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Abstract
Countermapping the conflict between hydrological interventions and women’s water literacy in the Khuzestan Region since the mid-twentieth century, this essay reveals the violent nature of hydrological paternalism across times and political regimes. Under the androcentric realm of colonial representations, resource development projects, Western modernizing missions, state violence, and financial strangulation by international economic sanctions, the multifaceted nature of women’s resistance against territorial dispossessions and the violence unleashed on women and waterbodies is at the center of the current struggles for social and environmental justice. Demystifying these historical entanglements makes the case for the rematriation of rivers as a necessary step in the transborder and crosscultural process of decolonization and feminist liberation.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Pierre Bélanger, Mehrangiz Kar, Anu Mathur, Rosalind Williams, Farzaneh Milani, Nahid Naghizadeh, Dalal Musaed Alsayer, Dilip da Cunha, Mohsen Mostafavi, Suzanne Moomaw, Jim Opie, Menna Agha, and archivists at Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. This research was financially supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Architecture School at University of Virginia, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Notes
1 Caution: content might be disturbing for some audiences. The armature recording circulated in social media at the time originally published on July 21, 2021. Since then, many posts have been taken down. See for instance https://x.com/ShahedAlavi/status/1418005706557513732?s=20, accessed August 2023.
2 As of 2019, there were forty dams in Karun, sixteen in Kharkheh, and thirteen in Jarahi watersheds.
3 The history of the Islamic Republic’s use of violence, especially intensified use of force against ethnic minorities, is undeniable based on documented histories and public knowledge. Early cases include mass execution of ethnic ‘rebels’ in 1979–80 and prison executions in 1988. Recent cases include the 2019 violent nationwide crackdowns known as the Aban Massacres or Bloody November. “Iran after the Victory of 1979’s revolution,” Iran Chamber Society, Nov 20, 2023, https://www.iranchamber.com/history/islamic_revolution/revolution_and_iran_after1979_1.php; “Iran: Details of 321 Deaths in Crackdown in 2019 Protests,” Amnesty International, July 29, 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde13/2308/2020/en.
4 Breaking the natural cycle of water has consequences yet to be seen. It includes increasing frequency of sandstorms across borders which make the air unbreathable. The current massive rate of migration out of the region is a sign that environmental collapse is leading to climate chaos and the migration of people whose impact will be transcontinental. The term “water bankruptcy” is adopted from Kaveh Madani et al., “Iran’s Socio-economic Drought: Challenges of a Water-Bankrupt Nation,” Iranian Studies 49 (2016): 997–1016.
5 Haleh Afshar, “The Position of Women in an Iranian Village,” in Women, Work and Ideology in the Third World, ed. Haleh Afshar (London: Tavistock, 1985), 66–82.
6 Author’s conversations with Nahid Naghizadeh, lead research associate at CENSTA, a nongovernmental center for sustainable development and environment in Iran since 1979.
7 Erika Friedl, “Sphere of Action in Rural Iran,” Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, eds. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 197–98.
8 Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (Bloomsbury Publishing, Kindle Edition, originally published in Arabic in 1977). See introduction and chap. 14, “Liberty to the Slave, but Not for the Woman.”
9 El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve, 10.
10 Afshar, “The Position of Women in an Iranian Village,” 67.
11 Here I am using “nourishing” and “providing” instead of “reproduction” and “production,” as I find these words more descriptive of the complexities associated with women’s work and agency in traditional rural and tribal Iran, in affinity with what Dene geographer Phoebe Nahanni has observed in women’s work and agency in her dissertation, “Dene Women in the Traditional and Modern Northern Economy in Denendeh, Northwest Territories, Canada,” (Master of Art, Department of Geography, McGill University, July 1992).
12 Friedl, “Sphere of Action,” 200.
13 Friedl, “Sphere of Action,” 198.
14 David Ekbladh, “Meeting the Challenge from Totalitarianism: The Tennessee Valley Authority as a Global Model for Liberal Development, 1933–1945,” International History Review 32:1 (March 2010): 51.
15 Great publications have been published on the TVA in the past decades. See for instance Christine Macy et al., The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion (Princeton: Princeton Architecture Press, 2007), and Avigail Sachs, The Garden in the Machine: Planning and Democracy in the Tennessee Valley Authority (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023). Unlike most architectural publications on the subject, this essay goes beyond the nationalist sociospatial assessments of the TVA as an infrastructural project to highlight the link between the rise of technocratic elite and United States imperialism, mediated through massive geospatial projects with lasting socio-environmental impacts.
16 See for instance David Lilienthal’s self-claimed magnum opus, TVA: Democracy on the March (New York and London: Harpers and Brothers Publishers, 1944).
17 Robert Rook, “Race, Water, and Foreign Policy: The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Global Agenda Meets ‘Jim Crow,’” Diplomatic History 28:1 (2004): 55–81.
18 Harry S. Truman, Remarks at the Women’s National Democratic Club Dinner, November 8, 1949.
19 For information on dam as spatial iconography of global development, see David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of the American World Order (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Christopher Sneddon, Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation (Chicago London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).
20 The coup aimed to abort the nationalization of Iranian oil, a legal movement approved by the Iranian parliament in 1951 which was a source of heated tension between the king (backed by England and the United States) and prime minister of the time Mahmood Mosaddegh. See Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2003); Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (New York: The New Press, 2013).
21 Eighty percent of Iran’s oil production and 20 percent of its gas production are located in the Khuzestan Region.
22 Development and Resources Corporation and Khuzestan Development Services, “The United Development of the Natural Resources of the Khuzestan Region,” March 1959, MC014_c05905, Box 897, Folder 3, Development and Resources Corporation Record, Special Collections at Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.
23 Cyrus Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change and Rural Society in Southern Iran (Middle Eastern and North African Studies Press, 1980), introduction.
24 FAO, “Interim Report, The Natural Vegetation of the Khuzestan Region and Headwaters,” Rome, 1961, MC014_c05900, Box 896, Folder 4, Development and Resources Corporation Record.
25 Grace Goodell, The Elementary Structures of Political Life: Rural Development in Pahlavi Iran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
26 Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010 [1988]), Kindle Edition; see chap. 2, “violence of reductionism.”
27 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change.
28 This multiscalar nature of the master plan is elucidated in Grace Goodell’s fantastic ethnography of northern Khuzestan in the early 70s as the DRC projects were implemented. See Goodell, The Elementary Structures.
29 See for instance David Lilienthal, “Enterprise in Iran: An Experiment in Economic Development,” Foreign Affairs 38 (1959): 132–39.
30 This link is evident in archival company reports, e.g., KDS, “Summary Report of Field Crop Testing Studies, Upper Khuzestan Plains of Iran 1958-1960,” published by KDS for KWPA, 1961, MC014_c05900, Box 896, Folder 3, Development and Resources Corporation Record. The original estimate of growth condition and expectations of yield in some cases comes from successful tests in California and Arizona.
31 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893); see also John C. Powell writings such as The Exploration of the Canyons of the Colorado (1875) and Report of the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1879). Powell’s writings, in particular, influenced congressional debates on “reclamation” of “arid lands” which eventually led to the establishment of the US Bureau of Reclamation in 1902. On this subject see Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
32 Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1996), 241. Also see chap. 9, “The Ideology of Dams.”
33 For more information on land reform and its implications see Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, University of Princeton Press, 1982), esp. chap. 9, and Eric J. Hoodlund, Land and Revolution in Iran 1960–1980 (Austin: University of Texas, 1982).
34 Goodell, The Elementary Structures, chap. 3.
35 Goodell, The Elementary Structures, introduction.
36 Sabri Ateş, The Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 168; Goodell, The Elementary Structures, 20–21.
37 Bryan Campbell Sitzes, “Alienating Iranians from Their Environment,” (Master of Arts thesis, University of Austin Texas, 2028).
38 Worster, Rivers of Empire, 57.
39 For the history and evolution of IRGC, see Afshon Ostovar, “Guardians of the Islamic Revolution,” (dissertation, 2009); Frederic Wehrey et. al, The Rise of the Pasdaran: Assessing the Domestic Roles of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (Santa Monica: Rand, 2009), https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG821.sum.pdf.
40 Gotvand was commissioned by the National Development of Resources and Power. The consultant was Mahab Qods, a consultancy firm connected to the Astan-e-Qods-e-Razavi (a cleric-run mafia group that controls the economy of northeastern Iran) and was constructed by Sepasad. Nik Kowsar, “The IRGC and Iran’s ‘Water Mafia,’” Middle East Institute, February 5, 2021, https://mei.edu/publications/irgc-and-irans-water-mafia.
41 IRGC has a monopoly over the nation’s economy through formal and illicit channels known as the “shadow economy.” See Wehrey et al., The Rise of the Pasdaran, chap. 5.
42 More in-depth elucidation of how IRGC has been circumventing the international embargo and US sanctions is beyond the scope of this paper and is discussed in the author’s other writings.
43 On the microeconomic effects of sanctions see Mohammad Reza Farzanegan and Esfandyar Bahmanghelidj, “Understanding Economic Sanctions on Iran: A Survey,” The Journal of Economists’ Voice, June 22, 2023.
44 Normalization of violence against women through religion is not specific to Islam. Nawal El Saadawi notes, “Any serious study of comparative religion will show clearly that in the very essence of Islam, as such, the status of women is no worse than it is in Judaism or in Christianity.” El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve, 12.
45 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 118.
46 Dariush Memar, “Jurisprudence, Sharia, and Customs in the Islamic Republic: Supporters of the Murder of Mona Heydari,” Independent (Farsi), February 8, 2022.
47 Paula Sanders, “Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law,” Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, eds. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991).
48 Mehrangiz Kar, Crossing the Red Line: The Struggles for Human Rights in Iran (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2007).
49 Kar, Crossing the Red Line.
50 Caution: content might be disturbing for some audiences. NCRI Women Committee, “Violence Against Women in Iran State-sponsored and Institutionalized,” Nov 22, 2020, https://women.ncr-iran.org/2020/11/22/violence-against-women-in-iran.
51 hooks, Feminist Theory, 118.
52 Such statements were evident in headlines of pro-state news agencies during the national uprising against compulsory hijab. These include for instance a quote by Hojjat-al-Islam Abdolmajod Maghami in an interview with Rasa News, Sep 23, 2022.
53 The mantra of “Woman, Life, Freedom” originated in the Kurdish women’s movement in 1987 (in Turkey). Cutting hair is a reference to women’s mourning, rage, and rebellion against injustice in the story of Farangis in a thousand-year-old Persian epic, Shahname, by Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi.
54 Shiva, Staying Alive, chap. 1, “Development, Ecology, and Women.”
55 Eduardo Mendieta’s observation of Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation as a guide for the ethics and politics of liberation, originally elucidated in Dussel’s La Filosofía de la Liberación (México: EDICAL, 1977). See Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), foreword by Mendieta, viii.
56 While my concern here is the Black and Brown worlds, racialized as in the geographic category of the ‘Third World,’ the phenomenon described here is a global condition.
57 Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Gender Discourses (Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 32.
58 Oyěwùmí, What Gender is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
59 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1961; originally French in 1961), “On Violence,” 2.
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Ghazal Jafari
Dr. Ghazal Jafari is a territorial scholar and a weaver of Persian and Azeri descent, trained as an architect and ecological urbanist. Her work intersects environmental justice, non-Western geospatial discourses, climate histories, political ecology, and transnational liberatory feminism. She is a coauthor of A Botany of Violence (ORO Editions, 2022) and “No Design on Stolen Land,” Architectural Design 90 (2020). Jafari is a codirector of Open Systems, a nonprofit research organization confronting complex, socioecological challenges and geopolitical conflicts through environmental education and spatial research. She is an assistant professor of urban and environmental planning at University of Virginia.