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Normalizing Homophobic and Sexist Violence in Jina's Uprising
Abstract
The Iranian protests in the aftermath of Mahsa Jina Amini’s death are the percolation of long-time grievances resulting from the unrealized promises of the post-revolutionary Iranian state whose anti-imperialist Islamic nationalism aspired to shed economic injustices, inequalities, and the political oppression of the Pahlavi regime. The ever-increasing economic and wealth gap between most of the population and the economic elites who only constitute a small fraction of it, the unequal distribution of resources and the impoverishment of the provinces where ethnic minorities such as Kurds, Arabs, and Baluch people live, and the suppression of dissent and social freedoms have been pent up over four decades. While many workers, women, students, and activists have organized around demands for social and economic justice through slogans such as “Woman, Life, Freedom,” “Bread, Work, Freedom,” and “Bread, Roof, Freedom,” the mainstream opposition media that enjoys the resources to circumvent the Iranian state’s interruption of the internet service during the protests have utilized social media to amplify voices that derail these demands by using sexists and homophobic slogans. These hyper-sexualized slogans that normalize rape and sodomy, not only target the clergy, the Iranian security forces, and the Supreme Leader, but also their wives, mothers, and sisters, as well as any voice that refuses to succumb to a binary logic of “with or against” the “regime.” Focusing on the social media, I analyze the way that the Manichean logic that makes any nuanced in-between position impossible through accusations of cooptation with the Iranian regime, reproduces misogynistic and homophobic discourses, while instrumentalizing women’s bodies and laying claim to the liberation of all Iranian women. By exploring the way that “woman, life, freedom” is re-signified in multiple territorializations and in the struggle for political power through the rampant use of social media, I show how those segments of the Iranian diaspora that are implicated in the biopolitical and necropolitical practices and the geopolitical interests of the empire, perpetuate Islamophobia and racial queering, while instrumentalizing women’s and queer freedom. Paradoxically, despite their absolutist claims of opposition to the Iranian state, many of these diasporic groups and individuals repeat the strategies of surveillance, intimidation, and shaming that are used by the conservative elements among the Iranian state.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
None