After two highly dense and thought-provoking chapters from Saba Mahmood, I found myself scrolling through the “Rich Kids of Tehran” Instagram page and the UN Women website. Let me start with the latter.
According to their own definition, “UN Women is the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women”. They have regional chapters all around the world, including Cairo. I don’t feel qualified enough to comment on the specifics of the work they do, but I want to stop and think about “empowerment” for a while, a word that is all over UN’s website and frequently repeated in other Western feminist discourse.
Here is a definition (literally the first image when one searches for it):
(wow!)
I want to think about this seemingly universal goal of empowerment related to two of the women Mahmood writes about, Sana and Abir. Sana’s belief in self-esteem and how it can form through making decisions according to who you really are, what you really want fits well within what empowerment aims to do. When it comes to Abir’s case, things are not that simple (for the already “modernized” brain). From a Western perspective, by becoming pious, Abir gives up many choices and freedom. Yet as Mahmood points out, it is her commitment to Islamic norms (not a break from them) that makes her “empowered” towards her husband.
Furthermore, Mahmood explains how women in piety don’t necessarily take actions according to their natural feelings but an opposite relationship is present where feelings form according to actions. This way of thinking is very unfamiliar to Western feminist standards as it can easily be seen in such a definition of empowerment.
I am confused, angry, and a bit tired after realizing even a phrase like “promoting gender equality” has so many presumptions and history behind it. Ah.
Moving to the rich kids of Tehran, it is basically an Instagram page that has pictures of a lot of, well, “rich kids” (smiling attractive young people in luxury apparel), expensive cars, trips abroad—and there are also the occasional posts of people making art and a sign reading “give peace a chance” or “nice day for a revolution”.
You probably got the idea, still:
I think it is a really striking example of Mahmood’s analysis regarding how “resistance” can mean reinscribing to alternative forms of power. It is possible to view what this account is doing as “resisting” the norms of the Iranian society, mainly the Islamic principle of modesty that was thoroughly discussed in the reading. What they think they are doing is aligned with this, as it can be understood from their bio: “Stuff ‘They’ Don't Want You To See About Iran”. The “stuff” apparently is the Western neoliberal ideal of a desirable life that exists for an elite portion of Iranians. What seems to be romanticized and presented to be rebellious freedom is thus capitalist consumerism (mixed with bits of neoliberalism), which is arguably one of the largest forms of power today. Though this is a pretty obnoxious example, it is not the only place where “resistance” and the status of economic strength go hand in hand.
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