Yasmine Ansari

My name is Yasmine Ansari, and I am a PhD student in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I hold an MSc degree in International Relations of the Middle East from the University of Edinburgh and a BA degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and International Studies from Seattle University. My research interests include Middle Eastern women’s and gender history, feminist oral history, feminist biopolitics, reproductive justice, and reproductive histories and politics in the modern Middle East.

In my MSc dissertation, I examined the history of reproductive politics, its transformations, and its related gendered effects under the Islamic Republic. Utilizing a wide range of primary and secondary sources in Farsi and English, I introduced a new periodization of post-revolutionary Iran based on various regimes of reproductive governance enacted since 1979 and demonstrated the Islamic Republic’s strategies for managing population size and policing women’s reproductive bodies and practices in each period.

Pursuing a PhD degree in GWS at UW-Madison, I aim to extend this work, focusing on the history and politics of abortion in post-revolutionary Iran. While existing scholarship has addressed the main determinants and possible causes of demographic anxieties, as well as the evolution of population policies and family planning programs under the Islamic Republic, this body of work provides little historical perspective on reproductive violence, the rise of reproductive surveillance, and the reproductive justice movement in Iran. In this context, my envisioned PhD project will address these limitations and chart new territory in the social and political history of reproduction in post-revolutionary Iran.