[1] She started teaching the anthropology of gender and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Bergen in 1986, completing her PhD there in 1996.
[2] The essay was published in the book Women in the Middle East: Perceptions, Realities, and Struggles for Liberation edited by Afshar Haleh.
Kamalkhani's this essay focuses on complex religious rituals of Shiraz women as a unique way of performing their identities and political agency.
The gatherings are referred as rowzeh (or rowzeh-zanāneh) which are stories about the Islamic saints (Imams) and oral narratives about the historical events significant for Iranian Shiism.
[5] As a native Iranian anthropologist, Kamalkhani describes that women-only religious meetings offered Iranian women public space to perform their identities as in most denominations of Islam and in Muslim cultures, women have comparatively limited participation in public space and Mosques.