Firoozeh Farvardin

Firoozeh Farvardin is a postdoc researcher/activist working on gender/sexual (counter) strategies of authoritarian neoliberalism at IRGAC hosted by the MERGE. She is also the affiliated researcher and former guest lecturer at BIM, Humboldt University of Berlin, where she also defended her doctoral thesis on the transformation of the state and social and sexual politics in Iran. Her interest includes feminist theories and movements, gender and social politics, transnational mobility and mobilization, and decolonization of knowledge productions on these issues, particularly in the contexts of the Middle East and Iran. Research Authoritarian neoliberalism both enhances and is fostered by neo-patriarchy that attacks sexual minorities and the reproductive rights of women*. The new patriarchal politics, partly through moral politics, mobilizes part of society against feminist legacies and undermines years of feminist and LGBTQIA+ struggles across the globe. To elaborate this argument and to imagine/discuss counter strategies, in this project, inspired by feminist theorizations of neoliberalism and affective theory, Firoozeh studies the affective aspects of neoliberal governance in Iran. Particularly, this inquiry digs into how reproductive and gender/sexual policies of the Islamic Republic have been conceived and appropriated in the contentious politics of the past decade that eventually led to a feminist revolution. It also unfolds the conditions of the possibility of convergence between moral politics and neoliberalism. A convergence that has paved the way toward the emergence and domination of new authoritarian regimes with specific class, gendered, and racialized agendas across the world.

• Academia.edu