Negotiating Gender Roles - Qanats and Women's Resistance in Rural Iranian Desert Communities

Abstract

Climate change and extreme resource conditions such as expanding droughts and increasing floods put vulnerable waterscapes and populations in constant danger. In the contemporary Iranian context, ongoing embargoes by foreign governments and the ‘Women Life Freedom’ movement within the current domestic political atmosphere highlight the challenging nature of life in Iran, especially for women. Discussing how female narratives and water resource mismanagement have been shaped historically, by applying a decolonial feminist political ecology lens, this study approaches two Iranian rural contexts in environments of extreme drought. Establishing a holistic contextual foundation, it interrogates correlations between interrelating global and domestic political and economic factors that influence the traditional Iranian qanat-based agricultural micro-structures. This work demonstrates how communities succeed in maintaining common-pool resources through autonomous collective work without control mechanisms and how female collective action thereby can function beneficial. Control over qanat irrigation structures represents power and independence due to their importance in shaping the quality of communal life. Long-established male hegemony and their legal and institutional reproduction by the Iranian theocratic state increase dogmatic gender perceptions in a context of rural familiarity, which legitimise power over resources in male hands and delegitimizes women’s freedom to entrench both their financial dependence and social disadvantage. Women, major actors and commodity producers, are more strongly impacted by structural and environmental transformations than men. Global and domestic politics have direct negative impacts on rural economies, which create multi-layered individual and collective resistances against social norms and theocratic law. Evolving understandings of the causes of marginalisation developed through local women’s research and their cognitive enhancement, reveals the significance of women’s collective resistance in support of social change. Findings show that local women’s collective management of the qanat is highly valuable and beneficial for the community. This study demonstrates how ultra-conservative rural contexts of extreme climatic conditions can be altered through feminist collective action and that thereby the involvement of the common resource can significantly benefit women’s success. Furthermore, it illustrates how despite challenges due to domestic politics in Iran, appropriate work by local NGOs, acting as intermediaries between the community and the provincial administration can be highly beneficial. Outcomes suggests that regarding women as a social group, the heterogeneity of the collective in its context must be considered with its multiplicity of experiences and resistances.