Translating a Revolution

Iranian Armenian women are an understudied, minoritized community in both their home country of Iran and their adopted country of the United States. In Translating a Revolution, Claudia Yaghoobi seeks to fill this gap by uncovering the powerful, untold stories of Armenian women who have navigated life across Iran and the United States. Using an interdisciplinary method that weaves oral histories with autoethnography, archival research, and critical theory, Yaghoobi examines the ethnic, gender, religion, race, and class-related marginalization that these women have experienced in both countries for almost half a century.

Moving between intimate life narratives and broader historical context, Yaghoobi reveals how war, discrimination, migration, genocide, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century Iranian and American nationalism have impacted her interlocutors and their identity: first as an ethno-religious minoritized community in Iran and later as racialized subjects in the United States.

Through an intersectional approach that centers everyday experiences from education and employment to clothing, family life, and encounters with Islamophobia, Yaghoobi shows how Armenian women navigate systems of power while forging their own paths. In so doing, she offers a new perspective on women’s agency, tenacity, and world-making, and contributes to conversations about gender, migration, and race that cut across national and cultural borders.