IranAlthough Iranian youth have been the subject of
state development policies for several decades, the
fully-fledged arrival of what can be and has been
identified in the Iranian public discourse as a youth
culture and movement must be traced to the post-
revolutionary era, particularly in the mid to late
1990s. In the 1960s and 1970s various attempts
were made to organize and create public spaces – for
example, the Kàkh-i Javànàn (Palace of Youth) or
summer and athletic camps – for the youth of both
sexes to encourage their congregation and engage-
ment in social and cultural activities. However, it is
in the later period that the immediate post-revolu-
tionary population boom of the early 1980s con-
fronts the Iranian Islamist state with difficult youth
related issues to manage. Figures ranging from 60 to
70 percent have been reported regarding the per-
centage of the Iranian population that is young,
depending on the cut-off age used. According to the
Iran Statistical Yearbook 1378/1999, which is based
on the 1996 census, approximately 60 percent of the
Iranian population in 1996 was under the age of 24.
This population bulge is expected to continue until
the latter part of the current decade, when it will
begin to taper off owing to the implementation of
population control policies in the late 1980s.
The increasing number of youth coupled with the
Islamist state’s harsh policies toward many forms
of social and public activities, ranging from en-
forced Islamic dress codes (mostly for women but
also for men) to public inhibitions or outright ban
on certain types of social interaction among men
and women, as well as on many cultural activities
such as concerts and other forms of entertainment,
have made Iranian youth increasingly restless since
the 1990s. While not articulated in an organized
social movement, the demands and needs associ-
ated with Iranian youth have loosely but clearly
manifested themselves in the Iranian fledgling
press; student demonstrations for increased politi-
cal, social, and cultural freedom; unorganized but
nevertheless systematic disobedience of publicly
enforced Islamic dress codes and guidelines for
proper Islamic behavior in public; electoral behav-
ior; and clandestine cultural activities in music and
the arts. These disparate political, social, and cul-
tural activities have become so prominent and
Youth Culture and Movements
troublesome for the Islamic Republic that the social
category of “youth” and what to do about their
needs, demands, and problems have become an
integral part of the Iranian public discourse.
In this public discourse, however, the nature of
the relationship between gender related issues and
the loosely knit youth movement is not yet clear. In
fact, the categories of “youth” and “women” are
generally discussed as though they are completely
separate entities, with distinct problems and issues.
At the same time, there seems to be an unstated
assumption that the problems of young men and
women are largely the same: the existence of an
autocratic and moralistic state that treats both with
disdain; imposes rigid guidelines on their public
and even private behavior; inhibits their political
participation; is incapable of creating suitable em-
ployment opportunities for their increasing num-
bers; and is unable to deal forthrightly with severe
social problems such as prostitution and drug abuse
among youth. As such, the particular problems
gender related issues pose for Iranian youth within
and beyond the dictates of the Islamic theocracy are
not yet adequately conceptualized. There are dis-
cussions of important social issues, such as the rise
in number of young female prostitutes or runaway
girls (some of whom trans-dress as boys in order to
survive in the streets), in Iran’s women’s press and
the press directed at youth. But there has been little
systematic discussion of how gender dynamics
make the lives of youth in the confines of the
Islamic Republic differentiated and varied. Sim-
ilarly, until recently there has been very little cri-
tique of the continued dominance of young men in
the more organized parts of the youth movement
such as the student movement. This is despite the
fact that young Iranian women through a variety of
activities, ranging from their continued defiance of
the Islamic dress code, to their now higher accept-
ance rate at the universities, to their strong voice in
arts and literature, have been critical contributors
to the emergence and sustenance of the youth move-
ment and culture. However, the situation is rapidly
changing. The increasing presence of younger
women in the Iranian press, the creation of feminist
Internet sites such as <www.womeniniran.org> run
by a younger generation of women activists, and
the explosion of young Iranian web bloggers, many
of whom are women, are bound to significantly