| Summary: | This thesis addresses questions and dynamics of gender and power in Iran, after
the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979. My research objective is to uncover the normative
assumptions about heterosexual masculinity and femininity that have been formulated,
shaped, and reinforced through the re-application and reinterpretation of hegemonic
religious edicts. Specifically, I will argue that, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the
regulation of femininity and female sexuality in public spaces has been attempted by the
ruling Iranian religio-patriarchal theocracy through the construction of women's bodies
both as socio-sexual risk and as at risk within the parameters of public spaces. I suggest
that they have done so because women represent risk that potentially threatens not only
the ruling theocracy's hegemony, but the very fabric of society. Foucauldian theories of
the repressive hypothesis and the surveillance system are used to explore not only how
the veil continues to be used in Iran as an instrument of control in the formation of female
compliance but, conversely, how many women in Islam have used the veil to gain
varying degrees of public mobility and freedom under strict fundament-Islamic scopic
regimes.
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