Publication Date
Spring 2020
Advisor(s) - Committee Chair
Ann K. Ferrell (Director), Kate Parker Horigan, and Margaret Ann Mills
Degree Program
Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology
Degree Type
Master of Arts
Abstract
In this thesis, I seek to understand different resistance strategies that Iranian women use in their everyday lives, especially in countering the patriarchal rules of dress in Iran and responding to issues of dress and identity in the United States. My research included interviews, a form of reciprocal ethnography, and participant observation in Tehran, Iran; Bowling Green, Kentucky; Nashville, Tennessee; and New York City. In some places, I also mix an autobiographic method with ethnography. The historical periods before and after the 1979 Islamic Revelation in Iran and its effects on Iranian women’s ways of dress are briefly examined in this study to give contextual information to the readers.
I address the main clothes of Iranian women in the form of hijab, referring to shawls and manteaux, to examine the meanings and messages that Iranian women can create and transform with these types of hijabs. Inspired primarily by “Strategies of Coding in Women’s Cultures” by Joan Radner and Susan Lanser, I discover the coded resistance strategies of “indirection,” “juxtaposition,” and “appropriation” in the culture of Iranian women’s dress. Drawing on Amy Shuman’s Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy, I show non-coded resistance strategies in personal experience narratives of Iranian women in which they challenge the imposed rules of dress facing Iranian hijab police. In the last section of this thesis, using a narrative told by an Iranian woman, I demonstrate how stigmatization makes counter narratives untellable in order to avoid representing different modes of culture in the diaspora.
Disciplines
Fashion Design | Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication | Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Recommended Citation
Abedinezhadmehrabadi, Zahra, "“I Choose the Styles Which are both Traditional and Artistic”: Iranian Women’s Ways of Dress" (2020). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 3182.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/3182
Included in
Fashion Design Commons, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons