Fataneh Farahani - Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora

This book is an important addition to the literature on gender and migration providing a much needed exploration of sexuality in the diaspora. Using a nuanced intersectional approach, the book skilfully explores how Iranian women in Sweden negotiate and perform their sexuality under the constraints and contradictions they face. Through addressing issues of displacement, marginalisation, racism and sexism as well as patriarchal forms of control, it explores amongst other issues, love and marriage, veiling and unveiling practices, sexual experiences, and demands for sexual purity. The book offers a much needed exploration of how women are embedded within contradictory sets of social relations around sexuality and gender in diasporic relations. This book is highly recommended as a central contribution to the area.

Floya Anthias, Professor of Sociology, University of East London, UK; Professor of Sociology and Social Justice (Emeritus), Roehampton University, UK; Visiting Professor, City University, UK

This is an informative and passionately argued study of how womens self-reflection in diasporic space, of sex and sexuality, veil, virginity, love and marriage, challenge past/present and home/foreign dichotomies. Farahanis analysis of sex, a vehemently protected taboo in Iranian/Muslim culture and how it is unravelled in the process of displacement and migration is bold, perceptive, and sensible.

Haideh Moghissi, Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar, Equity Studies, York University, Canada

This is a profound and ground-breaking book and in my opinion, the single best treatment of diasporic sexuality through an analysis of the narratives of first generation Iranian immigrant women living in Sweden. The provocative stories of what constitutes a desirable (hetero) sexual feminine subject(s) in Iranian diasporic social settings, together with thoughtfully articulated analysis using Foucauldian discursive genealogy, illustrates how theoretical knowledge and narrations of socio-culturally constructed sexuality can be shared through meaningful and respectful scholarship. This work could not be more timely. It is one of the first to map out how Iranian women construct their multiple hybrid identities in their daily diasporic experiences. Each chapter shows how these identities are raced, gendered, and transformed within processes of inclusion and exclusion in Swedish society. The book makes a compelling case for the contemporary relevance of studies on diaspora by transporting us from western understandings of gender and sexuality to narrations of identity and sexuality across regional, national, and global spheres. It brings a rich diasporic sensibility to the study of culture and with the incisive contextual and empirical detail, creates promise, hope and inspiration to women all over the world.

Loshini Naidoo, Associate Professor, Centre for Educational Research, Western Sydney University, Australia

To what extent do women accept, adjust, and challenge the intersecting and shifting relations of cultural, political and religious discourses that organise their (sexual) lives?

Seeking to expand the focus on changing gender roles and construction of diasporic femininities and sexualities in migration studies, Farahani presents an original analysis of first generation Iranian immigrant women in Sweden. Certainly, highlighting the hybrid experiences of Swedish Iranians, Farahani explores the tensions that develop between the process of (self)disciplining womens bodies and the coping tactics that women employ. Subsequently, Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora demonstrates how migratory experiences impact sexuality and, conversely, how sexuality is constitutive of migratory processes.

A timely book, rich with empirical and theoretical insights on the subject of gender, diaspora, and sexuality, which will appeal to scholars and undergraduate and postgraduate students of gender studies, anthropology, sociology, sexuality studies, diaspora, postcolonial, and Middle Eastern studies.

Fataneh Farahani is an Associate Professor in Ethnology at Stockholm University, Sweden.

www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Feminist-Studies-and-Intersectionality/book-series/RAIFSAI

Core editorial group: Dr. Kathy Davis (Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht, The Netherlands), Professor Jeff Hearn (managing editor; rebro University, Sweden; Hanken School of Economics, Finland; University of Hudders-field, UK), Professor Anna G. Jnasdttir (rebro University, Sweden), Professor Nina Lykke (managing editor; Linkping University, Sweden), Professor Elbieta H. Oleksy (University of d, Poland), Dr. Andrea Pet (Central European University, Hungary), Professor Ann Phoenix (Institute of Education, University of London, UK), Professor Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Syracuse University, USA).

Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality is committed to the development of new feminist and profeminist perspectives on changing gender relations, with special attention to:

21 Visualizing Difference

Performative Audiencing in the Intersectional Classroom

Elbieta Oleksy

22 Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora

Fataneh Farahani

I am from there. I am from here.
I am not there and I am not here.
I have two names, which meet and part,
and I have two languages.
I forget which of them I dream in.

Mahmoud Darwish

When the earth was flat
You were wary of travel

Now your fear is circular.

That you will find nowhere
but home.

Priscila Uppal