Description
With the intensification of the US-orchestrated economic sanctions on Iran (loosely since 2012), Iranian officials – especially hardliners including the Supreme Leader himself, have repetitively pushed for developing a “resistance economy” doctrine to build resilience against sanctions. In their analysis of what policy shifts the “resistance economy” contains, most male-stream scholarship has narrowly focused on the “productive” sphere of “economy”, ignoring the increased gendered interventions of the Iranian state in this era in the assumedly “private” sphere of households, family structures and intimate matters of marriage, divorce and women’s reproductive rights. Detailing these gendered policy shifts, this paper argues that reorganisation of social reproduction and production across gendered lines through a wide range of gendered interventions has been at the centre of the Iranian state’s governance response to the various sanction-induced crises resulting in ever greater emphasis on a conservative male breadwinner/female home-maker model of family life. This gendered analysis of “resistance economy”, provides a novel understanding of economic sanctions and their gendered consequences, by locating households, social reproduction, and intimate geopolitics at the centre of the state’s resilience-building efforts against the various geopolitical and economic shocks of sanctions. Additionally, reorganisation of social reproduction and production has often been discussed in the context of countries in the Global North, and as driven by capital (i.e. neo-liberal restructuring and the state’s retreat). This analysis highlights the lesser-discussed role of the state and its interest in social reproduction and intimate geopolitics in an authoritarian MENA context.
