Conference Agenda

Iranian modern history can be analyzed through the lens of various collective behaviors, ranging from the Constitutional Revolution to the Woman-Life-Freedom movement, which unfolded in September 2022. Each of these uprisings emerges from conditions of profound political mistrust. However, groups from the heart of the society start to give meaning to mistrust through the emergence of movements, instead of evading it. Drawing on Foucault’s biopolitics, postcolonial feminism theory and psychoanalytic theories, this paper aims to conceptualize the Women-Life-Freedom as forms of collective containment in which a population attempts to repair historical and contemporary traumas.

Nevertheless, this movement is repeatedly disrupted by a patriarchal state that works to convert politically productive mistrust into paralyzing and meaningless distrust by producing paranoia, confusion, and attack on linking. Misinformation and violence fracture the collective alpha-function and disorganize emerging forms of agency. It is thus important to take a closer look at how this process develops.

Over time, sexual violence and patriarchal laws continue to persist in multiple forms within society, and the women’s narratives that emerge in the therapy room bear witness to this reality. This study seeks to address the question of whether, despite pervasive distrust in the social sphere, therapeutic sessions can serve as a continuation of the movement’s goals by repairing trust, holding collective trauma and restoring agency?

This paper examines Nazar (the “evil eye”), widely understood as a gaze believed to spoil what is good such as beauty, prosperity, health. Protective rituals, such as stringing chilies and lemons across doorways, veiling, serve as defense against the threat of being harmed by another’s gaze. While such practices are pervasive across caste, class, and religious communities in India, they are profoundly gendered, positioning women as especially vulnerable to Nazar, thereby reinforcing patriarchal logics of fragility and protection.

Drawing on Freud’s account of the uncanny, Klein’s formulations of envy, and contemporary South Asian psychoanalytic writing (Nupur Dhingra Paiva, Shifa Haq, and Amrita Narayan), I propose that Nazar functions not only as a defense against projected hostility, but as a cultural technology for regulating women’s visibility and desire.

To illustrate this, I read the film Laapataa Ladies (Rao, 2024) as a clinical-cultural text, to trace how the protagonists’ negotiations with veiling move from compliance to tactical re-signification. Using Lacan’s concepts of the gaze, constitutive lack (−ϕ), the big Other, and topological inversion, I explore how three women in the film negotiate this structure: Phool through a gradual reconfiguration of desire within marriage; Jaya through strategic masquerade that exposes inconsistency in the patriarchal gaze; and Manju Maai through a subversive femininity that short-circuits the “good woman” ideal. The paper shows how agency emerges through working within contradiction, at the point where symbolic guarantees fail; where trust turns into mistrust, not only as a crisis, but as an epistemic opening to another kind of knowledge.

The paper addresses the conference theme by showing how culturally sanctioned protective systems both organize trust and generate mistrust, and how this rupture can yield new forms of knowing.

The proposed paper is an attempt to understand the erotic economy of the heteronormative family. The paper works with embodied voice of the Indian bride and their accounts of ‘wedding night’ (Suhag Raat). Indian wedding night is a site of both semantic and erotic excess. The proliferative discourse around wedding and regulative discourse around sexuality create this spectacle and presents an empirical site to understand what is offered to women in Patriarchy and what they actually receive. The paper draws its energy from its ambivalent relationship with Psychoanalysis and treats it as a ‘enabling violence’. It uses psychoanalytic concepts such as free association and active reconstruction in generating and analysing narratives around this experience. But the paper is also cautious of the status of Psychoanalysis as a Master Discourse and its tendency to ‘lend meaning’ to every culture and context, and in the process flattens out the materiality of bodies and voices. To account for the embodied voice of women the paper presents wedding chamber as a location of knowledge production and tries to re-read ideas of taboo and virginity with a feminist and post-colonial lens.

Wedding night is presented in the culture as the ultimate site of safety, trust and security.A sanitized space of conjugal intimacy, wedding and wedding night is projected as the beginning of sacred companionship in the Indian culture. But I wish to show how the women’s narrative reconstruction of this experience recast it as a potential site of violation and erotic danger. Here embodied voice is presented as a theoretical concept and psychological method that can work at the fissures of dominant narratives , carrying subversive knowledge registers with it.