At the time of working on this paper (December 2024), I attended a session organized by Bidar Research Institution in Tehran, where a young feminist was presenting the results of her M.A. dissertation on the Iranian women’s movement, One Million Signatures Campaign, in the 2000s. When I questioned the application of theories developed to study the agency and political action of subaltern groups, particularly Asef Bayat’s work, one member of the audience responded that this is not relevant to feminism and women’s movement. Nobody provided a counter argument, but a young male student mentioned another work by Bayat, Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam, where he discusses the agency of ordinary women in the Iranian post-revolutionary society. He briefly discussed the relevance of Bayat’s work to the exploration of women as a subaltern group. In Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Asef Bayat (2010) introduces the quiet encroachment of the ordinary. Drawing on James Scott’s everyday forms of resistance, Bayat discusses how subaltern groups such as the poor and women seek “life chances” through quiet encroachment in daily life in post-revolutionary Iran. He claims that “in many authoritarian Muslim states, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, where conservative Islamic laws are in place, women have become second-class citizens in many domains of public life. Consequently, a central question for women’s rights activists is how to achieve gender equality under such circumstances” (Bayat 2010: 96). Bayat answers this question in the framework of Scott’s theory: “Women resisted these policies, not much by deliberate organized campaigns, but largely through mundane daily practices in public domains, such as working, playing sports, studying, showing interest in art and music, or running for political offices” (Bayat 2010: 97). Bayat calls this “feminism of everyday life” (2010: 96). This short narrative brings me to the point that I want to discuss in this paper: the application of theories of political action and the resistance of subordinate groups in feminist and gender archaeology. I briefly discuss the relevance of subaltern studies generally and James Scott’s “everyday forms of resistance,” then turn to the methodological and socio-political outcomes of this expansion for feminist and gender archaeology. Finally, I discuss two examples to demonstrate the significance of daily life as a site of conflict and resistance.
