CSSD Member Amina Tawasil Publishes on the Emancipatory Effects of Marriage and Motherhood on Shi’i Women in Iran

January 8, 2016
CSSD Member Amina Tawasil Publishes on the Emancipatory Effects of Marriage and Motherhood on Shi’i Women in Iran

Amina Tawasil, Visiting Lecturer at the International Studies Institute, University of New Mexico and member of the CSSD working group on Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies, recently published research in the Journal of Women of the Middle East and Islamic World entitled “Towards the Ideal Revolutionary Shi’i Woman: The Howzevi (Seminarian), the Requisites of Marriage and Islamic Education in Iran.”

Tawasil’s ethnographic fieldwork in Iran reveals how some religious conservative howzevi (seminarian) women understand marriage and motherhood as constitutive of idealized womanhood. Tawasil argues that the howzevi’s observances of certain constraints impose both regulatory and emancipatory effects as they facilitate educational, social and political mobility.

Read the full article here.