Book contents
- Tied Up in Tehran
- Tied Up in Tehran
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Tables
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: The Personal Is Political – How I Came to Write This Book
- 2 Tied Up in Tehran: A Metaphor
- 3 How Our Mothers Drive Us Crazy: Hospitality, Ritual, and the Burden of the Social
- 4 Food as a Social Relation: Sabzi and the Question of Household Skilled Labor
- 5 Elegy or The Rule of the Fathers: The Break with the Past
- 6 Democratic Intimacies: Jokes, Sex, and Ta’arof
- 7 Through the Looking Glass: Reflexive Cinema and Society in Postrevolutionary Iran
- 8 Women, Life, Freedom: One Movement out of Two Legacies
- 9 Being a Public Woman: Streets, Cars, Crimes, and the Shifting Calculus of Moral Accountability
- 10 Shopping for Shoes: Consumer Identity, Commodity Fetishism, and Gender as a Brand
- 11 We Are More Than One, When We Speak Together: Collective Art, Plural Possibilities, and the Horizon of Utopia
- 12 Coda: Thinking in Practice – Arendt, Foucault, and the Challenge of Freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Democratic Intimacies: Jokes, Sex, and Ta’arof
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2025
Book contents
- Tied Up in Tehran
- Tied Up in Tehran
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Tables
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: The Personal Is Political – How I Came to Write This Book
- 2 Tied Up in Tehran: A Metaphor
- 3 How Our Mothers Drive Us Crazy: Hospitality, Ritual, and the Burden of the Social
- 4 Food as a Social Relation: Sabzi and the Question of Household Skilled Labor
- 5 Elegy or The Rule of the Fathers: The Break with the Past
- 6 Democratic Intimacies: Jokes, Sex, and Ta’arof
- 7 Through the Looking Glass: Reflexive Cinema and Society in Postrevolutionary Iran
- 8 Women, Life, Freedom: One Movement out of Two Legacies
- 9 Being a Public Woman: Streets, Cars, Crimes, and the Shifting Calculus of Moral Accountability
- 10 Shopping for Shoes: Consumer Identity, Commodity Fetishism, and Gender as a Brand
- 11 We Are More Than One, When We Speak Together: Collective Art, Plural Possibilities, and the Horizon of Utopia
- 12 Coda: Thinking in Practice – Arendt, Foucault, and the Challenge of Freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Even if everyone wants to talk about sex, the most intimate aspects of a culture are the little things, which are often the most opaque. Jokes, toilet etiquette, and mutual deferrals in doorways mark shared achievements of mutual recognition. But humor and bodily practices can be the least translatable of cultural identifiers. Diaspora and foreign observers tend to overlook local class differences and a deep-seated culture of political skepticism, fixating instead on more superficial revelations of sexual behavior that may not be so surprising. How do we translate cultural differences? Is it even possible to understand each other’s jokes?
Information
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- Tied Up in TehranWomen, Social Change, and the Politics of Daily Life in Postrevolutionary Iran, pp. 111 - 141Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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