Employing the method of autoethnography, I narrate my lived experiences as an
Iranian woman to illustrate how women negotiate their survival from sexual
harassment on a daily basis in the streets of Tehran. Grounded in the
theoretical and methodological approach of institutional ethnography, this paper
illustrates how textually mediated social institutions subjugate women’s
everyday experiences of sexual assault, and how women’s silent reactions
to these experiences is both the result of such subjugation and also a strategic
form of resistance. Social interactions encourage women to remain silent about
the harassment through reinforcement of the culture of shame, and this expected
silence encourages women to resist harassment and negotiate their survival not
through words but with their performative reactions. This article argues that
Iranian women’s responses to public sexual harassment should be
considered as both an agentic and a subjugated response.
Through an ethnographic study of a women’s empowerment program in Tehran, and in-depth interviews with its workers, I examine the hegemony of liberal feminist conceptions of empowerment among secular and cosmopolitan middle-class activists and NGO directors. This study demonstrates that activists’ liberal conception of agency inadvertently erased the agency of the marginalized clients and their rights-based advocacy did not equip the subaltern women with a framework of gender justice that would find currency in their communities. While NGO staff and administrators contested the practicality of advocacy for sexual autonomy among marginalized women, the subaltern clients rejected the culturally reductionist accounts of their oppression by prioritizing economic justice. Rather than positing liberal and secular feminist discourses as over-determining, this study reveals that local actors continuously debate and contest globally circulating “women’s rights packages” in accordance with local norms, their standpoint, and lived experiences.
The Palestinian "Great March of Return" in 2018, marked by the Israeli government's brutal attacks on Palestinians who were demonstrating at the Gaza border, nearly coincided with the Trump administration's "Zero Tolerance" policy in which the unauthorized border crossing of Latinx immigrants came under an ever severe attack. This article offers a comparative content analysis of the "border security" discourses of the two settler-colonial states of the United States and Israel by examining American and Israeli government officials' public comments on state violence at borders. We place our study within a settler-colonial framework to provide a historically grounded analysis of the U.S. and Israel's racial ideologies and the colorblind rhetoric of "border security." Through a content analysis of the speeches, interviews, social media posts, and press releases of American and Israeli government officials, we identified a settler-racial ideology shared by the two states comprised of three distinct and overlapping frames: (1) obscuring settler colonialism, (2) vilification of those constructed as non-native, and (3) glorification of the state. By bridging theories of settler colonialism and structural racism, we demonstrate that a settler-racial ideology is central to maintaining the ongoing systems of border violence within settler-colonial states.
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