Gender, Crises of Social Reproduction, and Iran’s Neoliberal Policy Regime

[This article is part of the Jadaliyya Iran Page's dossier, "Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom." Click here to read the dossier's introduction and browse the rest of the dossier.]

One of the most salient features of protests in Iran since at least 2017 has been their spatial and social shift away from urban middle-class centers toward the socio-economically marginalized locales: urban peripheries, small towns, and ethnic minority provinces. The geography of dissent thus has increasingly converged with the geography of poverty and social exclusion, positioning the working class, women, youth, and ethnically marginalized groups at the forefront of the mobilization. 

Yet public debate surrounding the protests in Iran often sidelines the crisis of social reproduction in shaping dissent and its social and geographical locals. Indeed, much analysis of Iran’s protests remains trapped within a rigid politics versus economy binary. This binary is reinforced both by the Iranian state—which frequently sorts dissent into “legitimate” economic grievance versus “illegitimate” political unrest—and by segments of the opposition, who treat attention to material conditions as a distraction from state repression, as if the economy itself were not a site of contestation, governance, and state violence. At best, such binary frameworks are analytically impoverished, obscuring the structural entanglements of authoritarian governance and gendered oppression with regimes of exploitation, labour extraction, and capital accumulation. At worst, this binary—particularly when mobilized and violently enforced by the right-wing opposition, especially by pro-Pahlavi monarchists—serves to erase the role of imperial interventions and decades of punitive sanctions in shaping the contours of unrest. More fundamentally, these binaries reflect a persistent epistemic tendency to fragment the violence imposed on Iranian bodies into competing and often mutually isolating frames: local versus global, authoritarianism versus imperialism, internal repression versus external intervention, sanctions versus state's violence, each obscuring the other. 

While such binaries may hold in the safe realm of analysis, they blur in the exigencies of everyday life. This most recent round of protests, in particular, brought into sharp relief an expanding crisis of social reproduction—one that has long shaped not only daily life and its gendered and classed rhythms of labour and survival, but increasingly the terrain of political struggle itself. “Crisis of social reproduction” refers to the mounting inability to sustain and reproduce life—to secure food, shelter, care, health, and education. In this sense, crises of social reproduction are fundamentally, crises of life itself. Such crises emerge when the institutional, material, and social infrastructures that render life livable are hollowed out, when the labour required to maintain bodies and social relations is systematically devalued, and thus rendered impossible. In this short commentary, I examine how these dynamics unfold in Iran, and how they have emerged. I argue that women’s labouring and reproductive bodies must remain central to any analysis of the catastrophic conditions leading to mass protest and mass repression. My aim here is to offer an overview of how gender and crises of social reproduction—two dimensions often overlooked in debates on Iran’s political economy—should be situated within the country’s sanctions-conditioned political economy and its increasingly patriarchal, authoritarian, neoliberal policy regime.

Crises of social reproduction in Iran are acute and expanding, most notably reflected in what is frequently euphemized in the Iranian context as a “crisis of livelihood” (Bohran-e-Maeeishat)—a formulation that signals the deepening erosion of people’s capacities to sustain their daily lives. Iran’s political economy is marked by inflation exceeding 42 percent, with inflation on some food items approaching 72 percent, a rapidly depreciating currency, and wage levels far below subsistence levels. These macroeconomic abstractions translate literally into the attrition of everyday life. The minimum wage, currently around 12 million Tomans and projected to rise to 18 million next year, remains woefully inadequate. Even with this increase, basic food—ten kilos of rice and five kilos of lamb—consumes more than half of a minimum wage. Even the simplest calculations highlight the absurdity of such wages, which fail to meet minimum nutritional and caloric needs, let alone housing, transportation, healthcare, or the rising costs of an increasingly privatized education system. 

Conditions for the impoverished middle class are only marginally less severe. Teachers, and nurses, (two overwhelmingly feminised professions, with women comprising 60 per cent of teachers and 70 per cent of nurses approximately), for example, earn between 20 and 30 million Tomans—an income that still falls sharply short of the requirements of social reproduction. According to data from the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labour, and Social Welfare, nearly 70 percent of Iran’s population now confronts malnutrition. That is a crisis inscribed on the bodies, in the most literal sense. These crises are not static, but expanding too. The arrival of the Bazaar into the latest round of protests in January signals a qualitative shift in the character of these crises. If once they were a threat to the social reproduction of labour, bringing into the streets the most socio-economically marginalized, their destabilizing effects now also threaten the conditions for the social reproduction of capital, particularly among smaller and more traditional forms of capital ownership, such as the Bazaar. Crucially too, the crisis of life, as this round of protests made clear, must also be understood as a condition in which the very space for demanding a life worth living is being rapidly foreclosed.

How, then, have these crises emerged, and which social groups have borne their heaviest burdens?  Undoubtedly, an ever-intensifying regime of sanctions, coupled with the Iranian state’s accelerated neoliberal turn, have constituted two of the defining features of Iran’s political economy since the early 2010s. Nonetheless, the analysis of how these crises have come into being has been the subject of intense public debate during this round of protests. The politics–economy binary discussed earlier is reproduced in polemical form, with economic crises attributed either to state mismanagement or treated as the inevitable outcome of sanctions. Within this debate, sanctions are rarely approached as an object of serious analytical inquiry; instead, they are mostly mobilized as a (de)moralizing framework through which political positions are articulated, policed, and delegitimized. In this fraught discursive terrain, foregrounding the violence of sanctions is easily read as a “pro-regime” stance, while critiques of state violence are often accompanied by the erasure of economic structures and sanctions altogether. 

This moralization of a fundamentally material question is not only ethically questionable—since it is often feasible only for those least materially affected—but also analytically lazy and inadequate, as it forecloses the possibility of examining how decades of sanctions have co-constituted regimes of accumulation, everyday survival, state policy, labour relations, and political horizons. In reality, neither the importance of sanctions nor that of state economic policies can be denied. The imprint of sanctions on Iran’s political economy is most acutely reflected in the fluctuations of nearly every major economic indicator—GDP, poverty rates, and currency devaluation—all of which respond closely to the tightening or loosening of sanctions. Take GDP per capita, for instance, which has closely tracked successive waves of sanctions: after rising steadily throughout the 2000s, it fell sharply following the intensification of sanctions in 2012. Although it briefly rebounded after the 2015 nuclear agreement, it collapsed once again under the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, dropping from $8,114 to $3,202 by 2020 (World Bank data). While this decline cannot be attributed solely to sanctions—elements including capital flight and the Covid-19 pandemic also played significant roles—the close correlation between GDP fluctuations and the tightening and loosening of sanctions underscores the shock effects sanctions exert on the pulse of Iran’s economy, including their role in facilitating conditions for capital flight. Even with some growth after 2020, GDP per capita remains at roughly 60 percent of its 2012 level. In simple terms, even if inequality had remained constant, the average Iranian in 2020 earned little more than one-third of what they did in 2012.

But inequalities have not remained constant. The widening class inequalities and the hollowing out of the middle class remains a defining feature of Iran’s sanctions-conditioned political economy. These disparities have been exacerbated by an increasingly authoritarian, neoliberal, and patriarchal state, which has disproportionately displaced the burdens of crisis onto labour, and households. The progressive erosion of labour protections, reduction of subsidies, and wage increases lagging far behind inflation have collectively devalued labour. While wealthier segments of the middle class have maintained some living standards through investments in assets such as property and gold, the effects have been most devastating for the “classes of labour^[1]”—those who rely exclusively on various forms of informal, low-wage, and fragmented work for social reproduction and daily survival. Women and youth, who hold fewer assets, are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of this devastating political economy.

Women—particularly working-class women—constitute one of the most marginalized “classes of labour” in contemporary Iran. The vast commentary on Iran’s political economy often ignores gender in analyses of labour exploitation, neoliberalism, and capitalist accumulation in the country. Although the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising forcefully foregrounded gendered inequality and bodily autonomy, dominant narratives largely under-articulated their entanglement with class relations, labour exploitation, and material conditions. Nonetheless, women’s labouring and reproductive bodies must remain central to any discussion of Iran’s crises of social reproduction, labour exploitation and neoliberal accumulation^[2]. The dominance of a narrow, mainstream definition of the ‘economy’—from which social reproduction is often excluded—has led to gender being frequently treated as merely ‘social’ or ‘cultural,’ rather than as a constitutive element of the political economy itself. Nonetheless, the rich literature in feminist Marxist and feminist political economy has long insisted otherwise, demonstrating that gendered social orders and the public–private sexual division of labour are not peripheral to capitalism, but foundational to its logics of accumulation and surplus value production. The historical relegation of women’s work to the home has therefore never been the outcome of an organic or “natural” inclination toward domesticity; rather, it has functioned as a central political-economic strategy for securing the conditions of social reproduction necessary for the reproduction of workers and soldiers through the unpaid labour of women. This structural reliance of political and economic systems on women’s unpaid labour helps explain the extensive empirical evidence from various crisis contexts—from the debt crises of Latin America and Asia in the 1990s, to Iraq under sanctions, to the aftermath of the 2008 global financial collapse—demonstrating how austerity and crises are never gender-neutral events, rather they repeatedly reconfigure gendered regimes of labour and social reproduction. Crucially, crises do not simply impact women’s labour unevenly; they are actively governed and responded to through gendered discourses and policy interventions. 

The past 15 years in Iran has in particular experienced a qualitative shift towards policies and discourses which have increasingly entrenched the public–private sexual division of labour.  These include measures such as promoting early marriage, restricting women’s access to formal/public employment, and a deeply coercive pro-natalist turn that has significantly intensified the erosion of reproductive rights. Amid a devastating economic crisis, these policies operate as a dual strategy of labour extraction. On the one hand, such policies confine women and their choices to unpaid socially reproductive work in the household, where they are increasingly expected to fill the gaps with their socially reproductive labour. On the other hand, since reliance on a single income has become untenable for most urban middle- and working-class households—and as many women resist marriage in response to the country’s persistently unequal family laws—these strategies and policies have increasingly pushed women into the informal labour market. Put differently, such policies have not simply kept women at home; rather, they have become key mechanisms for devaluing and informalizing women’s work. Official data on women’s employment in Iran show a strikingly low labour force participation rate—14.6 percent for women compared to 68.8 percent for men (2023)—despite high education levels and low fertility rates. Yet these data can significantly underrepresent women’s work in the informal economy. Iran’s informal economy—like that of much of the Global South and increasingly the Global North—is sizeable, accounting for 57 percent of employment in the country. Although the literature on women’s informal work in Iran remains rather thin, the prevalence of informal work among women, including high-skilled women, is increasingly acknowledged in Iran’s labour landscape. 

The informalisation of women’s work is not merely an indirect consequence of the state’s doubling down on its commitment to  a male breadwinner–female caregiver model of family amid economic crisis. Over the past decade, as women’s access to formal employment has been increasingly curtailed, the state has instead actively promoted home-based and small-scale informal activities for women. Such policies and initiatives are often cloaked in neoliberal discourses of “women’s empowerment” (Tavanmand-sazi-e-zanan) while in practice serving as poverty-management strategies directed toward the most socio-economically marginalized communities and female-headed households. Such policies, as I have argued elsewhere, have facilitated the emergence of a feminization of survival in Iran, as the state, households and the broader economy (and especially the private sector), increasingly rely on women’s unpaid and informal labour for their survival. In effect, these policies have systematically offloaded the burdens of social reproduction and survival onto women’s labouring and reproductive bodies, rendering their unpaid and underpaid work a cornerstone of the  everyday political economy of social reproduction and survival in the country. Such policies, hence, should be understood as integral to Iran’s adaptation to an authoritarian neoliberal regime that, as Ida Nikou emphasizes in her contribution to this collection, increasingly relies on coercive methods and precarity as mechanisms of labour and value extraction. 

If there is a single takeaway from this analysis, it is that the crisis of life in Iran defies easy containment within binaries. Instead, it is the product of decades of an ever-tightening sanctions regime intertwined with an increasingly neoliberal, authoritarian, and patriarchal state—one that has not only devalued labor and deepened class inequalities but has also offloaded the burdens of social reproduction and daily survival onto households, and ultimately onto women. Gender, too often overlooked in analyses of Iran’s crises and neoliberal governance, lies at the very heart of the state’s management of this widespread crisis of life. Patriarchal intensification has, thus, marched in step with austerity measures and sanctions-fueled crises, making gendered oppression a central mechanism of labor exploitation and value extraction. This analysis also foregrounds the political and analytical imperative of beginning with the experiences of working-class women in Iran, whose lived and laboring realities reveal the dense entanglements of sanctions and decades of  imperial aggression with regimes of neoliberal accumulation, patriarchal governance, and authoritarian power. Crucially, such a vantage point and analysis lays bare the banality of analytical and political shortcuts: frameworks that either strip anti-imperialism of its class and social foundations, or detach gendered oppression and discourses of bodily autonomy from its material and global context. These shortcuts are never neutral; they enact violence, masking one injustice in the service of another and leaving the very conditions of life vulnerable to further exploitation.

The task of an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian feminist project is, therefore, to foreground these entanglements while rejecting such analytical - and political, shortcuts. Principled solidarity must begin with an analysis that takes these co-constitutive relations seriously. From this vantage, a categorical rejection of imperial practices—sanctions and military interventions alike—is unavoidable: as I have argued here, sanctions have not weakened authoritarianism, at least not in any progressive sense; rather, they have fragmented and diminished the means of social reproduction, intensified classed and gendered inequalities, and constrained the very conditions of life itself. Yet critique of imperial power does not absolve the Iranian state, whose massively repressive apparatus has further foreclosed the possibilities for both life and progressive politics.

Nor can we afford to retreat into cynicism or resignation in the face of violent attempts by imperialist, Zionist, and monarchist forces to co-opt protests. Such (non)engagement only surrenders the ground of solidarity to reactionary forces, further undermining the prospects for progressive struggle within Iran. The brutal crackdown on protesters, combined with these external interventions, shows how quickly spaces for both life and political possibility are being foreclosed. Yet even as these spaces narrow, Iranians inside Iran continue to generate political meaning, even in the most fragile forms. Dancing while mourning, in particular, has emerged as a gesture that points toward a horizon of resistance, hope and life itself, even as such horizons rapidly shrink. 

We must learn to do the same: to cultivate a language and a practice of solidarity capable of resisting both authoritarian repression and imperial co-optation and intervention. Even when such politics cannot easily flourish, the ethical imperative to remain committed to life—and to the conditions that make life livable—remains non-negotiable. To uphold that commitment, even amidst despair, is not naïveté; it is a political necessity.