You may smother my voice, but you will hear my silence: An autoethnography on street sexual harassment, the discourse of shame and women’s resistance in Iran

Abstract

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.

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