Decentering citizenship: Gender, labor, and migrant rights in South Korea

Abstract

According to the website (the address for which is not provided in the book): “We have witnessed significant changes among the Iranian society in the last ten years, which confirms that it is achievable.” Afsaneh Najmabadi, an Iranian scholar of gender and sexuality, also offers history as an opening for hope. “In Persian, for instance, the use of the word jins (meaning kind, species, as a well as grammatical gender) for sex has a very recent origin.” It “seems to have come into Persian from translated books on ‘how to make your marriage happy’ and child pop psychology, and then from the late 1950s with psychology and psychoanalysis becoming popular, this usage became common” (Najmabadi, 2006, p. 13). In other words, the values on gender and sexuality that seem to have hardened into rigid doctrine in Revolutionary Iran may trace their origins to the West. Perhaps at some point in the future, there might be hope for a more Persian point of view.