Axis of Hope

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"Long-standing political tensions between Iran and the United States that intensified in the post-9/11 period and the Global War on Terror set the stage for women's rights activists both inside and outside Iran as they seek full legal equality under the Islamic Republic. Through discourse analysis and ethnographic research, Catherine Sameh demonstrates how despite limited success in overturning discriminatory laws under conservative and reform governments, women's rights activists have imprinted a gender equality perspective onto the state and society in defining modern Islamic democracy. Sameh engages with activist work both inside Iran and in the diaspora, through analysis of the One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law (a transnational campaign started in 2006 to reform Iranian Muslim family law), the work of Nobel Prize-winning Shirin Ebadi, and the independent, alterative internet streaming television channel Zanan TV, founded by longtime women's rights activist Mahboubeh Abbasgolizadeh. Situating post-reform women's rights activism within the unfolding and decades-long project to democratize Iran from within, Axis of Hope makes a timely and critical contribution to studies of feminist movements, women's human rights in Muslim contexts, activism and new media, and the relationship between activism, civil society, and the state"--