Associate Professor, Gender and Sexuality Studies
School of Humanities

Iranian feminism; human rights; transnational feminisms; gender and social movements in the Middle East and Muslim world; Islam; women of color feminisms

Hellman Fellow, 2018-2019

My interdisciplinary research agenda has developed through three different, often overlapping, trajectories. The first is organized around concerns of gender and feminisms in Iran and the diaspora, social movements in the Middle East, Islam, human rights, and transnational feminist networks. The second pursues questions of gender, Islam, Islamophobia, and intersectional and decolonial feminist epistemologies and political practices. I explore activist strategies, political cultures, and discursive interventions of feminists as they confront a number of local and transnational conditions, including legal discrimination, state authoritarianism, imperialism, and neocolonialism. I have advanced this research agenda through various projects, most notably in my first book, which I finished with the support of a competitive Hellman Fellowship (2018-2019). A third research trajectory takes up questions of immigration, memory, and national belonging through local foodways.

My book, Axis of Hope: Iranian Women's Rights Activism across Borders, locates Iranian women’s rights activism within the long-standing tension between Iran and the United States, intensified in the post-9/11 period by the Global War on Terror, and the ongoing demonization, isolation, and economic strangling of Iran through decades of sanctions. In the course of building local and transnational projects, and by creating and sustaining networks along axes of feminist solidarity, friendship, love, and shared community and commitment, Iranian women’s rights activists have cultivated ways of thinking of and being with each other that rupture the relentless difference-making and violence of coloniality. The activists profiled in my book bring into sharp relief the importance of theorizing decoloniality from the lives, ideas, and practices of activists who continue to build feminist projects within the complex geopolitical processes that delimit them. They present an alternative to the hegemonic framings of Islam and women’s rights as mutually exclusive and irreconcilable frameworks and challenge the militarized and patriarchal nationalisms of both Iran and the United States. Crucial in countering both the modes of despair and cynicism about Iran as well as the dangerous interventions by Western powers “on behalf” of Iranians, the narratives and practices of Iranian women’s rights activists are particularly germane in these precarious times, marked by war, isolation, sanctions, and anti-Iranian and anti-Muslim sentiment as well as by the authoritarianism, militarism, and patriarchal nationalisms that have come to define more and more parts of the globe.

2024. “Life-Affirming Endurance: Iran’s Long Feminist Struggle,” American Historical Review (forthcoming).

2024. "Toward a New Particular Universal," In Media Res, November 21, 2024.
https://mediacommons.org/imr/content/toward-new-particular-universal

2024. ”Woman, Life, Freedom: Iran’s Feminist Uprising in Historical and Transnational Perspective,” in Research Handbook on Feminist Political Thought. Edited by Mary Caputi and Patricia Moynagh. Northampton: Edward Elger Publishing, 2024.

2023. “What Hungers Call Us Home? Engaging Autotheory Through Food,” with Azza Basarudin, Tina Beyene, Elora Chowdhury, Sharmila Lodhia, and Khanum Shaikh, Feminist Studies, Volume 49, Numbers 2-3.

2023. “Queering ‘A League of Their Own.’” Against the Current, No. 222, January/February.

2022. “Reflections on ‘In Her Name: Women Rising, State Violence, and the Future of Iran.’” Against the Current, No. 221, November/December.

2022. “Woman, Life, Freedom: A Feminist Movement Reimagines the World,” Security in Context, October.

2021. “Standing with Afghan Women.” Sectors: Newsletter of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Development Section.

2021. “Introduction.” The Scholar & Feminist Online: Transnational Feminisms: Contexts, Topics, Forms. Attiya Ahmad and Catherine Sameh. Issue 17.1.

2021. “Digital Engagement in Transnational Feminisms.” The Scholar & Feminist Online: Transnational Feminisms: Contexts, Topics, Forms, Issue 17.1.

2021. "Countering Epistemologies of Islamophobia: Critical Feminist Pedagogies," with Azza Basarudin, Sherine Hafez, and Khanum Shaikh, The Scholar & Feminist Online: Transnational Feminisms: Contexts, Topics, Forms, Issue 17.1.

2021. Edited Journal Issue, with Attiya Ahmad. The Scholar & Feminist Online: Transnational Feminisms: Contexts, Topics, Forms, Issue 17.1.

2019. Axis of Hope: Iranian Women's Rights Activism across Borders. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

2017. “Political-Social Movements: Feminist: Iran,” in Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, General Editor Suad Joseph.

2017. "Solidarity" in Gender: Love. Edited by Jennifer C. Nash. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA. 181-196.

2014. Edited Journal Issue, with Janet R. Jakobsen. The Scholar & Feminist Online: Activism and the Academy, Issue 12.1-12.2, Fall 2013/Spring 2014.

2014. “Feminisms in the World,” The Scholar & Feminist Online: Activism and the Academy, Issue 12.1-12.2, Fall 2013/Spring 2014.

2014. “From Tehran to Los Angeles to Tehran: Transnational Solidarity Politics in the One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law,” Women's Studies Quarterly Special Issue on Solidarity, 42.3-4: 162-184.

2011. Desiring Change, with Amber Hollibaugh and Janet Jakobsen. Barnard Center for Research on Women. Research report. Access a pdf of the report here: http://bcrw.barnard.edu/publications/desiring-change/

2010. “Discourses of Equality, Rights and Islam in the One Million Signatures Campaign in Iran,” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12.3: 444-463.

2002. “Building Feminist Education Alliances in an Urban Community,” with Melissa Kesler Gilbert in Teaching Feminist Activism: Strategies From the Field. Nancy Naples and Karen Bojar, editors. New York: Routledge. 185-206.

2009-2010 Scholar-Teacher Appointee, Rutgers-Newark

2009 Joseph Fichter Research Grant, Association for the Sociology of Religion

2008-2009 Rutgers University Institute for Research on Women Fellowship

2006-2007 Rutgers University Graduate School Fellowship

2003-2004 Rutgers University Graduate School Fellowship

2016-2017 UCI Illuminations: Pedagogies, Methodologies and Practices of Feminist Humor

2017-2018 UCHRI Multi-Campus Faculty Working Group: “Countering Epistemologies of Islamophobia: Critical Feminist Pedagogies”

Middle Eastern Women's Studies Association

Middle Eastern Studies Association

National Women's Studies Association

Association for the Sociology of Religion

Cultural Studies Association

American Studies Association

Associate Director
Barnard Center for Research on Women 2010—2014

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6091

Last updated
12/02/2024