Routledge Affective Experiences of Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Spatiality, Religion, and Body

This book focuses on the affective experiences of women in contemporary Iran, exploring how they feel and inhabit urban space in a post-revolutionary society. It acknowledges the presence and influence of religion in everyday life when considering how places are experienced and remembered. Drawing on the work of Hartmut Rosa, the book conceptualizes the body as a ‘resonant medium’ – one that is socially constructed and serves as a reservoir of memory and affective experiences from the past that can be accessed via the senses. The author analyses the narratives of Iranian women alongside her own lived experience, employing fieldwork conversations and autoethnography to examine the emotional, sensory and imaginative connections to specific places in the city of Isfahan. The study highlights the role of multisensory engagement in shaping memory and covers visual, auditory, tactile, and gustatory dimensions. The chapters move across topics such as mourning and martyrdom, the call to prayer and ritual singing, wearing a veil, and spatial regulation. Addressing themes including belonging, exclusion, loss and absence, the book offers insight into the connection between the self and the world. It will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, sociology, religion, gender studies and Middle East studies.