The politics of the erotic: pious women's emotional experiences in Hizbollah cultural institutes and the surprises of the anti-feminist movement in post-2009 Iran

In the aftermath of the 2009 presidential election conflict, factions within the Islamic Republic of Iran encouraged pious women to join the fight against feminism through cultural activism centered on the Islamization of women's rights in Hizbollah cultural institutes. This article explores how Hizbollahi women's swift integration into these cultural institutes in post-2009 Iran was affected by their emotional experiences within these informal spaces for cultural work. This empirical study is grounded in fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2014 in Tehran. It reveals that while some pious women may enter conservative politics intending to support an anti-feminist agenda, their emotional encounters can disrupt the entire enterprise and move their activism in unexpected directions through a conceptual remaking of femininities and masculinities grounded in specific historical contingencies born out of their role as activists. Scholars have argued that political action is stirred with emotions and the body, but this article makes an original contribution by illustrating that women's emotional experiences in movements can have unintended consequences that bring about a rethinking and reworking of gender.