Joyous Iran: Performing Politics, Mediating Authenticity
My second single-authored book project examines the centrality of joyful affects and women’s bodily autonomy in socialities and performances of “joyful publics” in the socio-political context of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a state that harnesses Shia narratives of sacrifice and mourning for its political ideology. In the course of Iran’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, the world witnessed street gatherings of hundreds of Iranian women who held hands, danced around bonfires, and threw their headscarves to the flames in great dramatic gestures. Although these street scenes appeared astounding, they carried affective and embodied resonances to everyday acts “practiced” both in private and public for many years. Drawing on Asef Bayat’s notion of “quiet encroachment” and Michel de Certeau’s “everyday practices,” I argue that through continuing ordinary life practices prevalent in Iranian culture, such as the presence of music and dance in social gatherings, Iranians have maintained an affective sociality and an embodied ethics that by extension afford political agency. Cautious not to inscribe agentive resistance into all daily acts, I argue that although joyful practices have not (necessarily) been maintained for political purposes, they have afforded a discursive space that by now “reads” political. This is especially evident in social media circulations of such affects and adjacent commentaries, which posit these scenes as representing “authentic” Persian culture vs. state-imposed Islamic culture. My book examines the various publics and media spaces that Iranians have cultivated and harnessed in post-revolutionary Iran vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic. At the core, these liberatory practices continue to create narratives that “other” the restrictive state as not “truly Iranian,” a narrative that has been corroborated by hostile state actors such as the United States and Israel.
