| The following is a collaborative ethnography undertaken with Iranian women's rights activists resident in southern California, USA. In it I stage a series of conversations between various strains of contemporary anthropology and philosophy and the practices and theories of my collaborators. Presenting myself as an observant participant, this ethnography serves as a bridge between my ethical commitment to my collaborators as a feminist researcher, and my epistemic partnership with them as we focus together on a series of concept-metaphors, or catachreses, that are articulated to their practices and their ethical and political visions. In this light, the ethnography discusses four major catachreses: sex-gender, authority, time, and human rights. Throughout it emphasizes a variety of agencies, human and non-human, exploring the effectivity of the activists' efforts to raise awareness among Iranian citizens in California about gender discrimination, both cultural and legal, in Iran. By exploring the four major catachreses, as well as related concepts, including performance, power, temporality, generation, culture, rights, justice, and law, it draws attention to new forms of collective action whose basis is feminist and democratic. At the same time, it also draws attention to the limits and misfires of the performance of this collective ethos, and points to areas where there is considerable room for further reflection, debate, and conversation between ethnographer and collaborators. These areas include thinking beyond sex-gender as a binary system in which women aspire to equality with men; generating practices of power and authority that are collective and pluralist but not dependent on the dichotomy of the public and private spheres; exploring conceptions of temporality other than linear, progressive understandings, including by thinking through the articulations of time and the diverse economy; and emphasizing human rights---once the debates around cultural relativism and universalism are shown to rest on false assumptions---as a valuable, but not autonomous and complete, vision of justice. |
