Description
TitleSignatures, rights, networks
Date Created2012
Other Date2012-05 (degree)
Extentviii, 237 p.
DescriptionMy dissertation explores how Iranian feminists are mobilizing new discourses and
creating dynamic transnational networks, enabled in part by cyber and print cultures. I
investigate the ways in which Iranian feminist praxis consequently disrupts and reframes
the putative opposition between secularism and Islam, and the multiple binaries
assembled through this opposition—democratic versus authoritarian; liberatory versus
oppressive; egalitarian versus patriarchal; and modern versus backwards. Within a multimethodological and interdisciplinary framework, I examine three sites of Iranian feminist activism. I consider the One Million Signatures Campaign, a grassroots feminist
movement that emerged in Iran in 2006, which utilizes Islamic human rights discourses
and grassroots, democratic practices to engage the state in reforming family law. I also
investigate the transnational network structure of the campaign, reflecting on the
particular praxis offered by campaigners in the Iranian diaspora. Finally, I examine the
writings and reception of Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. As a Muslim, feminist and human rights activist, Ebadi emphasizes the compatibility of Islam with human
rights, thereby disrupting discourses that counterpoise them. Considered together, these three sites of Iranian feminism destabilize Western hegemony over Iran, consolidated through discourses which pit “superior” liberal democracies over “backward” Islamic nations. This oppositional staging gains purchase through geopolitical relations of power, including some iterations of global feminism,
which deploy neocolonial saving and rescue narratives in the name of women’s human
rights. Concomitantly, transnational feminist theory, which has destabilized the
normative authority of Western hegemony and global feminism, can also often reify the
very power relations it seeks to critique. By emphasizing the dangers, limits, and
dilemmas of transnational feminist work, transnational feminist theory can neglect
critical feminist projects on the ground, effectively writing some women out of history.
My dissertation considers how Iranian feminists in Iran and the diaspora challenge these various modes of epistemic silencing. Through a close examination of the praxis of Iranian feminists, reflected primarily through the narratives of the activists themselves,
my dissertation contributes to feminist theories of agency and helps revitalize
transnational feminist studies.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
NoteIncludes vita
Noteby Catherine Zehra Sameh
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.