Description
The feminist project of engendering economic/financial crisis has rarely viewed economic crisis through the lens of intimacy. As highlighted by feminist work across various disciplines, certain gendered, sexualised and racialised intimate/familial regulations have historically helped to secure appropriate social reproduction necessary for the survival of the states, economies and households. Given the reliance of our larger (national and global) political economic structures on certain (hetero/homo) normative affective arrangements, this paper aims to explore the relations between the destabilised moments of crisis and normative affective/familial arrangements. Put differently, what can we learn about our larger political economic structures, including crises, if we view them through the lens of intimacy/affective arrangements instead of the more familiar categories of social reproductive labour, private, and personal.
This paper seeks to address this question by looking at the impacts of sanction-induced crises on Iran through the lens of intimacy. Drawing on the life experiences of Iranian women and locating them within the various sanction-induced crises experienced over the last decade, it highlights the multiple ways in which economic crises are shifting the approaches of both the state and women to intimacy. In particular, increasingly non-normative heterosexual relations are developing in the country, partly as a coping strategy against the dire effects of sanctions and partly to resist the state's tightened grip on intimate matters of marriage, divorce, and reproductive bodies. Looking at economic sanctions through the lens of non-normative heterosexual love, it argues, can destabilise, make strange, and queer, our normative state-centric and disembodied understandings of sanctions.
