Iranian Women’s Transnational Patriarchal Bargains Across Borders and the Life Course

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 08. Gendered processes in migration

Abstract

This article expands Deniz Kandiyoti’s (1988; 2005) concept of “patriarchal bargains” by theorizing women’s negotiations across the life course and across borders. Based on 40 life history interviews with two cohorts of Muslim middle-class Iranian women, who came of age either during the Pahlavi monarchy (1925–1979) or after the Islamic Revolution (1979) in Iran and later migrated to Canada, the article shows that migration was part of an ongoing gendered negotiation that began long before departure. These negotiations — what I term transnational patriarchal bargains — unfold across multiple scales (family, state, and transnational spaces) and across time, often stalling, accelerating, or shifting direction in response to changing political conditions, intimate life events, and retrospective reinterpretations.

Author

• Bahar Hashemi, University of Toronto