Bibliographic record
Abstract
IRAN We Lived to Tell: Political Prison Memoirs of Iranian Women, by Azadeh Agah, Sousan Mehr, and Shadi Parsi. Toronto, Canada: McGilligan Books, 2007. 239 pages. $22.95. With the increasing participation of women in recent revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, We Lived to Tell is an important contribution to thinking about women's agency and resistance. It is also an important addition to recent publications of memoirs of women political prisoners. These include Fatna el Bouih's Talk of Darkness de scribing the experiences of Moroccan women political prisoners under the reign of King Hassan II, and Aisha Odeh's Dreams of Freedom describing those of Palestinian women political prisoners under the Israeli occupation. We Lived to Tell records the experiences of three women political prisoners during the Cultural Revolution in Iran in the 1980s. The book is introduced by Shahrzad Mojab. It is divided into three sections that document the stories of Sousan Mehr, Azadeh Agah, and Shadi Parsi as experienced and written by them. The three narratives go beyond the individual stories to constitute a testimony to those of friends and comrades in prison. The book addresses the question of what it means to remember and record these experiences and the wider political implications of such acts. It also raises the question of how state and religion collude in disciplining women's bodies and sexuality. Women political prisoners were tortured, denigrated and vilified for being women and claiming an oppositional space. These women ruptured the boundaries of patriarchal-religious submissiveness, pushed their sexualized bodies into the public sphere and claimed rights (p. 9). The book depicts the differences as well as the bonds between women in prison. It relies on reflexive methodology and on diary and memory to record these experiences. We Lived to Tell provides a detailed description of torture that included an assault on women's political agency and autonomy. Torture in this context is gendered as the women were targeted by the Iranian authorities for opposing the state and for doing so as women. As the prison authorities controlled the minute details of these women's lives, they thought of the prisoners as godless creatures that did not deserve to live like human beings (p. 78). Their goal to make us as miserable and obedient as possible. Anything that made us happy or kept us busy and creative became an object of punishment (p. 88). The authorities believed we all needed to come to terms with our past, repent our 'sins,' and form new beliefs and attitudes toward the system. Any 'distracting' activity was deemed not conducive to positive change (p. 112). The book depicts the variety of modes of resistance that the women employed to survive that ranged from faith and devotion to their beliefs, crying, consoling, and confiding in each other. The main challenge was to remain sane and loyal to their essence of humanity as they endured the physical and psychological torture and the divide and conquer policies of the prison authorities. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".