2022-23 VOICES IN MIDDLE EAST STUDIES LECTURE SERIES: Featuring Groundbreaking Scholarship in the Field of Middle East Studies

The Middle East Center presents Social Change Through Presence: White Marriage in Iran on February 13, 2023, a talk by Maral Sahebjame(graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Near and Middle Eastern Studies PhD program and a graduate fellow in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington).

In 2014, a Tehran-based women’s magazine published a report on “white marriage” (local term for cohabitation) and was temporarily banned for its alleged promotion of white marriage as the office of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei condemned it for being shameful and contradictory to Islamic values. Since then, academics across the country have held town halls, clerics have made official comments, and health officials have expressed their concerns for the rise in white marriages. As new generations of Iranians re-articulate their desires and expectations in intimate partner relationships, they force state and legal actors to rethink contemporary forms of marriage and re-examine the legal code and system. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork in Iran, this talk examines white marriage through the lens of academics, psychologists, clerical actors, legal actors, and those who are engaged in white marriages. In so doing, it finds that through their everyday practices and their “power of presence,” those engaged in white marriages rewrite gender and marriage norms while participating in a social non-movement that effects social change.

Maral Sahebjame is a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Near and Middle Eastern Studies PhD program and a graduate fellow in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington. Her research focus and interests include gender in the Middle East and Muslim-majority societies, ethnography, social movements, and state, law, and society relations in contemporary Iran. Her dissertation title is: “Marriage across the Color Spectrum: Making Commitment Palatable in Iran.”

Sponsored by the Middle East Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Contact: mecuw@uw.edu.

The Middle East Center presents States of Power: Gender & Protests in Iran on November 28, 2022, a panel discussion with Nazanin Shahrokni (London School of Economics) and Peyman Safari (College of William & Mary), moderated by Arzoo Osanloo (University of Washington).

“A Feminist Revolution?” Rethinking Protests through a Feminist Lens – Nazanin Shahrokni 

Nazanin Shahrokni is a sociologist and an assistant professor of gender and globalization at the London School of Economics, where she directs the MSc program for Gender and Gender Research. Her scholarly work is located at the intersection of gender and globalization, feminist geography, and ethnographies of the state in Iran, the Middle East and beyond. Nazanin is the author of the award-winning book Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (UC Press 2020). She also serves on the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association.

Labor & State in Iran: From the 1979 Revolution to the 2022 Protests – Peyman Jafari 

Peyman Jafari is Assistant Professor of History and International Relations at the College of William and Mary. His research focuses on the social history of revolutions and the role of the labor movement in contemporary Iran, and the relationship between empires, labor, and ecology in the global history of oil. He is currently writing a monograph titled Oil and Labor in the Iranian Revolution: A Social History of Uneven and Combined Development.

Sponsored by the Middle East Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Contact: mecuw@uw.edu.