Description
Feminist IPE project of engendering economic/financial crisis has powerfully established that crises are also crises for social reproduction. This work, however, has rarely viewed economic crisis through the lens of intimacy. Nonetheless, As discussed by feminist IPE work on intimacy (i.e. Peterson, 2014), certain gendered, sexualised and racialised regulations of intimate/familial/marital/reproductive have historically helped to secure appropriate social reproduction necessary for the survival of the states, economies and households. Given such critical historical linkages, this paper highlights the necessity of asking the question of intimacy in (time of) crisis: In other words, what type of biopolitical interventions into the intimate is warranted by the contemporary neoliberal crises of social reproduction at global and national levels?
This paper addresses this question by examining the impacts of sanction-induced crises on Iran through an intimacy optic. Drawing on situated and embodied methodologies (primarily in-depth interviews with Iranian women collected during my fieldwork) and combining them with a feminist international political economy reading of the state’s policy and discursive shifts in domains of marriage, reproduction, and (gendered) family relations over the last decade, it details various ways in which sanction-induced crises has turned the intimate both as everyday sites of crises as well as an increased site of state’s control and governance. Doing this, it argues that the state’s increased penetration into the intimate has been part of pushing for a new organisation of social reproduction – to which I refer as (re)domestication of social reproduction. This argument also highlights different manifestations and governance of crises of social reproduction in the none-industrialised West.
