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Women Reclaim their Voices in the Music of Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising
Abstract
In this paper, I argue that the eruption of women’s voices into public spaces in Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement was preceded by several years of practices of counterpublicness (Michael Warner 2002, Nancy Fraser 2016) and counterpublicity (Stephanie R. Larson 2018) in online communal spaces that culminated in a full-fledged musical response. State security forces fought these online performances legally if they became too popular, such as in the case of the Māhbānu women’s ensemble directed by the composer Majid Derakhshani, and used different strategies to deter women singers from holding large “private” concerts, effectively denying them publicness. With the outbreak of protests, however, women have harnessed both the content as well as strategies of previous performances to reclaim their voices, both literally and figuratively. They have taken traditional song lyrics and swapped in “adolescent sister” for “brother,” reformulated old anti-imperialist tunes to voice women’s struggles, rapped verses that “whip clerics’ cloaks with hair,” and re-written the anthem of the Islamic Republic to hail its “champion girls.” Scholars have theorized about the voice as a locus of agency (see Parapart & Parashar 2019), and we witnessed a progression of agentive action within the musical sphere leading up to the events of September 2022. By discussing prominent woman-voiced songs of the movement, and their visual and performative presentations, I will trace the feminist transformation of the sonic and musical sphere that centers women in this revolutionary narrative.
Discipline
Anthropology
Media Arts
Sociology
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
None