Abstract
This book explores the trajectory of sex segregation in the Islamic Republic of Iran over a 30-year period. What began as exclusion of women from public spaces following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, imposition of the hejab law (mandatory veiling), and the gender-segregation plans and practices of the 1980s gradually evolved into policies and practices of accommodation, especially in the face of women’s own resistance and demands. The book builds on a prodigious literature by Iranian feminist scholars that places gender at the center of the Islamic state’s politics and policies and its evolution over time. As Shahrokni puts it, the state’s mode of regulation shifted from prohibition to provisioning—exemplified by her book’s three case studies of city bus transportation, public parks, and sports spectatorship.
The introductory chapter lays out Shahrokni’s major propositions. There is not one coherent gender politics of the state; instead, women’s bodies reflect the “signs of the times.” She writes of the “not-negligible shifts in the way women have been perceived as, administered, provided for, and engaged with” (p. 35). The male political elite make the rules and compete with each other, and this competition is played out on the bodies of women to assert, reinforce, and challenge their authority. She notes the paradoxes and unintended consequences of regime policies: the “deepening of gender segregation practices” signified “a gradual expansion—and not contradiction—of women’s access to the city” (p. 35), and “. . . gender segregation of the bus space facilitated [women’s] movement” (p. 41).
By the late 1990s, women had developed a sense of entitlement to the segregated spaces on buses and resented and complained when men intruded and sat in their space (p. 45). At the same time, there was the ability to mix with men as the two sections were divided by a mere bar. One revealing photo in the book shows a couple standing in close proximity across the bar. The “Mothers’ Paradise” park and similar women-only parks became places not just for entertainment, health, or exercise but also sites for activism, such as gathering support for the One Million Signatures Campaign for reform of discriminatory constitutional articles.
Although published 2 years before the outbreak of the Fall 2022 Woman-Life-Freedom protests in Iran, Women in Place has lost little of its explanatory power. The Mahsa protests were indeed about women’s ability to move freely without being monitored for their dress and comportment, whether by state agents, male kin, or men at large. However, the protests also reflected the broader crisis of accumulation and legitimacy of the Iranian state—a crisis of its own making as well as the product of relentless economic and financial sanctions, most of them imposed unilaterally by the United States, with their harsh societal effects.
Shahrokni’s ethnographic study, complemented by analysis of government documents, speeches, and press accounts, displays the author’s keen observational skills and engaging and erudite prose. Her analysis of the state is worth highlighting: “the process of Islamization has been haphazard” (p. 114) with a multiplicity of actors involved in its definition. It has entailed strategies of “outsourcing, scaling down, and scaling up” (p. 119) a “flexible yet fragile state” (p. 120) seeking “hegemony through consent” (p. 121) but not shy of engaging in repression.
Yet I was puzzled to read of a “discursive shift from protecting women’s virtue and chastity in the name of Islamic morality to protecting women’s rights and safety in the name of secular liberal citizenship” (p. 5, emphasis in the original). This latter concept is not sufficiently elucidated to be convincing. Also missing in the book is Iran’s social complexity—dynamics of class, religion, and ethnicity, as well as gender, which were on display during the 2017/18 and 2019 working-class protests (predominantly by men) and most widely during the fall 2022 Woman-Life-Freedom protests. If the results of the most recent (2024) parliamentary elections are valid, and as just 40 percent of the electorate went to the polls, it reflects that most Iranians—men and women, citizens of various classes, religions, and ethnicities—yearn for a different political system, one that is guided by (I would hope) a genuinely secular concept of social citizenship.
Overall, in just five chapters, Women in Place covers considerable ground. Shahrokni shows that Iran’s political elites are not a single unified entity. Thus, the state is sufficiently fragmented to allow for multiple “discursive regimes” and policy changes. These insights will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in the areas of Iranian studies, feminist political sociology, and global Middle East and North Africa Studies.
