Intimacy in (the time of) crisis: Tracing the linkages between the intimate, the state and crises of social reproduction under the sanction regime in Iran

The lived experiences and governance of crises of social reproduction have frequently been examined within Western contexts. In line with the purpose of this workshop, pluralizing social reproduction, this paper aims to highlight some of the different ways in which crises of social reproduction may be manifested, governed, and lived in non-Western settings. The paper does this by highlighting the analytical value of the intimate – including the familial, marital, and reproductive aspects – for understanding crises of social reproduction. Historically, there have been vital linkages between the intimate and social reproduction, as certain gendered, sexualized, and racialized regulations of the intimate have helped secure appropriate social reproduction necessary for the survival of states, economies, and households. Given such critical historical linkages, this paper emphasizes the necessity of asking the question of intimacy in times of crisis: In other words, what type of biopolitical interventions into the intimate are warranted by the contemporary neoliberal crises of social reproduction, and whose intimacies are the most penetrated and extracted from? The paper addresses this question through the case of Iran under the intensified regime of international sanctions since 2012. Drawing on situated and embodied methodologies, primarily in-depth interviews with Iranian women, and combining them with a feminist international political economy reading of the state’s policy and discursive shifts in domains of marriage, reproduction, and family since 2012, it details various ways in which the intimate has increasingly emerged as both sites of the state’s governance as well as everyday struggle, negotiation, and contestation. In particular, the paper argues that with the increased reliance of both the state and households on women’s unpaid labor, the state has increasingly aimed to push women back to the household through a wide range of both coercive and incentive interventions in domains of marriage, reproduction, and family. Through these interventions, the state has been pushing for an organization of social reproduction, referred to in the paper as ‘(re)domestication of social reproduction’. The paper uses ‘(re)domestication’ to distinguish Iran’s experience (as a neoliberal authoritarian context) from that of Western countries where the dominant governance framework of social reproduction under neoliberalism is typically characterized as the ‘privatization of social reproduction,’ a term used in its dual sense of either the return of social reproduction to the private sphere or acquiring care services from the private sector for those who can afford it (Bakker, 2003; Fraser, 2017). In the context of Iran, however, this double organization of social reproduction cannot be materialized, especially because of the prohibitive prices of care for the majority. The push for (re)domestication, nonetheless, has passed through interventions into the intimate, which, in turn, has increasingly turned the intimate into a site of everyday struggle and negotiation, if not resistance. Overall, through this intimacy-focused approach to crises of social reproduction, the paper aims to offer the possibility of thinking about some of the different ways in which crises of social reproduction maybe lived and governed in neoliberal authoritarian contexts.