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Resistance and Encroachment in Everyday Life: A Feminist Epistemological Study of Qajar Era Iranian Women’s Travel Journals
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مقاومت و پیشروی در زندگی روزمره: نگاهی به روزنامههای سفر زنان قاجار با رویکرد معرفتشناسی فمنیستی
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- Author / Creator
- Mohaghegh Neyshabouri, Safaneh
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This dissertation is a study of Iranian women’s everyday resistances in Qajar-era Iran, the period prior to the Constitutional Revolution (1906). Mobilizing feminist epistemology, and specifically feminist standpoint theory, which calls for the uncovering of women’s hidden knowledge, I analyze five personal life narratives of Qajar women writing between 1880 and 1905. My analysis challenges previous narratives about the women of the era.
This research is made possible by the discovery of five travel journals written by four Qajar women, uncovered in private and public collections since 1995 and as recently as 2010, which have received little scholarly attention, to date. Contrary to the commonly accepted historical reports in which the agency of Qajar women was undermined, these personal writings tell a different story. The question at the heart of this investigation is how does the perspective of everyday resistance reveal new knowledge about the agency of Qajar era Iranian women? Building on recent developments in feminist epistemology regarding the importance of everyday resistance and epistemic injustice, this dissertation identifies these elements at work in the Qajar women’s travel writings, shedding light on the relations of power in their lives more generally, and identifying the ways in which these women overtly and covertly exercised agency.
In doing so, I synthesize feminist standpoint theory with the works of feminist theorist Bettina Aptheker on the dailiness of women’s lives, anthropologist James C. Scott’s work on the everyday forms of resistance in the lives of the dispossessed, and sociologist Asef Bayat’s theory of quiet encroachment. Employing discourse analysis methodology, I take and extend these theories to be applicable to the Qajar context: specifically, I extend Bayat’s theory of quiet encroachment to what I call epistemic encroachment as it is mobilized in written form in the life narratives of Qajar women. -
- Graduation date
- Spring 2020
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.