A decolonial feminist inquiry into women’s agency in the urban landscape in 19th-century Iran

Abstract

ABSTRACT Proposing a socio-historical and decolonial analytical lens, I challenge the current dominant discourses surrounding Iranian women’s agency in emerging public spaces in the late 19th century. I scrutinise the urban landscape in late 19th-century Iran, drawing from a variety of archival data, such as first-hand memoirs, travelogues, and official reports, to situate Iranian women in a broader sociohistorical context and present a nuanced understanding of their presence in emerging public spaces. To do so, I compare texts written by the non-locals with those written by local observers with a specific focus on their characterisation of women and their presence and agency in the newly emerging public spaces during this time. Having used grounded theory methods to carry out the initial examining and coding of the data, I investigate the degree to which the images portrayed by the local and non-local texts take into account the material circumstances of women. I deconstruct the dominant knowledge about Iranian women’s portrayal and reconstruct a layered sociohistorical interpretation of the findings, thereby proposing an alternative decolonial narrative of women’s agency in public spaces in 19th-century Iran. I contend that the prevalent historical portrayal of women’s agency, particularly in public spaces, is markedly shaped by one of the narratives of the late 19th century, i.e. that of the non-local Western observers. Building on a comparative analysis, I argue that to produce alternative decolonial place-based feminist knowledge, it is imperative to re-engage with domestic texts. By revisiting these sources, feminist scholars can question and deconstruct the dominant knowledge on women’s presence in urban landscapes and reconstruct a more accurate and diversified feminist narrative that acknowledges women’s dynamic interplay with the local and global forces which in itself is a decolonial feminist practice.