A Sound Power of Presence

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, female vocalists in Iran have been banned from singing solo in public under the assumption that the feminine voice can morally corrupt society. Despite this repressive context, silence has never been the case and women have sustained their careers through a myriad of subversive strategies.

This talk explores these strategies through the career of Masoumeh Mehrali, a prodigy of the legendary Mohammad Reza Shajarian in the 1980s, whose story exemplifies the challenges of a master female vocalist sustaining a career without the privileges of prerevolutionary fame. Over the past forty-six years, in addition to establishing herself as master musician, she has also trained a new generation of female singers who continue to challenge the limits of the ban’s enforcement.

Building on Assef Bayat’s concepts of “power of presence,” “social non-movements,” and “quiet encroachment” within authoritarian systems, I consider how women’s consistent presence in the musical arena has changed the standards of permissibility since 2006 when my fieldwork began. Importantly, the morally sound nature of these presences—as in Mehrali’s work that synthesizes the feminine voice, music, and Sufi poetry—present alternative modes of subversive ethics that implicitly challenge the theocratic status-quo. Thus, women’s online and underground performances, as well as their established networks of transmission, articulate new “ethical feminine voices” that negate the assumptions of their voices’ immorality.

This talk also explores how today’s musical culture harnesses a unique power to imagine and perform alternative realities on online platforms, dismantling the ideological foundations of authoritarian regimes in a manner that eludes their policing tools.