Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Shahla Talebi is a social cultural anthropologist, with a BA from UC Berkeley, and MA & PhD from Columbia University. She is currently an associate professor of religious studies and a faculty of anthropology of religion in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. As a native of Iran, she has lived through the Revolution of 197, and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Both events have informed her research and scholarship, which revolve around questions of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, revolution, war, violence, memory, memorialization, history, and trauma. She has also written on language, metaphor, embodiment and embodied performances, incarceration, imprisonment, death and madness and torture in prison, as well as gender and sexuality. Her geographical concentration is Iran and the Middle East. She is the author of awards winning book, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran, and has published on the aforementioned topics in academic journals and edited books. Shahla was a national humanities research fellow in 2017-2018, where she worked on the revisions of her second book manuscript on the contested martyrdoms in post-revolutionary Iran.
Modalities, Influences and Trajectories of Shariati and Marxists’ Views on Women, Gender and Sexuality in Iran
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Along with their affinity for socioeconomic justice, Ali Shariati and many of the Iranian leftist intellectuals of the 1960-70s propagated an image of an ideal womanhood that was perhaps more similar than different. An ideal woman for most Marxists and for Shariati was a socio-politically conscious and active individual, an anti-capitalist and a revolutionary, while simultaneously a heterosexual loyal lover, wife, and mother. She was neither a “traditionalist”, nor a “product” or object of liberal capitalist system. She was her own creator, though after the examples of particular heroines. Explicating the similarities and difference of their views on women, gender and sexuality, and through an ethnographic narration, I seek to understand their potentials and hindrances and the extent of their influence on women activists. I draw on textual analysis and ethnographic research to explore the trajectories of these views from the 1960s on, and examine whether or not the new reading (s) of Shariati and Marxists have rendered new approaches to women, gender and sexuality possible without sacrificing their stance on socioeconomic justice?
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