Iranian women

A controversial and comprehensive debate that has resulted in numerous discursive clashes in Iran pertains to the presence of women at stadiums during male soccer matches. Different discourse systems have expressed their own contradictory and opposite stances in terms of whether Iranian women have the right to attend such events inside or outside the stadium, ranging from different notions of ritual pollution and moral threats to gender equality and women rights in public spheres and spaces. When the debate is considered more in depth, a question arises about the female representation of national identity in Iran: What is the status and role of the female body in symbolic demonstration of the national body of Iranian society as a kind of social body? It seems that there is a discursive debate about the symbolic representation of female body in public sphere in Iran. To provide further insight into this question, ethnographic methods, participant observations and different models of interviews (focus and nominal interviews) were employed in the fields and cultural areas under study. The purpose of this article is to examine the systems of discourses about the allowance or prohibition of the presence of women at soccer stadiums and the cultural foundations and backgrounds that have given shape to these discourses over recent decades.

This study investigated cross-cultural differences in the privacy regulation and perception of crowding among two Iranian sub-cultures (Kurdish and Northern women).The primary purpose of this study was to exامینe whether Northern and Kurdish women differed in their desired and achieved levels of privacy in parks. The second purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between the desired and the achieved levels of privacy and the experience of crowding. The final purpose was to describe the cultural differences in the experience of crowding between Northern and Kurdish women. The research methodology was designed on interview and questionnaire. A random size of 600 Kurdish and Northern women was selected in Sanandaj and Rasht cities. Moreover, to exامینe the survey Chi-Square Test, Independent Sample Test and Analysis of variance were conducted. The results show that Kurdish women desired more privacy in public spaces than Northern women. Regardless of culture, women’s desired and achieved privacy levels have associations with the level of perceived crowding in public spaces. These findings assist environmental designers to present strategies for achieving privacy in relation to Iranian sub-cultures.

At the beginning of the Victorian Era (1837-1901), although British women’s activities were limited to housekeeping, their restriction in social activities and job choices, the increase in their population, were among the issues that led to the formation of new perspectives on women and their possibility of working outside the home. Meanwhile with the expansion of missionary activity in British colonies, Victorian women gained the opportunity to participate in missionary works beyond their homes. A significant number of them were attached with the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and came to Iran. They faced two challenges for proving their ability in creating a “new self and identity” versus “others”: 1) in Victorian society as a social identity equal to men, 2) in Qajar society for introducing “themselves” as a preacher of “new social identity” to Iranian women. Focusing on the conceptual framework related to the issue of “self, other and identity”, reviewing the surviving reports and documents, this article examines the causes and manner of the process that led to the formation of the “new identity” of these missionary women and their demarcation between “themselves” and the “other”, i.e. , patriarchal structure of the Victorian society and the CMS. It also reviews the feedback from their interactions with Iranian women as “other” in shaping their “new self and identity”. The achievements of this article show that the liberal and feminist actions of missionary women in creating a “new self and identity” in their homeland led to an open competition with missionary men in patriarchal structure of the CMS. Furthermore, following the interaction of the CMS women with different strata of Qajar women, their “missionary identity” faded and “their humanitarian self and identity” aspects replaced.