Agrarian Change and Gender Relations in South-east Iran

This article looks at some of the recent cross-disciplinary debates on the nature of the household, and in particular the need to juxtapose intrahousehold gender relations against the wider socio-economic context within which households are embedded. It places particular emphasis on the development of market forces, seen as a neglected theme in research on gender relations in rural Iran. Drawing on village-level fieldwork, the ‘conjugal contracts' in two neighbouring districts of the Iranian province of Kerman are located within the wider network of socio-economic relations in which both men and women are involved, taking into account the varied development of commercial agriculture, as well as the impact of state policies and the changing balance of social forces. Although these developments account for some of the observed differences in conjugal relations between the two districts, shared notions of ‘household unity’ and ‘wifely duty’ are also highlighted as critical factors shaping the conduct of husband and wife in ways that are comparable across the two districts. The pressures that are brought upon men and women with the development of market forces in one of the districts, while making women relatively more vulnerable in certain respects, have enhanced their assertive-ness within marriage — often in defiance of deeply-embedded ideologies that subsume their interests to those of their households.     

Re-Interpreting Modern Iran: Tribe and State in the Twentieth Century

For the nationalist elite of early Pahlavi Iran, the regime's military successes over tribal opposition, whether real or imagined, were welcomed and celebrated. These successes were interpreted as confirmation of their views of tribal power as hostile to modernity, archaic and outmoded, and of Riza Shah as the deliverer of Iran's national salvation. This conceptualization of the “tribal problem” had appeared in tandem with and as a product of modernist ideology in the late nineteenth century, acquired the backing of state power with the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty, and endured until the revolution of 1979. It communicated itself, in diluted form, to Western scholarship, which has been largely content to depict Riza Shah's tribal policies as regrettably brutal, but an unavoidable stage in Iran's progress and “modernization.”

Yet this version of tribe–state relations is clearly an ideological construct rather than an historical analysis. The account which follows begins a re-evaluation of tribal politics in modern Iran, focusing especially on the Riza Shah decades when these politics were a site of intense conflict and where the nationalist template was most starkly delineated, and concludes by tracing and re-examining the evolution of the tribe–state dynamic in the decades of land reform and revolution.     

Performing Trans in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Gender Transitions in Islamic Law,Theatre, and Film

In the wake of a string of sensationalist documentaries about transsexuality in Iran, Iranian theatre and film artists began crafting groundbreaking trans performances to educate audiences and depict characters living non-heteronormative lives without the translating influence of queer theory or identity politics. Investigating transsexual bodies as assembled by jurists in Iranian Shi?a jurisprudence and by artists on stage and screen reveals the ways in which the transsexual body is constructed in Islamic legal discourse and represented in narrative and bodily form in the public imaginary in Iran. Representations of transsexuality in theatre and film highlight the role of the arts as a vehicle for social change, communal recognition, and self-cognition. In particular, performances of female-to-male gender transitions in theatre and film have expanded the boundaries of how gender presentation is translated onto Iranian stages, into Tehran coffeehouses, and onto global screens. These trans performances usher Iranian spectators into new forms of viewership and artistic consumption in their attempt to creatively represent transsexual bodies and narratives to increase tolerance towards transsexuals; further, they have ignited a conversation among artists and activists about the assemblage of transsexual bodies in artistic productions and the most effective narrative and emotional forms of catharsis to inspire change.     

Biopolitics meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia

Crises persist in Australian Indigenous affairs because current policy approaches do not address the intersection of Indigenous and European political worlds. This paper responds to this challenge by providing a heuristic device for delineating Settler and Indigenous Australian political ontologies and considering their interaction. It first evokes Settler and Aboriginal ontologies as, respectively, biopolitical (focused through life) and terrapolitical (focused through land). These ideal types help to identify important differences that inform current governance challenges. The paper discusses the entwinement of these traditions as a story of biopolitical dominance wherein Aboriginal people are governed as an ‘included-exclusion’ within the Australian political community. Despite the overall pattern of dominance, this same entwinement offers possibilities for exchange between biopolitics and terrapolitics and, hence, for breaking the recurrent crises of Indigenous affairs.