#MeToo Movement in Iran

The volume includes a prologue, this introduction, ten chapters, and an afterword. Contextualizing the historical framework of Iranian MeToo activism within the larger Iranian feminist movements as well as the historical background within the context of the Middle East, the contributors address how the privileged position of men who have been outed as rapists, helps them to aggregate social, political, sexual, and economic capital through various networking to delegitimize the narratives of the survivors and in fact, to use their testimonies to their benefit. While Iran's #MeToo challenges the political economy of a capitalist society which re-produces systems of oppression such as sexual assault, one way this privileged position is considered as Iran's class-based system within the power hierarchies which allows men from the upper class of society to exploit those from more oppressed social groups. Within this complex web of power and privilege, the question of consent is significant. After discussion of the various confluences of positions of power and privilege in silencing the voices of the survivors to the assaulters’ benefit in accumulating socioeconomic, sexual, and political capital, the volume also covers the intersections of various systems of oppression specifically highlighting marginalized voices such as the experiences of lesbian and the lesbophobe attacks within the online digital world. In these chapters, the contributors highlight the power dynamics within digital feminist networks in Iran with their unique attributes due to political, social, and religious structures. Many of these feminist networks have been selective in their support of the survivors which also speaks to the intersection of class and power leading to the inclusion of some and exclusion of others from the feminist discourses and support. The volume ends with a chapter focusing on cultural productions, specifically cinematic works, through which some filmmakers have challenged normalizations of sexual harassment by offering alternative discourses which have arguably paved the way for #MeTooIran.

At a time when Iranian women have galvanized the world with their audacious protests against the compulsory Islamic dress code, The #MeToo Movement in Iran aptly reminds us of a prior moment when women dared to speak of the many forms of sexual abuse and harassment they have long endured in silence. The contributors offer trenchant analyses that lay bare the Iranian state’s hypocritical claim of protecting women through the dress code only to punish them for the acts of violence against them. Inspired by the global #MeToo Movement, the Iranian movement is shaped by local differences, stemming from the theocratic regime’s hostility to women’s rights as well as the rights of minoritized bodies and longstanding cultural taboos. This book provides invaluable insights into how the digital media amplified the reverberations of the movement across Iranian social and cultural arenas., Inspired by the global #MeToo Movement which has uncovered dark stories of sexual harassment experienced by women and girls across the world, this timely and much anticipated edited volume offers, for the first time, a comprehensive and accessible analysis of sexual assault against women and girls in Iran and its diaspora. Sensitive and nuanced, this book will stand as an essential read for scholars of all disciplines who work on the complex socio-cultural and political mechanisms of gender oppression and sexual harassment as a persistent universal problem and its impact on the private and public lives of women.

Claudia Yaghoobi is a Roshan Institute Associate Professor in Persian Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. She is the author of Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Iranian Literature and Film (2020) and Subjectivity in ‘Attar, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism (2017).