Preface: how to read this book; 1. Introduction: the personal is political: how I came to write this book; 2. Tied up in Tehran: a metaphor; 3. How our mothers drive us crazy: hospitality, ritual and the burden of the social; 4. Food as a social relation: Sabzi and the question of household skilled labor; 5. Elegy or the rule of the fathers/the break with the past; 6. Democratic intimacies: jokes, sex, and ta'arof; 7. Through the looking glass: reflexive cinema and society in post-revolutionary Iran; 8.

Women, life, freedom: one movement out of two legacies; 9. Being a public woman: streets, cars, crimes, and the shifting calculus of moral accountability; 10. Shopping for shoes: consumer identity, commodity fetishism, and gender as a brand; 11. We are more than one, when we speak together: collective art, plural possibilities, and the horizon of utopia; 12. Coda: thinking in practice: Arendt, Foucault, and the challenge of freedom.