Full Description
With this book, Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor offer the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. Foregrounding the work of Armenian women's organizations, the authors trace minoritarian politics and the shifting relationships among doubly minoritized Armenian female subjects, Iran's central nodes of power, and the Irano-Armenian patriarchal institutions of church and political parties.
Engaging broader considerations around modernization, nationalism, and feminism, this book makes a conceptually rich contribution to how we think about the history of women and minoritized peoples. Berberian and Grigor read archival, textual, visual, and oral history sources together and against one another to challenge conventional notions of "the archive" and transform silences and absences into audible and visual presences. Understanding minoritarian politics as formulated by women through their various forms of public and intellectual activisms, this book provides a groundbreaking intervention in Iran's history of modernization, Armenian diasporic history, and Iranian and Armenian feminist historiography.
Contents
Introduction: Min(d)ing the Gap
I. From Photo-Studio Sitters to Organizational Leaders, 1860-1899
1. Ethnographic Subjects and Advocates of Education
2. Transimperial Connections and Disciplinary Power
II. Volunteerism and Revolutionary Benevolence, 1892-1925
3. Volunteerist Ethos and Performance of Solidarity
4. Radical Politics of Charity and Progress
III. The Satirized and Contested New Woman, 1925-1958
5. Charity's Triumph and Patriarchal Reckoning
6. The New Armenian Woman in Action and in Print
IV. Indigenous Feminism and State-Minority Engagements, 1960-1977
7. The Golden Age of Feminism
8. Nation-Community and State-Minority Bonds
Conclusion: Vision Interrupted
