Rocks and Hard Places: Gender, Satire, and Social Reproduction in Pre-Revolutionary Iran

Abstract

This article examines the ways that Iranian women have been situated in the nation-building exercise from the White Revolution of 1963 to the 1979 revolution and period of consolidation of clerical power. Social Reproduction Theory elucidates critical facets of both state control and spaces of counterhegemonic resistance. These spaces include publications like Tawfiq, a political satire magazine published in the Pahlavi era, which is featured in the analysis as a site of political contestation that could be utilized and expanded by other opposition groups. This paper argues that in contrast to the popularly accepted dichotomy between liberalized and regressive gender roles, this arena represented a critical failure on the part of the secular opposition, which enabled the clerical faction to co-opt and take control of narratives in which they cast themselves as protectors of women and other vulnerable groups.

The historiography of social reproduction and reproductive labor

“…Scholarship that delineates social reproduction as a process that entails both the reproduction and transformation of power is not limited, however, to socialist historical contexts. For example, in an article on the history of how gender figured in political cartoons produced in pre‐Revolutionary Iran, Sahar Razavi (2021) astutely notes that the analytics of social reproduction captures “both state control and spaces of counterhegemonic resistance” as women's bodies and social roles formed a locus of contestation by competing political factions over the future of the nation (p. 71). Writing about Atlantic world slavery, Diana Paton (2022) and Jennifer Morgan (2021) show how enslaved women's reproductive labor, while integral to the reproduction of slavery, contained, in Paton's words, “an affective and emotional dimension to it as well, with particularly profound meanings in contexts of racist oppression” (p. 732).…”