On March 18, 2022, the Iran 1400 Project spoke with Dr. Claudia Yaghoobi about her book Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Iranian Film and Literature. During her presentation, Dr. Yaghoobi examined temporary marriage in Iran, also known as sigheh marriage. She presented the history of sigheh marriage and described its place within modern society, before analyzing the representation of sigheh women in novels and short stories from the Pahlavi era, and cinematic works produced after the Islamic revolution. In the Q&A session, Dr. Yaghoobi addressed a variety of questions from sigheh’s relationship to feminism, to its connection (or lack thereof) to Islam, to how it relates to women’s bodily autonomy.
Claudia Yaghoobi is Roshan Distinguished Professor of Persian Studies and Director of the Center for the Middle East and Islamic Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research subjects include Persian literature, Iranian "woman question," minorities in Iran, contemporary Middle Eastern literature, diasporic literature, literary theory, and gender and sexuality studies.
