CMES | The Yale Council on Middle East Studies, The Yale Program in Iranian Studies Iran Colloquium presents
Being a Public Woman: Spaces of Possibility, Spaces of Risk in Contemporary Iran
Norma Moruzzi, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies & Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
Friday, February 5, 12:00PM
ISPS Room A002, 77 Prospect St.
Light lunch will be provided
Norma examines issues of gender and public security in post-revolutionary Iran. Although controversies over Iranian women’s public presence are usually treated as functions of Islamic culture and tradition, the debate in Iran is no longer about whether women should be present in public, but about how they should be present. Women moving in and through public space experience a double threat: to their own social and physical well-being, and as a perceived disruption of the well-being of society. Exploring public space and public transportation as sites of gendered possibility and risk, Norma explores the conflicts of being a “public woman” (an old term for a woman in/of the street whose free presence in public placed into question her right to social respect and bodily autonomy; in other words, a whore) in modern, urban Iran.