Women Creating New Spaces: Reconfiguring Gender Segregation in Iran

• Author / Creator

  Torabi, Samira

• This thesis studies two new gender-segregated places in Iran: women-only parks and women-only metro train cars. There are two dominant and opposing popular narratives of gender segregation in Iran. For conservative Iranian women, gender segregation is central to upholding Islamic values and has offered women access to a “safe” public sphere in certain contexts as an alternative to women’s seclusion. More liberal Iranian women, however, see gender segregation as a discriminatory practice that authorities use to subjugate and control women. Liberals tend to describe it in purely negative terms as a sign of an oppressive and restrictive patriarchal order.
  Moving beyond these dichotomous understandings, my research mainly focuses on women as actors in gender-segregated spaces enabling them to move beyond the ideologies that have helped establish these segregated spaces and also to make their own spaces with new sets of rules and new ways to relate to their surroundings. In my two-month ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Zanjan and Tehran, in Iran, I conducted 42 semi-structured open-ended interviews with women who attended women-only park in Zanjan and women peddlers in Tehran metro trains. I have focused on familiarizing myself with the new realties, new categories of spaces, and new categories of being a woman, independently of these practices’ and realizations’ implications for political/feminist objectives.
  This project has aimed to complicate the analysis regarding Iranian women’s own understanding and motivations in their use of these spaces. This thesis shows how women, each with a unique lived experience and different sets of struggles and hopes, make use of these places and how, in doing so, they enhance their meaningful connections to the larger world, material or immaterial, physical or metaphysical.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Gender Segregation
  • Iran
  • Women-Only Spaces

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-kmqk-yp17

• License

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