#MeToo Movement in Iran

Claudia Yaghoobi is a Roshan Institute Associate Professor in Persian Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. She is the author of Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Iranian Literature and Film (2020) and Subjectivity in ‘Attar, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism (2017).

At a time when Iranian women have galvanized the world with their audacious protests against the compulsory Islamic dress code, The #MeToo Movement in Iran aptly reminds us of a prior moment when women dared to speak of the many forms of sexual abuse and harassment they have long endured in silence. The contributors offer trenchant analyses that lay bare the Iranian state’s hypocritical claim of protecting women through the dress code only to punish them for the acts of violence against them. Inspired by the global #MeToo Movement, the Iranian movement is shaped by local differences, stemming from the theocratic regime’s hostility to women’s rights as well as the rights of minoritized bodies and longstanding cultural taboos. This book provides invaluable insights into how the digital media amplified the reverberations of the movement across Iranian social and cultural arenas.

• Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and TranslationPrologue: #MeToo Movement and Redefining the Private Sphere Ziba Jalali NainiIntroduction: Bodies, Spaces, and Places Claudia Yaghoobi1 Like a Wrapped Chocolate: The Islamic Republic’s Politics of Hijab and the Normalization of Sexual Harassment Esha Momeni2 The Iranian #MeToo and the Double Bind of Iranian Feminism: Between Religion, the Global Gender Struggle, and Liberal Feminism Dilyana Mincheva and Niloofar Hooman3 Rhetorical Listening to the Iranian #MeToo Movement in Diaspora Yalda N. Hamidi4 Structural and Material Considerations and the Nexus of Power and Sexuality in the Iranian #MeToo Movement Mahdi Tourage5 Twitter Data Analysis on #MeTooIran Yasamin Rezai and Mehdy Sedaghat Payam6 #Unveiling_the_Iranian_MeToo: Symptomatic Reading of Iranian MeToo through the Lens of Political Economy Paria Rahimi7 Whose Voice Is Missing? MeToo Digital Storytelling on Instagram and the Politics of Inclusion Golnar Gishnizjani8 Sexual Violence, MeToo, and Iranian Lesbians’ Censored Voices Mahdis Sadeghipouya9 The White-Collars’ New Masculinities in #MeToo: How to Maintain Gendered Privileges? Somayeh Rostampour10 Hush! Girls Don’t Scream (2013) by Puran Derakhshandeh and the #MeToo Movement in Iran Maryam ZehtabiAfterword: Patriarchalism, Male Abuse, and the Sources of the #MeToo Movement in the Muslim Middle East Roger Friedland, Janet Afary, and Charlotte HoppenNotes Bibliography List of Contributors Index