Making Sense of Law: Iranian Women’s Informal Networks and Community Building in Navigating Legal Alienation

This paper examines the ways Iranian women overcome legal alienation through informal networking and community building to counter structural gendered oppression. When discussing Iranian women’s encounters with the legal system, the body of literature often overlooks how lay people navigate a highly specialized field. This paper addresses this gap by studying individual women's struggles to overcome legal alienation and exclusion in the juridical field. Focusing on the women’s individual cases and their attempts to redress their grievances, this paper investigates sources women use to understand legal procedures and translate the laws. Adapting Bourdieu’s account of the juridical field and employing netnography, this research studies how women network for their legal cause and navigate their entry into the juridical field. It analyzes a popular online social forum (Ninisite), widely used by housewives and mothers, as an online ethnographic site and examines the dynamics, interactions, and relationships within the forum.

A preliminary analysis of interactions within the forum from 2020 to 2024 reveals that women engage in dynamic exchanges on topics such as divorce, custody, alimony, rebellious wife behaviour, and extramarital relationships. Women use the platform to share experiences, seek legal advice, translate complex legal terms, interpret laws and legal procedures, and collectively make sense of their legal rights. The study highlights how women use these informal, supportive networks to challenge legal exclusions, bridge knowledge gaps, and navigate the juridical field more effectively. This research contributes to our understanding of gender inequality and legal alienation by elucidating the role of informal community building in helping women confront discriminatory legal structures. Rather than depicting women as helpless and passive victims of rights violations or as unknown and silent heroines of resistance, this study illustrates how women actively engage with legal processes, create networks, and make sense of the law in their everyday lives.