Subtle Calibrations: Whiteness as Symbolic Capital, Cultural Power, and Social Currency for Iranian Armenian Women
Presenter(s)
Claudia Yaghoobi
Date
September 15, 2025
About the Talk: In this talk, I will examine how Iranian Armenian women in the United States navigate whiteness as a strategic and affective resource. Situated at the intersection of Middle Eastern and Caucasian geographies, Armenian Christian heritage, and histories of genocide, revolution, war, displacement, and immigration, these women defy simple racial categorization. Drawing on in-depth oral history interviews with 20 women, the talk explores how whiteness functions for them as symbolic capital, granting partial access to social safety, professional mobility, and respectability, while simultaneously demanding silence, conformity, or erasure of cultural specificity. Their stories reveal a racial hinge identity: able to pass, blend, or remain ambiguous depending on context, yet never fully anchored within whiteness nor wholly embraced as nonwhite. Unlike groups marked by visible racial difference, Iranian Armenian women often engage in subtle calibrations rather than overt declarations of identity, negotiating belonging through accent management, neighborhood choices, professional comportment, and relational labor. Gender further shapes these negotiations, as white womanhood operates as both a protective shield and a site of constraint, intertwined with norms of respectability, beauty, and domesticity. I argue that whiteness for Iranian Armenian women is neither simply privilege nor exclusion but a shifting assemblage of cultural power, social currency, and symbolic capital strategically deployed yet never fully secure.
About the Speaker: Claudia Yaghoobi is a Roshan Distinguished professor of Persian Studies and serves as the director of the Center for the Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Yaghoobi is a scholar of Iranian cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies with a focus on the members of sexual, ethnic, and religious minoritized populations. Yaghoobi’s body of work includes several impactful publications. She is the author of Transnational Culture in the Iranian Armenian Diaspora (Edinburgh UP 2023), Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Persian Literature and Film (Cambridge UP 2020), and Subjectivity in ‘Attar, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism (Purdue UP 2017). Additionally, she is the editor of a volume titled, The #MeToo Movement in Iran: Reporting Sexual Violence and Harassment (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury Press, 2023). Yaghoobi earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Feminist Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2013. Leveraging her extensive knowledge and expertise, she teaches diverse courses encompassing Iranian literature and culture, Middle Eastern literature, gender and sexuality, diaspora studies, and human rights. A true embodiment of her multifaced identity, Yaghoobi identifies as an Iranian Armenian American. Her research encapsulates the literary landscape of the Middle East, with an acute emphasis on Persian and Armenian literature. Particularly, she hones on the experiences of those who belong to sexual, ethnic, and religious minority groups, often positioned at the periphery of normative society. Through her academic inquiry, she delves into the nuanced intersections of liminality as they are expressed by authors, artists, and directors, who valiantly challenge and deconstruct prevailing social hegemonies. Currently, Yaghoobi is completing her fourth monograph titled, Lives Translation: Armenian Women’s Voices in Iran and the US, under contract with UNC Press. She is also editing the Companion to Iranian Revolution for Cambridge University Press.
