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I agree

I’m going to have to agree with Laura Secor on this one!  She writes a critique of Mahdavi’s work that shows she (Secor) is incredibly well-informed of Iran’s important issues.  I’m hugely impressed at the wisdom Laura Secor shows as an American scholar/writer which is not the norm (sadly). 

Most Iranians who live in Iran can tell you that for years, the IRI has tightened and loosened social restrictions among youth in order to distract them from the real issues of political injustice, no freedom, no human rights, etc.  Secor picks up on this when discussing the willingness of the IRI to change some social rules while still jailing the activists fighting for really significant change. Mahdavi “makes big claims” for her the youth in Tehran who are pushing the envelope of social behavior and perhaps causing slow social reforms.  In her book, Mahdavi presents these youth as revolutionaries who are “intended to bring about regime change.” But as this article’s author, Laura Secor, contemplates, “ What she (Mahdavi) does document is a groundswell of young people who reject Islamic sexual morality, feel they should have the right to associate with whomever they wish and to do what they please with their bodies, and who are willing to risk brief, but plenty unpleasant, run-ins with the morality police in the name of fashion, partying, dating and sex. Does Mahdavi imagine that these young people, if granted a modicum of personal, sartorial and social freedom, would fight on--for freedom of expression, freedom of religion, prison reform, representative government, an independent judiciary that respects the rights of the individual? For the rights and freedoms, in the end, of others?” Secor goes on to say, “Those who would choose to fight such battles, and to make the sacrifices that such a fight would entail, are few in any society, and Mahdavi's subjects are not to be faulted for choosing the already uphill battle to enjoy their youth. But the distinction is worth noting, mainly because it is not lost on the Iranian regime, which has shown a willingness to cut deals with its populace--loosening social restrictions, or turning a blind eye toward parties or translucent head scarves in upscale neighborhoods, precisely while tightening the screws on political activism and the independent press.”......“she does not mention the wholesale exclusion of reformers from government, or the imprisonment and torture of dozens of feminist activists”...  

Mahdavi is a poor researcher

I'm being polite here, so that I don't get erased. This was told to me in the past from several University level people in Southern California who have interacted with her. Luckily you don't have to take my word for it.

To be honest, I thought this article would be yet another "shah-kar" by some young Iranian who is basically using her summer vacation house in North Tehran to sound "deep" and get a PhD. from clueless American academics. As such I almost certainly expected blind praise form the Nation, but I was pleasantly surprised that even they called her on it.

From the Nation article:

They spend a lot of time in cars, getting high on ingeniously obtained or concocted substances, and looking for sex. Is this a sign of political ferment or of a disused demographic--unmoored and decadent, dissipating its energies--for which its country has no use?
Mahdavi does not press such inquiries. Nor, notably, does she ask her subjects about religion. By engaging in sexual behavior the state deems "un-Islamic," do Iranian young people feel they are questioning the state's monopoly on Islam, or are they questioning Islamic sexual morality itself? Are her subjects evidence of a secularizing culture, or have they found a way to absorb Islamic spirituality while flouting Sharia law? The absence of searching analysis along any of these lines is striking, and it prevents Mahdavi's extensive collection of anecdotes and informants from rising above the level of observation.

In fact, what she calls ethnography often feels more like a thinly academicized memoir of the Iranian party scene. Mahdavi, who grew up in California and spent extensive time doing research in Iran, gets in the way of her subject by compulsively inserting herself, often in self-flattering terms, into the frame. We never hear her subjects speak without also seeing Mahdavi nod and smile. She includes her diary entries verbatim and emphasizes her feelings about the parties she attends. "My smart, beautiful friend from America. Knowing you makes me so cool," she quotes one of her informants as telling her. She quotes others saying that only she can help them with their problems, or that maybe the women in the beauty parlor are asking her why she isn't married because they feel threatened that Mahdavi appears to "have it all."

Although Mahdavi writes that she did research among poor youth as well as the middle and upper classes, in the one extended account of an outdoor party on the wrong side of the tracks, we hear next to nothing from the poor urban youth in attendance. Instead we get a scene in which a young woman admires Mahdavi's shoes and Mahdavi generously offers to trade her fashionable footwear for the girl's tattered sandals, to the girl's gratitude and delight. "I've never met a rich girl like you," Mahdavi quotes her as saying. "Who are you, anyways?" These authorial intrusions make the first five chapters of Passionate Uprisings feel aimless and amateurish. Fortunately, when we get into the material about public health and sex education, about which Mahdavi has done truly original and far-reaching research, the author steps aside and allows her material to order itself before the reader in all its richness.

interesting article

thanks for sharing