Wednesday 10 June 2015

The gender politics of Iran’s nuclear policy

‘Dignity’ has been an indispensible part of discussions in Iran over nuclear talks with world powers. “Iran, with millennia of history, will not be intimidated,” said Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister in late May, as he dismissed any solution that was “less than respectful, less than dignified”.

Honour and dignity are mostly framed in reference to historical events, including the US and British-led overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and the western support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Some conservatives have even compared Iran’s nuclear concessions to world powers with the humiliating 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, through which the country gave up parts of its northern territory to Tsarist Russia.

Often lurking within discussions about Iran’s prestige and international standing are terms carrying deep associations with gender. Potency, firmness and resistance are all perceived as masculine characteristics, hence embraced and affirmed, while weakness, flexibility and softness are all associated with femininity, therefore to be avoided and disowned.

The masculine thus constructed needs to protect the feminine in order to prove itself, and, at the same time, avoid being contaminated with feminine characteristics. Along these lines, one of the key concepts used to assert the inalienability of Iran’s nuclear rights is namous. Promoted mainly by conservatives, namous is a term of Greek origin referring in Iranian popular usage to the female side of emotional or family relationships. It is widely regarded as a significant, even sacred, carrier of honour.

It is the violation or desecration of namous that provokes masculine violence in acts of honour killing. Honour is thought to be preserved by killing the adulterated female and also making attempts to punish the violator.

Framing the Iranian nuclear project in terms of namous helps construct an aura of sanctity and inviolability around it, meaning that any profane, penetrative or possessive treatment of it by outsiders can elicit a radical response.

In a television interview on 18 April, Brigadier General Hossein Salami, deputy head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), stressed that Tehran would respond with vigour to any attempt at visiting its military sites. “I believe that we will not only not allow foreign countries to visit our military centres, but we will not even allow any thought about this issue,” he said, likening such a visit by nuclear inspectors to “occupation of land” and “national humiliation”.

“Anybody who broaches such remarks”, Salami concluded, “we will respond to them with hot lead”.

Closely allied with the concept of namous are two other highly gendered keywords, harim (sanctum) and gheirat (manly moral courage). As projected in the Iranian atomic discourse, military sites are nodes of national power and potency and therefore constitute an integral part of the nation’s harim, which should stay free from alien access and, worse still, inspections.

The same rule applies to the nuclear scientists as “sons” of the motherland. The term harim in Iranian popular culture brings to fore the notion of female privacy, which is perceived to require protection and so warrant guardianship.

In an address to military alumni of the IRGC-affiliated Imam Hossein university in Tehran on 20 May, the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled out agreeing to any permission for foreigners to inspect military sites or to interview Iranian nuclear scientists.

“Now in these negotiations, once again they are raising new issues, such as inspections; we said we will not allow strangers to conduct any sort of inspection of our military centres; they say we ought to come and interview your scientists, that is indeed, interrogate them”, he said. “We will not allow the smallest insult to the harim of our atomic scientists and scientists in any other important and sensitive subject.”

To leave no room for doubt, Khamenei continued: “I will not allow strangers to come here, sit and talk to our scientists, the prominent and dear sons of the Iranian nation who have taken this vast science to this point.”

The resonance of this nationalist-paternalist discourse with conservatives and their constituencies has been shown in the formation of a gathering calling itself “We Won’t Allow” - following the hardline group “The Solicitous” (Delvapasan) - which has organised demonstrations in several Iranian cities including Tehran, Mashhad, and Isfahan.

Such guardianship of the national sanctum, and its protection from insult and alien hands, is usually carried out through demonstrating gheirat: a type of virile moral courage with an occasional religious touch that is intended to guard namous or harim against external adulteration.

Safeguarding honour is widely regarded as proof of gheirat. And those who fail to do so stand accused of pofyouzi (an abstract noun, and swear word in Farsi), the defining characteristic of a man lacking gheirat.

In other words, pofyouz (a subject noun in Farsi) is a man with loose and dishonourable morals, particularly when it comes to the social or sexual life of the female members of his kin. Reformist academics in Iran who have questioned the costs of the nuclear policy have been accused by certain conservatives of pofyouzi.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2015/jun/09/iran-gender-politics-and-nuclear-policy




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