From Homeland to Diaspora:Iranian Women Navigating Family and Gendered Expectations

About the Talk: This paper is a qualitative study of women’s gendered negotiations of respectable womanhood through the life course and in the context of precarious legal status and transnational migration. I draw on and extend Denise Kandiyoti’s concept of “patriarchal bargains” to examine changes in gendered negotiations throughout women’s lives and in changing institutional and political contexts. I focus on the patriarchal bargains that women engage in with relation to marriage arrangements, their education and labour market participation as young adults and later in life, migration and return visits to Iran, and the work of securing livelihood and legal status upon migration to Toronto.

About the Speaker: Bahar Hashemi received her PhD in sociology in 2023 from the University of Toronto. She joined the department of sociology at UTSC as an Assistant Professor Teaching Stream (CLTA) in 2023. Her research and teaching specialize in the areas of Introduction to Sociology; Sociology of (Im) migration; Transnationalism; Diaspora Studies; Families; Gender and Feminist Theory; Labour; Citizenship; and Qualitative Methods.