This book is based on more than ten years of fieldwork conducted in Iran from the 1990s until 2007. During that period, I conducted in-depth interviews, engaged in participant observation, and researched multiple aspects of Iranian history, social life, and culture. Over time, I was able to establish working relationships and personal friendships with Iranians inside and outside the country that have extended beyond the period of the fieldwork and despite geographic distances. The analyses in this book are based on painstaking hours of careful research, questioning and requestioning what I thought I knew and what I didn’t know. Iran was not an obvious research choice for me, until it became one. This introduction tries to explain how it became my central focus, a focus refracted through varied and often oblique perspectives on underlying questions of power, freedom, and agency in everyday life. It also tries to demonstrate the interpretive methodology of my research in Iran by providing a detailed description of an interpretive experience: an Iranian film I saw in Chicago, but only understood as an effective representation of postrevolutionary Iranian life after I could talk to people about it in Iran. This example – of an initial understanding, the recognition of misunderstanding, and a more inclusive comprehension that depends on acknowledging metaphor as a political strategy as well as a narrative device – provides a model of the method of reflexive interpretation that is at work throughout the book.

Beginnings (The Personal Is Always Political)

I met Kaveh in graduate school (Johns Hopkins). I was studying political theory (focusing on Hannah Arendt); he was a human geographer (working on Iran); we met in a Hegel reading group (we really did). He was one of the group organizers, attended the first session, and then left Baltimore for the summer. I was the last person he saw driving out of the neighborhood: standing on a corner by the farmers’ market, talking to a friend, market bag over my shoulder. I was the first person he saw at the end of the summer, driving back into the neighborhood: standing on a (different) corner, waiting to cross the street. Kaveh suspects I was lurking in wait all summer. I deny this. Our paths often crossed (literally) on a small campus with an interdisciplinary intellectual and social identity (students got to know each other), in a small city with great cheap housing stock (students could afford to live within walking distance of the campus), and not a lot of expensive distractions (this was still John Waters’ Baltimore). We shared an interest in social theory. We shared an interest in film. That’s how it started.

In March 1992, I went to Iran for the first time. By then we were married, and he wanted me to see the place he was from. I wanted to see it too. Kaveh was from Iran; his parents were still in Iran; his fieldwork had been in Iran. I had known him long enough; I had talked to enough people – Iranian friends, relatives, and colleagues – that I had a sense of what to expect for a visit. We had saved some money, and I was getting ready to begin in the fall as a tenure track assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, so we had some financial stability in front of us. But I knew no Persian, and next to nothing about the country. This would be simply a family visit; there were no expectations other than those of domestic negotiation and accommodation that exist for any new family entrant.

Our first few trips were mostly like that. I was the privileged guest who didn’t know the local rules, but wasn’t expected to; that was the advantage of not being Iranian-American, and being almost totally ignorant of how things should be done.Footnote ¹ I got cultural credit just for trying to fit in, and even for my mistakes: kissing everyone around the room at an extended family reunion; bowing formally, hand on heart, to the teachers in a village school; traveling in the war-torn province of Khuzestan in the far south of the country. Iranians kiss on each cheek, but only if you are already closely connected, not on first introduction; the hand-on-heart bow is for men, not women; there were hardly any tourists from Tehran, let alone Americans, in Khuzestan in the early 1990s. But the relatives thought I was open and warm-hearted; all the schoolchildren poured out of the school to view the clueless stranger suddenly in their midst; ordinary people were extraordinarily generous and welcoming. I enjoyed my family visits, but I wasn’t taking them seriously as scholarly work.

I was a political theorist, so I thought a lot about power, understood not only as hierarchical domination but also as more comprehensive systems of possible empowerment, positioning, and control. I knew I didn’t know anything about Iran, or even more generally about the Middle East, beyond what a reasonably intelligent person could read in the newspaper (not much). I went over the proofs for Speaking through the Mask, my book on Hannah Arendt, in Kaveh’s parents’ house. I’d been working on the political intersections of social identities, especially gender and religion, not only in Arendt but also in more contemporary issues involving Muslim women, including the first big national headscarf scandal in France.Footnote ² For that essay, I read a lot of newspapers. I appreciated the nuance of the everyday, and I liked to pay attention to social detail, but I worked on ideas and on texts. Texts don’t move around in the multidimensional way that people do.

Politics (History, the State, and Society)

In 1978–1979, Iran experienced a revolution. A revolution is not a coup: not an exchange of elites at the top of the state, but a bottom-up overturning of the established political and social order. Revolutions are not common. They change everything, because no matter what happens, they establish a precedent that change can happen, that the status quo of power and hierarchy is vulnerable to human action. The 1979 Iranian Revolution overthrew a strong state, a key and strategic US ally with a well-organized military, ruled as an absolutist monarchy with a modernist veneer. But it was not the first revolution in Iran; for Iranians, the first modern revolution is the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1906.Footnote ³

The Constitutional Revolution (Enghelab-e Mashruteh) established a Constitution (Mashruteh) and a Parliament (Majles) and the principle of popular sovereignty in Iran in 1906, a period when most European governments were monarchies, the Great Game of empire was at its height, and democracy was still a global dirty word. Iran was never formally colonized, in part because it was a neutral, independent buffer state between the competing expansionary dreams of Russian and British imperial power. But by the twentieth century, the ruling Qajar dynasty was already in its decrepit end days, a dynastic story in itself of ruthlessness become decadence become decline. In the summer of 1906, 12,000 men took refuge on the grounds of the British Embassy compound in leafy north Tehran, tolerated by the British and advocating for constitutional limits to Qajar monarchical rule. Then the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 (agreed upon by the two imperial rivals in order to counter the shared expansionist threat of German alliance with the Ottomans) recognized two “spheres of influence” in Iran, each to be the legitimate arena for intervention, by Russia in the north and by the British in the south. The British turned against the Constitutionalists, but having lost faith in the Qajars, eventually helped ease the impressive Reza Pahlavi into power and a new dynasty.

Reza Shah was from the north, the last and only Iranian commanding officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade. Tall, illiterate, and extremely capable, in a photograph taken before the dynastic change he towers impressively behind the short, round, sleepy-looking figure of the last Qajar ruler, Ahmad Shah. I saw this photograph in an exhibit of monarchical relics in the basement of the Niavaran Palace in Tehran in the early 1990s, on what was probably my first trip to Iran. At that time, I didn’t know anything much about Iranian history or politics, let alone enough to recognize individual personalities. But I knew enough to pick out the tall man with the piercing eyes in the background of the snapshot and to ask, “Who is that?” And then to ask who was the rotund figure in front (Ahmad Shah Qajar). And then I thought I knew everything I needed to know about early twentieth-century Iranian political history (not quite).

During the twentieth century, the Pahlavi monarchy followed an abbreviated version of the Qajar dynastic trajectory. Reza Shah ruthlessly centralized the political and military structure of the state and built infrastructure (railways, tunnels, urban boulevards) that still endure as the pride of visible Iranian modernity. The story is that he supervised the planting of the trees along the main north/south Tehran thoroughfares, chenar (local variation of English plane trees or American sycamores) that can grow for hundreds of years and now tower benevolently over the street unless they have been killed off by more recent combinations of drought, construction, and pollution. But in 1941 Iran’s strategic location, its oil, and Reza Shah’s preference for affiliation with the Germans rather than Iran’s traditional, rival Great Power foes led to the Anglo-Soviet Invasion, and Reza Shah was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

During the postwar period, Iran experienced another efflorescence of popular sovereignty, this time under the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh nationalized the Iranian oil industry, which had been developed as an exclusive British concession by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company).Footnote ⁴ But national sovereignty outside the metropole was suspect, and in 1953 Great Britain and the US coordinated a coup in Iran that deposed the elected government, placed Mossadegh under house arrest for the rest of his life, and solidified monarchical control by the more pliable Mohammad Reza Shah.Footnote ⁵ The reformulated Pahlavi regime became a favored foreign ally of the US and was held up as a model of enlightened absolutism and shiny top-down modernization. But its internal politics were elitist, exclusionary, and corrupt, and the role of benevolent despot was an ambiguous one by the 1970s. Despite the international glamour of the 1971 celebration of 2,500 years of glorious Persian Empire, ordinary people in Iran were becoming more and more dissatisfied. The luxurious tent city built by the Shah at Persepolis (Takhte-Jamshid), the ceremonial capital of the ancient Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), welcomed Iranian and foreign dignitaries and celebrities and was flatteringly covered by the international press. But it was itself an anachronism, even in its location. Persepolis is outside the more recent, but still venerable city of Shiraz, itself the site of the mausoleums of two of the most beloved Persian poets, Saadi (thirteenth century) and Hafez (fourteenth century), and the capital of the enlightened ruler Karim Khan Zand (circa 1705–1779), who named himself Representative of the People (Vakil-e Ra’aayaa) rather than Shah, already in the eighteenth century.

The Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979 was a national phenomenon, and not specifically Islamic until it became so with the foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. History always is claimed by the victors, even if it does not belong to them, and revolution is always a two-part process, initially of liberation (from the old) and then of foundation (of the new). The Iranian Revolution was an effective mass movement of national liberation from an autocratic and dictatorial monarchy. It was also the problematic foundation of a republican form of government with a formalized Islamic ideology and leadership only loosely institutionalized. And then in 1980 Iraq under Saddam Hussein, receiving military support from the US, invaded Iran. The revolutionary dreams of political utopia, already under pressure from the realities of ideological and popular divisions (crisscrossing among the right and the left, the religious and secular, the urban and the rural, the center and the provinces, not to mention between genders, generations, sects, ethnicities, and regions), were blown apart by the immediacy of violence coming from the outside as well as within.

The Iran–Iraq War ended in 1988, and the country had to rebuild, although since Iran remained under widespread international sanctions that was a slow process. By the later 1990s, most people’s ordinary daily life had normalized enough to open some room for political experimentation. When I first went to Iran in 1992, we boiled the milk because Kaveh’s mother didn’t trust the pasteurization process. A few years later, we didn’t have to anymore: we knew the milk was pasteurized. People could manage to look up and look around and reconsider what they had been through and where they were going as a collective. In 1997, Mohammad Khatami was elected President of Iran in an unexpected and massive victory. The election ushered in what came to be known as the Reform period and signified a widely shared popular desire for change, and for the easing of the political, cultural, and social pressures that had accompanied the experiences of the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution and the eight years of the Iran–Iraq War.

The postrevolutionary Iranian government is a complicated structure of elected and nonelected branches that have often fought out their intense rivalry by attempting to contradict each other’s control and/or initiatives. The elected branches of government are the Parliament, the Presidency, and the Assembly of Experts; the nonelected branches include the Judiciary, the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council, and the Expediency Council. Throughout much of the postrevolutionary period, the elected branches provided more support for increased democratic participation in public life and increased social freedom in private life, while the nonelected branches endorsed a vision of governance based on theological authority. Within the unstable balance of competing powers within the Islamic Republic of Iran, popular pressure from below has often manifested itself in the street, the independent newspapers, and the Parliament. More authoritarian resistance to political and social change has come from the nonelected governing institutions of the Judiciary, the Guardian and Expediency Councils, the state-run television, and formal and informal elements of the security apparatus. Balancing within this framework, sometimes tilting it from side to side or regaining a balance, are the offices of the President (elected, although candidates must be approved by the nonelected Guardian Council, as are all candidates for Parliament), the Supreme Leader (selected by the Assembly of Experts), and the Assembly of Experts itself (elected, although all candidates for the Assembly must be approved by the Guardian Council before election, and approved after election by the Supreme Leader).

This complicated and interlocking structure is intended to provide a system of checks and balances, overseen by a uniquely respected Leader above the partisan fray. Ayatollah Khomeini, the face of the Islamic Revolution and the first Supreme Leader until his death in 1989, theorized the rule of velayat-e-faqih (rule/guardianship of the Islamic jurist) as the governance basis of the new Islamic Republic and the supreme arbiter of legal and moral questions through the interpretation of religious ethics, precedent, and law. Khomeini himself emphasized that the legitimacy of the Faqih (the Supreme Leader) rested on the will of the people and was not incompatible with democracy, although his role was to interpret, guide, and correct popular will. In practice, the theory of velayat-e-faqih and the governing structure of the postrevolutionary Islamic Republic have provided for ongoing factional struggle since its inception. During periods when the factional rivalries were less evident, it has usually been because of intensifying state repression. But as soon as the unsteady balance of the system is regained, the competitive struggle between contradictory visions of a postrevolutionary political system reasserts itself.

Over time, velayat-e-faqih has been used to justify more explicitly antidemocratic positions, including the argument that those with state-sanctioned Islamic authority have the priority of power and decision-making over those whose legitimacy comes from the people and the republican form of government. This increasing tension between the Islamic and republican interpretations of power within the hybrid Islamic Republic has occurred concurrently with the increasing realization by the electorate and the nonelected stakeholders that the majority of voters want a much more limited version of religious political authority. Despite and because of the creation of a theologically defined state, Iranian society has become more secular, as ordinary people, no matter what their personal level of faith and religiosity, have become more skeptical of the close intertwining of religious and political authority.

In a national situation that combined limited political freedom with a state that legitimated itself through a narrative of revolutionary popular (Islamic) sovereignty, Khatami’s 1997 election as President provided widespread recognition of shared dissatisfactions and the beginnings of a wider conversation of who and what a postrevolutionary Islamic Republic would represent. During the Reform period under the two terms of Khatami’s Presidency, from 1997 to 2005, the hidden struggles over the present and future relations of power in the Islamic Republic became much more visible as they permeated all levels of Iranian society. While the governing factions contested each other’s institutional control through competing practices of power (democratic or authoritarian) and authority (electoral or theological), most people experienced political transformations through the minor but significant struggles of the everyday: who makes the decisions in a family (the revalorization and slow disintegration of classic patriarchy); exactly how a woman adjusts her headscarf (the contestations over control of bodies and public space); what opportunities are available during free time (the contradictions of state censorship and social desire in a country recovering from revolution and war). The wider political implications of personal social decisions were often intentionally implicit rather than explicit: representations can sometimes be most eloquent when most imprecise.Footnote ⁶ Small gestures could speak for big ideas, coded in a locally recognizable vernacular that enabled both recognition and deniability. Daily life suddenly became full of promise.

President Khatami sponsored the beginning of an independent press, and “a dialogue of civilizations” that had implications inside and outside the country.Footnote ⁷ New newspapers sprang up and were read cover to cover, handed around from reader to reader, only to be shut down by the Judiciary, which remained controlled by more conservative elements of the regime. Days later, a new newspaper would usually open with a different name but the same staff and editorial policy. Ideas mattered; there were red lines of public discussion, but there was excitement in the air as people recognized in each other similar, previously hidden desires for collective change. The questions of how that change should happen, who should control it, and what it should entail were debated in the pages of the papers, in private conversations, and increasingly in public places – in taxis, in grocery lines, and in the street. I realized I was seeing a society democratize itself, incrementally but every day. This was speech as action, the mutual self-recognition of the citizens’ subjectivity through their engagement with each other and their collective creation of a space of participatory appearance. I was seeing the transformative power of politics happening right in front of me. I realized I needed to pay attention.

Action (Film as Text and Politics)

Arendtian politics is premised on action, and action is mostly speech. As I recognized that my theoretical interests were occurring in real time around me, I also realized how much I needed to learn, both about Iran (history, religion, and economics) and about how to work on the instability of speech and action in process (fieldwork), rather than waiting until it is written down (texts). As an intermediate step, I began to write about films.

When we moved to Chicago in 1992, the same year that I first visited Iran, we discovered that the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute held an annual month-long Festival of Films from Iran. The New Wave of Iranian cinema was just emerging, and every weekend through the month of October, two new films were screened, often accompanied by visiting filmmakers and actors as special guests.Footnote ⁸ We’d already been going to the films, and we had the chance to meet the filmmakers because Kaveh had volunteered to do the question-and-answer translations. (During this period, relatively few Iran-based intellectuals and artists spoke English well; it was more likely that they could speak French.) Out of the luck of geography, I was ideally positioned to observe the flourishing of the Iranian cinematic New Wave and to watch a lot of Iranian movies, some now well known, some generally forgotten.

The innovative auteur-influenced filmmaking that exploded in Iran during the 1990s and through the 2000s was a primary vehicle for social critique and cultural experimentation. The films had to abide by strict representational controls and avoid any overt political references. They were supposed to provide models of proper Islamic behavior as educational postrevolutionary entertainment. But in a society in which the exact degree of coverage provided by a woman’s headscarf was a daily issue of public morality vs. private freedom, apparently anodyne representations of daily social life conveyed powerful, recognizable political messages. Working within a peculiarly limited vocabulary of cinematic representation (supposedly private scenes had to conform to norms of public behavior), Iranian screenwriters and directors had to innovate with the conventions.Footnote ⁹ Because their national audience could recognize the unreality of the representation (no ordinary woman gets into bed wearing full outdoor hejab, including an overcoat, as was often the case in films during the early 1990s), clever filmmakers began experimenting more explicitly with the artifice of representations in order to avoid scenes appearing clunkily artificial. The nuances of social life became highly significant in their representation. And on film, if you don’t catch it the first time, you can try to see the scene again.

Watching films, thinking about them, and writing about them became my bridge to doing actual fieldwork in Iran. Because the conventions of Iranian cinematic representation during that period were so deeply enmeshed within the nuances of social representation, the films provided insights into opaque relations of social power. But sometimes it was necessary to interrogate actual social relations in order to appreciate what was going on in the films. I couldn’t just watch people, on film or on the street or in the household. I had to talk with them.

Talking with people helps you learn. It can also help make very clear how much you don’t know.Footnote ¹⁰

Looking into a Representation (Inquiry and Reflexivity)

During the 1999 Festival of Films from Iran, which was also its tenth anniversary season, the Chicago Film Center screened two separate films with surprisingly parallel stories: Tahmineh Milani’s Two Women (1999) and Fereidun Jayrani’s Red (1999). Both films portrayed women being controlled by possessive, abusive husbands; in both, the heroine has to argue for a divorce to release her from her oppressive marriage before a mullah who represents an unsympathetic legal system; and in both, the heroine is only released from the misery of her marital bondage by the eventual violent death of her husband.Footnote ¹¹ But the films were also very different. The heroine of Two Women was a perfect overachiever who was reduced to absolute passivity by her husband’s jealous control, finding release only after her stalker murdered her husband. By contrast, the heroine of Red was a strong-minded nurse and devoted mother who insisted on her independence all through the movie; when her crazed and violent husband eventually tried to gain ultimate control by killing her, she killed him in self-defense. (And that film was identified as “based on a true story.”) Stylistically, the films were equally opposite. Red was in the familiar style of a Hollywood domestic abuse drama: conventionally realistic, smoothly professional, and especially toward the end, effectively suspenseful and scary. But Two Women had the heightened characters and theatrical stagings of a melodrama: the virtuous heroine romanticized in her passivity; the villainous psychopath who threatens the heroine by glowering at her and brandishing a tiny knife; a key scene in which the heroine pleads for a divorce before an Islamic religious judge by delivering an emotional, futile polemic on the general issue of a woman’s right to be treated like a human being.Footnote ¹²

I found Two Women’s style too broad to be convincing, and I was suspicious when I found the Chicago audience tended either to love Two Women and hate Red or love Red and hate Two Women. (I was leaning toward the latter.) It seemed to me that what most divided the two films (and the audience response to them) was the role of agency. In Red, the heroine maintains her agency throughout; even as a victim, she maintains her claim to her autonomy. In Two Women, the heroine becomes so passive under the jealous browbeating of her husband that during the climactic scene in which the psychopathic stalker, newly released from prison, tracks her down in an empty street, she falls to her knees screaming, “Kill me, kill me!” The stalker then declares his love and instead kills the husband, who shows up at an inopportune moment. Finally released from her marital predicament by the timely, violent intervention of her crazed suitor, the end of the film has the heroine of Two Women telling her best friend that she is ready to put her life back together, even ready to learn to drive; it doesn’t seem to matter that early in the film she was offering to give her friend driving lessons or that a key middle scene involved her driving a car.

Both movies had been huge popular successes in Iran, but it was Milani’s Two Women that was being hailed abroad as a feminist achievement, while Red received almost no critical attention or distribution. For audiences in the US, Two Women seemed happily to confirm the worst stereotypes about Iranian/Islamic/Middle Eastern men, and the absolute misogyny of Iranian society, state, and culture.Footnote ¹³ But Two Women didn’t match up at all with what I’d seen of the assertive tenacity of postrevolutionary Iranian women. So I was shocked when I discovered that women in Iran were finding a feminist message in Milani too.

I saw the films in October, and by March I was in Iran. I knew Two Women had been a huge box office success, but I was surprised when so many of the women I knew told me how much they liked the film. They were active professional women (teachers, urban planners, publishers, and social workers), some married, some single, and some divorced, all of whom wouldn’t seem to have had the trouble with agency that I had associated with the heroine of the film. It didn’t make sense to me that these independent and determined women would have been drawn in by the heavy-handed sensationalism and passivity of Two Women. Yet they described an emotional connection to the film that puzzled me, all the more so because I was sure it was quite different from the projection of utter feminine victimization I had encountered in Chicago among both the US and Iranian exile audience.

My interpretive impasse was only resolved through the course of a long evening conversation among several friends, women and men, who had been in and out of the country for different durations over the past twenty-odd years. We all had slightly different reactions to the film, but as we started comparing those reactions, we also began to realize that we were reacting to the representation of different experiences. My impression, and one shared by several other Iranians in the room, had been that Two Women had provided an almost Orientalist version of an Iranian woman’s feminine oppression and that the very excesses of this representation (the heroine’s polemics and the uniform hostility of all the men around her) had been part of the film’s refusal to engage with the specific (rather than the rhetorical) historical and material conditions of Iranian women’s lives.Footnote ¹⁴ But not everyone agreed. As we talked, it became clear that the Iranian women who had been in the country through the Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War had a very different interpretation: they had seen a different film. For them, Two Women was not an ahistorical melodrama of generalized masculine oppression but an accurate emotional representation of their own experience under the specific historical, cultural, and political conditions of the early years of the Islamic Republic.

The difference in our interpretations of the film depended on a few very small but key details that I hadn’t even noticed. The film’s title refers to the heroine and her best friend, and the different life trajectories that lead to their encounter fifteen years later, one a successful architect in partnership with her loving and supportive husband and the other an oppressed housewife and mother still persecuted by the crazed stalker/suitor from her past. Although this time frame meant that the women would have been university students during the Revolution, the film had seemed to avoid political references: these were just “two women,” certainly not two revolutionaries. But that evening, one of the women who had been in Iran during that period, and who had been the same age as the characters would have been in the film, pointed out the particular references that would have signaled political context for an audience attuned to them. These were the codes of representation (essential for communicating social critique within a context of political censorship) that I hadn’t known how to read and that I realized I had to learn if I wanted to understand the multidimensionality of postrevolutionary Iranian experience, and its essential intermingling of political and social nuance.

The most important of these signals is a brief remark early in the film. In a conversation about homework and tutoring (and the one in which the heroine offers to teach her friend to drive), the two friends also mention, seemingly in passing, rumors that the universities will be closing. It’s a brief discussion, seemingly unimportant, but it locates the friends as students immediately before the period of the Cultural Revolution (1980–1983), the three-year period shortly after the Revolution itself when the universities were closed, and students and faculty were politically evaluated to determine their appropriate Islamic credentials for readmission to the reconstituted university community. The universities were closed to everybody, men and women, but for young women who did not yet have their degrees this was especially problematic. Like the young women in the film, they often had families who had been willing enough to let them go off on their own to study, but who now, with the universities closed and the country in upheaval, wanted their girls to come back home. And what was the alternative? The residence halls were closed, the Iran–Iraq War and the US-led embargo devastated the economy, and the popular ideology of the Revolution reemphasized a traditional domestic role for women. Even young women who had been raised in a seemingly entirely Westernized and modernized middle-class social environment (coeducational schools, mixed parties, the liberationist texts and music of the 1970s) found themselves newly pressured by families having second thoughts about the cultural trends they had encouraged in their children, especially now that the whole nation seemed to be in a backlash against them. A lot of young women got married. What else could they do? But that isn’t all that happened.

My friend described the change in gender attitudes after the Revolution, how it seemed that all the men around you, in the middle of national turmoil and their own personal dislocation, found some stability in the cultural reinscription of a gendered hierarchy. And how women, themselves confused, equally caught up in the Revolution’s dynamic of renewal and rejection, found themselves going along with this. Maybe it was true, after all, that Iranian national identity had become so deeply contradictory because it had abandoned its (Islamic) roots. And maybe it was further true that a return to those roots, even for the less religious, could be accomplished by a return to those family values that secured women’s energies (sexual, intellectual, and practical) firmly in the home. So they got married and had their children. And eventually, as time passed and they got a little older, as the early days of Revolutionary confusion and idealism gave way to ordinary life under a new regime, they felt themselves to be trapped. Individually, each young woman had her personal situation. But collectively, they felt betrayed by a national shift that had cut them off from the future they had expected, and stranded them in a landscape of changed gender relations that proscribed the conditions of their individual fulfillment. It wasn’t just that times were tough, politically and economically. It was the feeling that they had personally paid the price for a national experiment in gender relations, and the experiment hadn’t worked.

For these women, this was the story that Two Women told. The polemics, the passivity: the heroine’s problem wasn’t merely with the men around her; it was that the men around her represented her problem with a whole society. The heroine was trapped, not simply by her marital situation but by her national situation, as experienced during that period. She was passive because there really wasn’t that much she could do individually about changing the national context, and she was released from her situation by actions outside herself, even if she was a part of them. Twenty years later, often with university student daughters of their own, these women weren’t trapped any longer. (Many women and men identified the 1997 election of President Khatami as the defining moment when they knew that things had really changed.) And it was precisely because they had changed, as had the society, that the film functioned as such a powerful cathartic experience.

The young women who had been through the emotional experience portrayed in the film were precisely the independent Iranian women whom I had been unable to connect with the film’s narrative representation. But they made the connection. They recognized their younger selves in the young heroine, and they also recognized the portrayal of a national political experience in personal terms. In particular, they recognized the ending of the film: the heroine’s sudden frantic need to get going and catch up and to learn (and relearn) the skills that allow for independence in the contemporary global world. (This was the significance of the references to knowing how to drive.) This is what one friend said about the film’s meaning for her:

As an allegory of the national experiences of a specific generation of Iranian middle-class urban women, Two Women functions brilliantly. But on first viewing, and even on fairly careful consideration, I had completely missed this aspect.Footnote ¹⁶ I was still applying an interpretive model in which private life can be assumed to function independently of public events. But for the women who had lived through this period, the political was personal. The present openings of political and cultural reform were not only about regaining a separation of the public and the private (about getting the government out of decisions about who could watch satellite television and who would wear a head scarf) but also about recognizing the intersections of personal and political life.

At the same time, my conversations in Iran with Iranian women made me realize that my interpretive ignorance was not at all unique but was in fact recognized by my friends as part of the problem represented by the film itself. The heroine in Two Women gets cut off; her friends don’t know what has been happening to her. Part of her urgency at the end of the film is to catch up with them, with a life lived with others involved in the world. She needs to know about what has been going on, and she needs the people outside her immediate experience to know what has been going on with her. Here is another comment on the film’s function as a representation of that experience:

After these discussions, I understood several things more clearly than I had before. I better understood the film Two Women, or at least many Iranian women’s response to it. I better understood something very important about the intersection between the personal and the political in Iranian women’s lives. And I better understood that the most important thing was the effort at understanding itself; the actual engagement in a dialog about our own and each other’s lives.

For everyone in Iran, the decades years since the Revolution have been a profoundly political construct. Everything has been politicized, sometimes especially when politics seem to be most overtly absent. Throughout these years, the tense push-and-pull between reformers and hard-liners over every aspect of public and private reform has meant that almost every social critique has formal political implications, and attendant risks. Under these conditions, the public presentation of a seemingly strictly personal story may function as a very different narrative to an informed audience. The women I spoke with couldn’t at that time make a critical public analysis of the effects of the Revolution and national ideology on their own available life choices. But they could recognize such an analysis when they found it, even when apparently styled as a marital melodrama.

I still don’t really like the film Two Women, and I still think that Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s The May Lady (1998) is a better feminist analysis of the postrevolutionary cultural pressures shaping Iranian women’s lives. But it was only by going to Iran and talking to women in Iran that I was able to comprehend that the film could also be functioning as an allegorical aesthetic project, and not simply as the Orientalist melodrama I feared. Without my friends’ conversation, I was unable to appreciate the different levels on which the film might be working, and the different levels of experience that had shaped their lives.

Every woman’s life is personal, but it can also be a prism of the national experience. In Iran, this may be particularly true and, in a time of national transformation, particularly hard to grasp. Everything is more complicated than an outsider would first expect, and the codes seem impossible to comprehend. It’s easy to make mistakes; it’s easy to misread the signs. But it’s also not too difficult to have a conversation, to ask questions, and to listen to what people have to say for themselves. It’s not that Iranian women don’t speak up. The problem is the gap in knowledge; the gap in life experience which the heroine of Two Women is in such a hurry to overcome, the gap in shared understanding about which my friends spoke. A gap that can begin to narrow in the course of a conversation, or through the viewing of a film, or the reading of a book.

Analysis through Narrative (Metaphor and Metonymy)

This project grew out of my attempts to make sense of what I saw, what was happening around me when I was in Iran, and what mattered to the people around me. Politics and the public sphere mattered: the elections, the newspapers, and the competitive jockeying of political figures. But the sphere of Iranian formal politics was extremely volatile and extremely fraught. Making a mistake within or about that sphere could lead to imprisonment or worse.Footnote ¹⁸ And one thing I had learned from watching films but also from reading social and political theory is that the realm of personal, private life can also be a window into the structural ramifications of political and social power. The question for me was how to write about it.

For a long time, I struggled to find an academically conventional, scholarly approach to writing about the profound political and social changes I was observing in Iran. I wanted to get across the sense of unexpected dynamism I had myself discovered in postrevolutionary Iranian people and society, while conveying the knowledge I had gained to make sense of the changes I was seeing. Working within the norms of contemporary academic writing, this meant that, intentionally or not, I was trying to be as staid as possible. But it turned out that what most people, especially Iranians, really wanted to hear was the funny story that forms the basis of Chapter 2 and the title of this book: being tied up in Tehran. I told the story almost as often as I was asked. And as I told it more often, I thought about it more, and I realized it taught me quite a bit about Tehran and Iran, but something even more specific about writing. The story was funny, but it also provided a rich basis for interpretation and analysis.

The tied-up anecdote itself was a metaphor, and a point of beginning for the rest of the book I wanted to write. Each chapter of this book begins with a similarly positioned narrative telling; a story of immediate, day-to-day practice that sticks the specificity of personal experience to a fabric of social analysis.Footnote ¹⁹ The stories began as accounts of experiences and observations I wanted to share, and that I recognized sooner or later as metaphors representing larger, more significant, and complex issues I needed to explore. Metaphor functions as a rhetorical logic of poetic representation and substitution: a word or an image or an anecdote that provides a concise expression of a longer explanation. In (Lacanian) psychoanalytic terms, metaphor is linked to repression (vertical stasis) and the symptom: the surface indication of the underlying state of being.Footnote ²⁰ Metaphor provides focus; it is the grip.

The chapters themselves, and the discussions within the chapters, are organized to accommodate their narrative and analytical momentum. Although they intersect in their subject matters and analyses, they are also independent entities that can be read independently and not necessarily in a strictly linear, although nonetheless systemically connected, process. This is the rhetorical logic of metonymy: a lateral linking of one thing to another, a horizontal movement of contingency, relation, and association.Footnote ²¹ In (Lacanian) psychoanalytic terms, metonymy is linked to displacement.Footnote ²² Metonymy enables change and movement toward the discovery of a utopian horizon. Metonymy is freedom.

In combination, metonymy and metaphor construct the narrative. Metonymy is the relational logic between disparate ideas, the analytic momentum of the narrative. Metaphor is the precise selection of word and image that stitches the thoughts together while allowing for the lateral tension and flow. This is indeed a linguistic and analytical metaphor of sewing: the stitch that connects (the vertical hold) and the cloth that flows (the horizontal movement). The stories in this book, often funny but sometimes not, are intended to provide the vertical hold within the horizontal movement of the social analysis. The stories should catch your attention; the analysis should keep and develop it.

The (Larger) Logic of (Everyday) Practice

This book is an analysis of contemporary everyday practices in order to illuminate fundamental issues of social and political power in contemporary Iran. Every chapter is focused on a different practice or associated set of practices that preoccupied me, and every chapter therefore relies on a different subset of the literature of scholarly research that helped me solve a particular puzzle of social and political meaning. Within each chapter, I make use of what seemed the most relevant scholarship; sometimes this makes for an eclectic choice. But a few social and political theorists provide the analytical backbone for this book: Hannah Arendt, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and hovering in the background, but asserting that an absence is not a lack when it can be a multiplicity, Luce Irigaray. Sometimes these theorists and their theories make their way explicitly into the text. More often, they are implicit within the analysis. All have helped me to think about power in unconventional ways and to pay attention to the nuances of power in the most ordinary and everyday interactions and practices.

In order to sidestep the problems of writing about formal politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I have chosen to write about the social politics of a postrevolutionary society. But the line between society and state is always blurred. As I have written elsewhere, the exact beginning and end of a revolution is hard to pinpoint.Footnote ²³ To speak in Arendtian terms, revolution is a process of liberation and foundation. Bringing down a regime is not the same as transforming a state, and the society in which the state is embedded. Do ordinary people think of themselves as subjects or citizens? Do they look to a figurehead as either a savior or villain? Or do they recognize power as located in each other and themselves, with all the difficulties and challenges that constantly entail?

Voting matters, as do political parties and government pronouncements. But especially under conditions of state repression, political transformation may be more evident in the informal sectors of the economy, society, and the state. How have ordinary people changed the way they do things, the way they treat each other and themselves? What do they expect of themselves, and how have social relations of power and intimacy changed between the generations, the genders, between friends and in families, in private and public spaces, and in our own bodies? These are ongoing questions in any society, and especially in one as dynamic as Iran has been since 1979. This book is my effort to address those questions and to share my interest and preoccupations with those who choose to read it.