Sara Hassani

“In the Wake of Woman” investigates the high rates of self-immolation among young women in Iran. Through rigorous historical research and interviews with survivors of self-immolation, their doctors, caregivers, advocates, families, friends, and neighbors, it offers a carefully contextualized reconstruction of the experiences of women who are typically dismissed as irrational in the official discourse and largely neglected by Western scholars. “In the Wake of Woman” unsettles prevailing notions of the morality police and theorizes its expansive and intimate reach, illuminating the multidimensional operation of police power enacted on women’s bodies in their daily lives and the unconventional political agency they exercise under and against that police power.

This dissertation investigates the steep and gendered rates of self-immolation plaguing the domestic sphere in the Persian belt countries of Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and mounts a conceptual challenge to common distinctions between self-destructive acts of resistance and suicide in the study of politics. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews with survivors of self-immolation, nurses, burn surgeons, and civil society actors, as well as 200 qualitative surveys from across the region, this project challenges the pathologizing rationalizations characteristic of epidemiological accounts of self-burning and theorizes this lethal and affective form of agency and protest through the lens of marginalized actors who exist within the cultural, political, and socioeconomic realities of apartheid.