Golbarg Bashi

The title of my thesis, which I have written under the supervision of Professor Robert M Gleave and defended (pending graduation this year), is "Rethinking Human Rights in Iran: A Feminist Critique".

This study is a feminist critique of the human rights discourse, with particular reference to modern Iran. My objective is to investigate the ways in which the discourse of human rights might be salvaged from both its nativist opponents and its universalist proponents, and then subject the result to a postcolonial feminist critique. The defenders of human rights have appealed to the universal validity of the idea, while its opponents have argued that it is specific to "Western culture" and its application to Islamic societies is ideological imperialism. My aim in this thesis is to break through this misleading binary and explore the existing ideological structures and processes that place the notion of human rights as contradictory to the norms and practices of an Islamic Republic. My objective is to open up the domain of discussion by (1) exploring the endemic issues and problems within the global human rights discourse proper; and (2) expanding that discussion into a wider spectrum of contemporary Iranian history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My principal proposal here is that we often apply a categorical, uncritical and quite abstract notion of "human rights" to an Iranian context that has itself already been radically Islamicised. While bringing out some of the internal and innate contradictions in the human rights discourse, I also wish to posit that critical analysis next to a more inclusive reading of Iranian political culture, one that does not limit it to an exclusively Islamist (or so-called "secular" for that matter) discourse and recognises the multifaceted aspects of its modern history. The result is the suggestion that the notion of "human" in the human rights discourse must perforce be predicated on the formation of a normative and moral agency in the immediate context of modern (Iranian) history. The rights of this historical "human" can no longer be denied on exclusively nativist (Islamist) grounds, or else presumed granted on exclusively "secular" European Enlightenment premises. The centrality of women's rights in these struggles is the acid test of my argument in this thesis.

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Golbarg Bashi گلبرگ باشى

Doctoral Thesis: "Rethinking Human Rights in Iran: A Feminist Critique"