Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online 2014-1
You may smother my voice,but you will hear my silence: An autoethnography on street sexual harassment,the discourse of shame and women’s resistance in Iran
Employing the method of autoethnography, I narrate my lived experiences as an
Iranian woman to illustrate how women negotiate their survival from sexual
harassment on a daily basis in the streets of Tehran. Grounded in the
theoretical and methodological approach of institutional ethnography, this paper
illustrates how textually mediated social institutions subjugate women’s
everyday experiences of sexual assault, and how women’s silent reactions
to these experiences is both the result of such subjugation and also a strategic
form of resistance. Social interactions encourage women to remain silent about
the harassment through reinforcement of the culture of shame, and this expected
silence encourages women to resist harassment and negotiate their survival not
through words but with their performative reactions. This article argues that
Iranian women’s responses to public sexual harassment should be
considered as both an agentic and a subjugated response.
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