Reading as Practice: The Howzevi (Seminarian) Women in Iran and Clair de Lune

Abstract

The Iranian howzevi (seminarian) have been key to the Islamic regime’s development. This paper takes as its critical focus the branding of the howzevi as the unenlightened for their support of the regime. I take de Certeau’s reading as poaching to look at how life scripts or ideologies failed to work through women’s bodies. Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork, I describe how they unsettled ideologies in their reading of de Maupassant’s “Clair de Lune.”