Khomeinist regime after the revolution by forging new institutions of coercion and governance, mobilizing popular support, and eliminating domestic rivals. On the other hand, the war also created deep and lasting divisions within the new political elite, and between the new state and significant sectors of the Iranian society over the legacy of the war and the nature and the direction of the post-revolution and post-war project. The popular aspirations that were unleashed during the revolution were incorporated into the war experience, but they remain unfulfilled and are a major factor that shape public culture and political practices. This discontent is compounded by the shortcomings of authoritarian and ill-conceived post-war reconstruction, especially in war-torn regions. The imposition of an official interpretation of the “Sacred Defense” effectively silences plural experiences of the war and alternative and more critical analyses of it. As a result, instead of acting as a unifying experience that reinforces state hegemony, the legacy of the war is a widespread resentment that affects public culture and political attitudes. This paper investigates the conflicted legacies of the Iran-Iraq War by using case studies from historical and ethnographic research, as well as professional experiences in urban planning and post-war reconstruction.

For Iranians, the orthodox representation of the Iran-Iraq war has been as a national experience of Sacred Defense. This hegemonic narrative (presented in books, films, and state-sanctioned political history) has been extremely male-dominated, and has been conventionally assumed to reinforce conservative gender and social expectations. But in recent years a number of women’s memoirs have been produced (often as oral histories facilitated by another writer) and several have become enormously popular, both because of and in spite of official support. These authors and their texts (Masoumeh Ramhormozi’s Last Sunday/Eternal Fragrance; Zahra Hoseyni with Azam Hoseyni’s Da; Masoumeh Abad’s I’m Alive; and Ghadam Kheyr Mohammadi with Behnaz Zarrabizadeh’s Daughter of Sheena have been valorized by conservative state authorities and for the most part ignored by feminist critics; both sides characterizing these women’s stories as conventional models of Islamic feminine virtue. But even those women’s memoirs that have been most publicly approved by the state offer a complexly ambiguous representation. Da (Kurdish for “Mother”) has been especially celebrated and distributed by the government as an example of “sisterly” Muslim sacrifice. But Hoseyni’s account raises its own questions about women’s private responsibility and public role. Is she a simple civilian just doing what she has to do, or an exceptional national heroine? Can the ethic of radical (wartime) self-sacrifice absolve the incongruity of a woman adamantly upholding feminine conventions of duty and decorum, while actively fleeing domestic responsibilities and familial obligations? This paper examines a number of recent Iranian women’s memoirs of being on the frontlines of the war, and the extent to which they (often unexpectedly) challenge conventional representations of the war and of women’s proper national role. A paradox of wartime is that to the extent that it removes men from their conventional social roles, both public and private, it enables women to enter more into public life, including entering more into public life with men. Compared to other conditions of widespread male absence (migration for remittance work, etc.), women’s wartime transgressions of gender expectations are often considered admirable rather than immodest. The emergency ethos of collective effort and self-sacrifice makes the otherwise unthinkable possible, and provides women with unexpected opportunities. This paper explores the extent to which the contested legacy of Iranian women’s wartime experience still resonates within state and society arguments over the formation of a new, post-revolutionary Iranian female subject.

This paper discusses gendered effects of the Iraq-Iran war in Iraqi society. Although the mass recruitment of men as soldiers and fighters temporarily expanded spaces for women’s participation in the Iraqi public sphere, militarism and militarist discourse during the 1980s and afterwards have reinforced gender polarity and heroic forms of masculinity, marginalizing and degrading the noncombat social positionalities of the majority of men and women. My paper focuses on notions of masculinity and non-normative masculinities in Iraq. Drawing on graphic art and poetry produced as part of a regime sponsored ‘culture of war’, I portray how war propaganda during the 1980s propagated a crude heroic and heterosexual military masculinity, including eroticized overtones designed to amplify its mobilizing effects. The Iraqi Ba’thist regime’s turn to religious revivalism and social conservatism in the 1990s was anticipated during the late war years, when it gave up on its cautiously reformist agenda regarding women’s rights, reiterated patriarchal norms and emphasized procreation and motherhood. The specific circumstances of this move exemplify the erosion of the regime’s original modernist agenda as a result of the war. Still, despite the regime’s turn to religion and social conservatism, Iraqi society remained multiple in its gendered and sexual practices. Thus, the paper presents evidence that the regime tolerated the existence of a queer sub-culture in Baghdad and other city throughout the years of its rule, notwithstanding Saddam Hussein’s hostility towards ‘unmanly men’. I conclude by discussing the question how organized violence by Islamist actors against non-normative gender and sexual behaviors, enactments, and identities in post-Saddam Iraq is related to war experiences and the 'war culture' that was promoted during the 1980s.

On the Iranian side of the Iran-Iraq War, the armed forces relied on a labor-intensive war strategy in which volunteers played an important role, many of them of young age. While recent scholarship has more accurately estimated the number of casualties and deaths resulting from the war, few studies have taken into account the social legacies of mass mobilization for veteran and “martyr” families. Anecdotal accounts often claim that veteran families experienced a form of upward mobility via affirmative action in the post-war years through special access to education and employment quotas. Yet this claim has never been balanced against more common forms of transmission of status through family ties such as wealth or cultural capital. How did war-linked upward mobility fare against less politicized forms of status and class preservation in the Islamic Republic of Iran? To assess the social legacies of the Iran-Iraq war, I draw from the 2016 Iran Social Survey, a large, nationally representative survey (N=5005) conducted over phone from Tehran in November/December 2016. Questions were included about war participation in combat and non-combat roles for respondents, spouses, or fathers. As a result, Iran Social Survey data allows us to estimate the social demographics of war veterans, including family size, educational levels of parents, and occupational and educational status of male and female children. To preview the findings: processes of war-linked upward mobility did exist for a subset of families in the survey, controlling for other factors. Yet the degree of mobility is modest compared to two other processes of status transmission: land inheritance and parents’ class status. In sum, as with many wars, mass mobilization left a legacy of “social leveling” in Iranian society but the effects varied alongside other powerful forms of social stratification and inequality.