Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, female vocalists in Iran have been banned from singing solo in public under the assumption that the musical feminine voice will corrupt society. Despite this repressive context, silence has never been the case and women have sustained their careers through a myriad of subversive strategies.

This talk explores these strategies through the career of Masoumeh Mehrali, a prodigy of the legendary Mohammad Reza Shajarian in the 1980s, whose story exemplifies the challenges of a master female vocalist sustaining a career without the privileges of prerevolutionary fame. Over the past forty-six years, in addition to establishing herself as master musician, she has also trained a new generation of female singers who continue to challenge the limits of the ban’s enforcement.

Building on Assef Bayat’s concepts of “power of presence,” “social non-movements,” and “quiet encroachment” within authoritarian systems, this talk considers how women’s consistent presence in the musical arena has changed the standards of permissibility since 2005—drawing on a cumulative eight years of fieldwork over a nineteen-year span. Importantly the nature of these presences—i.e., Mehrali’s work that synthesizes the feminine voice, music, and Sufi poetry—function as alternative modes of subversive ethics. Thus, women’s online and underground performances, as well as their established networks of transmission, articulate new “ethical feminine voices” that negate the assumptions of their voices’ immorality.

This talk further explores how today’s musical culture harnesses a unique power to imagine and perform alternative realities on online platforms, posing threats to the ideological foundations of authoritarian regimes in a manner that eludes their policing tools.

Payam Yousefi (PhD Harvard, 2023) is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Florida specializing in the intersections of music and politics in the Middle East and the US. Currently Yousefi is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Yale Department of Music and a Long-term Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. His book project titled, Subversive Sounds: Music and Authoritarianism in Modern Iran tells multiple stories of how Iranian musicians’ have transcended authoritarian controls over the past 19 years. Presenting case studies in four genres—traditional, classical, sacred, and popular—the book argues for music’s efficacy as a tool to inscribe material changes in authoritarian political contexts where explicit protest is violently suppressed. Importantly, Yousefi explores how musicians’ ethically framed practices, not only mediate social movements, but also imagine and enact new socio-political futures. His past research on the musical resistance among female vocalists in Iran was awarded both the “Charles Seeger Prize (2019)” and the “James T. Koetting Prize (2018)” by the Society for Ethnomusicology. In 2023 he was awarded SEM’s “Religion, Music, and Sound Section Paper Prize” for his research on Anti-Theocracy Protests in Iranian Shi’ite Chanting Rituals.  Most recently, his solo album for the kamāncheh, Songs of Hope (2025) was awarded a Global Music Award, showcasing his improvisatory and compositional prowess in the Persian dastgāh tradition. His forthcoming scholarship includes a chapter in Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society, ed. Siamdoust & Chehabi, where he considers the non-coercive power of Iranian women’s vocal performances in online and offline counter-publics—arguing that women’s subversive musical performances play on “social poetics” to engender contrasting notions of respectability, in effect limiting the power of authorities to enforce restrictions.  At the University of Florida Yousefi is also affiliate faculty in the Center for Global Islamic Studies and the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship. In addition to this he founded and directs UF’s Persian Music Ensemble.

Part of the Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts

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