The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran

Firmly situated in the field of legal anthropology, Arzoo Osanloo’s ThePolitics of Women’s Rights in Iran is an ethnographic treatment of women’srights discourse in contemporary Iran. It is concerned with unraveling theassumed paradoxes involved in administering a republican theocracy thatattempts to incorporate both divinely inspired legal injunctions and representativeforms of governance.Whereas many conversations concerning human rights and Islam aredrowned in contention, normativity, and exegetical speculation, Osanloo’scontribution steadily manages to remain above the fray. This is done by placingthe discourse of women’s rights within the cultural context of globalizationand post-colonialism and yet still identifying its local, embodiedpractice within the shifting political dynamics of post-revolutionary Iran. Tothis end, through exploring the lives of upper-middle class women in Tehranand their encounters with the emerging Islamo-republican state, the authorexplores the “conditions [that] have allowed for the discussion of rights tomaterialize in a language that was unacceptable just after the revolution…”(p. 7), while paying close attention to the ways in which contemporary Iranrepresents a vernacular modernity expressed through “a hybrid discoursethat locates a distinctive form of modernity at the juncture of Islamic revivalismand Western political and legal institutions” (p. 8).Her theoretical and methodological approach, which incorporates elementsof post-colonialism and post-modernism, is presented in a shortintroudction. Guiding concepts such as “rights as discursive practice,” “dialogicalsites,” and “subjectivization” thus readily inform her mobilizationand treatment of the data. Thankfully, her concern for methodological precisiondoes not obscure or consume the narrative form through which she putsforth her thesis in the remainder of the text ...