“The Subaltern Citizen and the Meaning of Voting: An Analysis of the Lived Experiences of Women in the Javadieh Neighborhood of Bojnourd during the 2024 Elections”

This study explores the lived experiences of subaltern women in relation to their participation in Iran’s 2024 presidential election, using Max van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenological approach. The research was conducted in the Javadieh neighborhood of Bojnourd, a social context where women occupy intersecting positions of gendered, class-based, cultural, and spatial subalternity. The central question guiding the study asks how electoral participation is experienced and what meanings it holds for these women within their lived horizons.



The study is informed by a theoretical perspective that brings together Subaltern Studies—particularly Gayatri Spivak’s notion of the “subaltern”—and Patricia Hill Collins’s “matrix of domination.” Data were generated through thirteen semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis.



Findings reveal that electoral participation among the women studied is largely shaped within dominant power structures, with limited reliance on conscious political agency or critical choice. Participation often reproduces unequal relations of power rather than challenging them.



By engaging the concept of the “subaltern citizen,” the study highlights the gap between formal models of political participation and the lived experiences of marginalized groups. It shows how notions such as “political participation” and “democracy” acquire situated, context-dependent meanings in subaltern settings, underscoring the need to rethink dominant democratic paradigms through the lens of marginalized lifeworlds.