Research - Current International Research Projects
Rural Women (SSHRC-Assisted)
Parvin Ghorayshi
Immediately after the revolution in Iran, issues related to women became the focus of fascination both in Iran and in the West. Iranian women became the topic of debate among academics and non-academics. Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, a veritable cascade of books and articles has poured forth on the subject of Iranian women. Issues related to agriculture, rural areas, and especially rural women did not attract the intense attention that either the Islamic revolution or urban Iranian women received after the Islamic government came to power. Despite the increase in the bulk of publications both on Iran and Iranian women, research on rural women are few and far-in-between.
Rural women in Iran are caught in a web of hierarchical power relations. The lives of women of the village being researched are filled with counter discourses. Resistance happens at various levels and takes different forms: formal and informal, individual and collective, public and anonymous. The study of women’ s everyday lives shows that they have succeeded, within their limits and boundaries, in challenging institutional constraints, and control by men, by the older generation, and by those who have power over them. Women’s struggles, the ways in which they organize, and the tactics that they use to create spaces, are context specific and take a variety of forms. No matter what the context of these forms of resistance, they draw attention to sites of struggle and power relations and have implications for the ways in which they operate through women’s status in the community. This case study of one village is evidence against universalizing discourses about women, patriarchy, Islam, and oppression.