Bio: Mahsa Shekarloo

Mahsa Shekarloo is a journalist, translator, and co-founder of the website, Badjens, which addresses contemporary women's and gender issues in Iran. She has co-translated two of Shirin Ebadi's books, Women's Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran and The Story of One Woman. She is also a founding member of the Women's Cultural Center, an NGO based in Iran, which aims to expand women's rights and social participation.

Abstract

This paper will analyze how women's public presence within Tehran's context is figured in current anxieties about social and moral displacement and decay. It will evaluate the prescriptions and proscriptions claimed by different groups on women's mobility, accessibility, behavior, speech, and dress. Tehran's public transportation system, which includes both formal and informal vehicles of transport, will serve as the major site of investigation. Social and sexual encounters within the realm of formal (taxis, buses, Metro) and informal (private cars serving as passenger carriers) transportation mirror many of the contradictions and anxieties about gendered and class-based relations. The individual freedom and mobility, sexual opportunity, and loosening controls available in the city are challenging the power divisions imbedded in these relations. At the same time, women are expressing a heightened sense of vulnerability to sexual and physical danger. The dominant discourse, which simultaneously holds women as targets in need of protection and as main instigator and culprit, will be examined, as well as the extent to which women themselves participate in, internalize, and reject this discourse.