From Exclusion to Conditional Inclusion: Women and Professional Musicianship in Tehran

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From Exclusion to Conditional Inclusion: 
Women and Professional Musicianship in Tehran

In the ever growing field of literature on the social lives of Iranian women, exclusion from various aspects of the public, including music-making spaces and processes, is often accentuated as the main obstacle Iranian women face. This emphasis disproportionately valorizes notions like defiance and subversion as women’s response to those exclusionary actions while overlooking a variety of other strategies Iranian women utilize. Responding to this challenge, my paper employs the concept of conditional inclusion,  to explore an array of Iranian women’s music-making practices that fall in a vast space between total exclusion and full inclusion. Conditional inclusion as an analytical lens unpacks a myriad of strategies that Iranian women employ to perceive, navigate, negotiate with, battle, and subvert the various acts of exclusion they face within the Iranian public.

Hadi Milanloo, University of Toronto
Hadi Milanloo is an ethnomusicology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto. Focusing on the music and lives of female instrumentalists who perform Iranian classical music in Tehran, Hadi’s doctoral project explores the intersections of music, gender, and resistance/resilience in Iran. He works towards an ethnomusicological approach that accounts for both aesthetic contributions and social activism of Iranian female musicians.
Hadi is also a musician and has studied Setar and the radif of Iranian Classical Music with Dariush Talai and Hamid Sokuti, among others.

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