Performative agency: A realization of an objective clash of “social justice” discourses or a requiem for a subjective silence

Abstract

Based on the author’s original fieldwork, this chapter seeks to show how the antagonistic relations between the discourse of Islamic justice and women’s rights discourse, in public and private spaces, leads-inadvertently-to the construction of a “performative agency” among Iranian women. The antagonistic unfolding of these two contradictory discourses in the public life of Tehrani women and their socialization processes culminates in two different ideal-typical gender identities whose perpetual challenge in women’s everyday life leads to the “crisis of subjectivity” in women’s consciousness. This chapter shows how this complicated process paves the way for emerging a fluid and “performative agency” among Iranian women and highlights the need for constructing a new epistemology for studying gender justice in Iran.