Moving Beyond Resistance: Women’s Multi-Generational Narratives of Body and Sexuality in Tehran

This paper looks at women’s experiences of embodiment as an analytical perspective in understanding gender policies in a context of social and political changes in Iranian society. In order to highlight the relationship between the contemporary social and cultural transformations in sexuality and sexual politics and women’s personal experiences, I conducted ethnographic research amongst two generations of women in Tehran: those born in the 1950s and those in the 1980s. Through an inter-generational approach I discuss the contradictory definition of womanhood in Iranian context and how women’s embodiment is constructed in intersection with different discourses on women’s sexuality. In contrast to the literature in which women’s agency is simply represented through their acts of resistance against the authoritative institutions such as the Islamic Republic, here I discuss how women’s personal narratives highlight the complexity of their positionality that cannot be easily reduced to the binary of defiance/subordination.
Based on my ethnography, I discuss the ways in which they negotiate, challenge or reproduce the concepts of normal/natural female sexuality in their everyday experiences. I will argue that amongst these two generations women’s bodily experiences, their sources of learning about sexuality, their awareness of their rights to pleasure and their image of womanhood have shifted hugely due to changes in sexual politics of the Islamic Republic as well as their increasing access to the globalised media.
In general, this paper underlines the necessity of moving beyond the binary framework in reading women’s experiences. It also evaluates the possibility of social or political reform through sexual liberation in Iranian society in the context of similar discussions in the Middle East.