Glocalizing Women’s Empowerment: Feminist Contestation and NGO Activism in Iran

Abstract

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.

Registered NGOs and advocacy for women in Iran

“…We selected five case studies of registered NGOs that have advocated change for women under the Rouhani administration (below, we will discuss further the significance of being a 'registered' versus an 'unregistered' organisation in Iran). Whilst there is a wealth of literature on NGOs operating under the Rafsanjani, Khatami and Ahmadinejad governments (see Kar 2014;Hoodfar and Sadr 2010;Pfau and Rial 2012;Pournik 2013;Rostami-Povey 2004), there is relatively little information presently available on the work of NGOs in Rouhani's Iran (two notable exceptions are Chubin 2020 andRivetti 2020). This paper is a contribution to filling that gap.…”

Embodying Place

“…as a place to channel their politics—once radical and revolutionary, now charity‐based. In Fae Chubin's (2020a; 2020b) ethnographic articles about women's empowerment NGOs in Tehran, she intersectionally identifies how the liberal feminist values among cosmopolitan NGO activists and directors sometimes overlook the economic justice prioritized by their ethnic minority and Afghan youth clients. During my fieldwork, I saw how class tensions arose when NGO staff and volunteers periodically expressed frustrations about youth guardians who held their children home from school to engage in wage labor or help with domestic work.…”

Culture and glocalization: an introduction

“…The popularization of information and communication technologies (ICT) and digitization has greatly amplified such trends (see Harsin, 2014;Waisanen, 2013). Moreover, the relevance of glocalization for the cross-national or transnational dimensions of feminism and mobilization on issues of gender remains largely unexplored (for an exception, see Oh and Jang's chapter in this handbook; also, Chubin, 2020).…”