This roundtable will explore the significance for Middle East studies and related fields of a new monograph on contemporary Iranian social protest through a feminist lens, which will be published in December 2024 by Northwestern University Press. The author of the book and other scholars will dialogue about how the book’s themes are connected to broader intellectual projects in social movement studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and transnational feminist and queer theory.
The author will first share remarks on the book’s major themes. The Iranian freedom struggle comprises over a century of interlocking movements for liberation from domestic dictatorship and foreign—including U.S.—imperialism. It has encompassed two revolutions, and includes uprisings since the 1979 Iranian revolution, when a newly minted dictatorship, the Islamic Republic, blocked the realization of freedom. Deeply grounded in this historical context, the book offers a refreshingly intersectional analysis of how progressive and radical movement builders renewed their communities’ visions of liberation in the decades following 1979, despite renewed dictatorship under the Islamic Republic as well as continued foreign imperialisms. Challenging narratives that treat working-class, feminist, queer, and oppressed ethnic groups’ movements as separate spheres in Iranian society, the author explores perspectives which have renewed the Iranian freedom struggle by tending to how capitalist, patriarchal, and ethno-racial power intersect domestically and internationally. Through analysis of a rich array of sources including in-depth oral histories with key, yet underrecognized, Iranian feminist, labor, and student organizers as well as resistance literature and socially engaged art, this book shows how a segment of movement builders re-envisioned radical democratic self-determination for all—and no less than all—Iranians in struggle. Such renewed visions of liberation have only been possible, the author demonstrates, by engaging lessons from earlier generations of protest and kindred struggles globally.
Other scholars on the roundtable, who hail from fields as diverse as anthropology, gender studies, and peace and conflict studies, and who study sites as diverse as Iran, Palestine, Kurdistan, and Turkey, will engage the significance of the book’s conclusions in relation to regional politics broadly. How does the book intervene in questions of internationalist solidarity among movements across the region? How do the feminist and queer perspectives at the heart of the book interlock with regional and transnational feminist and queer perspectives? How does the book invite readers to reconsider the relationship between the universal and the particular in radical politics? Participants explore these and related questions.
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In my remarks, I will explore the forms of activism and art my book centers, and what these mean for radical intersectional feminist political projects across the Middle East broadly. My book explores the activism, intellectual work, and art of diverse Iranians who have transformed the very meaning of freedom as an idea in their society. Such diverse interlocutors include teacher unionists who advocated a working-class feminist perspective in Iran’s labor movement, student activists who were the first to organize Marxist student organizations since the Islamic Republic’s brutal repression of the revolutionary left in the 1980s, novelists whose work provides crucial historical memory for the place of gender justice in the Iranian freedom struggle, and artists whose work engages the politics of queer people’s freedom. I show how these disparate political communities shaped one another, and how they shared an understanding of the Iranian freedom struggle that advocated a deeply gender-conscious and cross-group vision of liberation. These voices tended to the heterogeneity of people in struggle in Iran, emphasizing the experiences of historically marginalized religious and ethnic groups in the society, including Kurds, Arabs, Afghan migrants, Lors, Afro-Iranians, Azerbaijanis, Baluchis, and others subject to a Persian-centric, Shia Islamic Republic. Thus, I will also discuss how Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, which was a gender justice rebellion that crossed ethnic lines, puts the intersectional feminist perspective explored throughout my book in sharp relief. While the progressive and radical movement builders centered in the book form a small segment of the millions who have protested for change in Iran, I show how they have undertaken the complex task of attempting meaningful solidarity across interlocking oppressions. Thus, I argue that their work holds potential to inspire broad swathes of the society who want change.
These movement participants also rejected what they viewed as a false choice between embracing a US imperialist agenda seeking to co-opt their movements on the one hand, and submitting to the Iranian state which represses them in the name of anti-imperialism on the other. In rejecting this false choice, they forged an internationalist consciousness which understood the Iranian freedom struggle as intimately interconnected with liberation struggles elsewhere. The book shows that such internationalism was shaped by regional and global episodes of revolt, including the 2011 Arab revolutions as well as a wave of global protests in 2019 for related forms of political and economic justice.
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This new monograph is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on Iranian social movements and their relationship to transnational queer and feminist knowledge production. In my remarks, I will focus on the much needed interventions the book makes on the politics of gender justice and queer freedom in Iran, and how these connect to my own work on queer Palestinian activism. In Palestine, queer people face intersecting oppressions from the Israeli’s state settler colonial ethnocracy on the one hand, and toxic masculinity and heteronormativity on the other, including among other Palestinians. While I have termed this phenomenon, “ethnoheteronormativity,” the author of the book under discussion speaks to a related set of power relations facing queer Iranians. The author advances the instructive concept of “post/revolutionary conditions,” to describe the ways in which Iranian social movements find ways to survive and thrive in spite of a false choice presented to them by global geopolitics between submitting to a US imperialist agenda on the one hand that co-opts their movements for its own economic and geopolitical interests, and submitting to the Iranian state on the other which brutally represses them under the false pretense that they are agents of Israel and the United States. This situation has particular consequences for queer Iranians, who are marginalized even within broader Iranian democratic movements. Scholars of queer and feminist issues in Palestine and Iran have much to gain from this conversation. While Israel purports to be a friend to Iranian democratic movements, and the Islamic Republic purports to be a friend to the Palestinian people, both states take part in destructive practices that foreclose the possibility of liberation from interlocking oppressions for diverse peoples in the region. Putting queer Palestinian and queer Iranian experiences in dialogue with one another therefore holds potential to forge a transformative intersectional politics that may serve as an alternative to entrenched transnational structures of imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and authoritarianism.
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This book is a major contribution to the study of contemporary democratic social movements in Iran. I engage with the Marxist feminist theoretical underpinning of the book, that aims to figure how all forms of social oppression, whether rooted in sexuality or nationality, are interconnected with forms of exploitation like class, poverty, and unemployment. Through a close reading of selected chapters, particularly the chapter on women teachers’ activism in teachers’ unions and the chapter on student activists in the early 2000s who were the first to form socialist student groups since the Islamic State's suppression of the left in the 1980s, I aim to explore the book’s intervention regarding the “renewal” and indeed transformation of radical political thought among the generation that came of age after the 1979 Revolution. Further, while the conclusion analyzes the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” feminist movement, also known as Jîna’s Uprising, my remarks will tease the implications of this analysis for the future possibility of radical social transformation in Iran. In my own current scholarly work, I consider Jîna’s Uprising a portal offering an entry into a realm of possibilities for renewed historical and theoretical analysis on questions of political struggle. The Uprising has left its mark on people's consciousness and has profoundly impacted modes of cultural expression of body, sexuality, and political imagination. It has remade notions of national belonging and exclusion, bolstered the understanding of social cleavages, and challenged all forms of power structure, notably the state, patriarchy, religion, and hetero-nationalism. In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2003), Robin Kelly argues that to envision a possible better world, we must examine the struggle and achievements of those who dared to imagine it and fought to make the change. The new monograph featured in this roundtable follows in this tradition, by creatively drawing upon the grounded knowledges of Iranian writers, intellectuals, students, workers, and activists who saw the struggle for freedom and equality in their society as their primary task.
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Towards Transnational Solidarity for Freedom
This book makes a politically inspiring and culturally innovative reading of what the author calls “post/revolutionary conditions” in Iran. My discussion will focus on the significance of this reading for students of radical politics and transnational solidarity carried out in and beyond the Middle East. The term “post/revolutionary” refers not only to the aftermath of the revolution that killed its own children but also to revolutionary potentials ebbing and flowing in the present. As a way of unearthing these potentials, the author examines political as well as cultural resistance across space and time. The book chapters take readers from working-class feminist unions to Hushidar Mortezaie’s artwork, from student movements of the early 2000s to Omer Khayyam’s poems, and from oppressed indigenous groups in Iran to Martin Luther King’s speeches. By interweaving different threads of the collective and the individual, the book invites us to rethink the relationship between the particular and the universal in radical politics.
In my presentation, I will first discuss if and how social movements transcend the temporal and spatial bounds of individual and collective action. Second, I will explore the ways in which the author’s writing itself is enacting such transcendence. For this purpose, I engage with the two other concepts the author uses in the book: liberation and freedom. If liberation assumes and reacts to an existing system of power, (positive) freedom necessitates the imagination of a new horizon for politics yet to come. By connecting collective historical and imaginative individual archives, the book pushes us to think beyond the diagnosis of existing power structures. While a common enemy defined through a truly intersectional perspective is the necessary ground of flight for transnational solidarity, that ground has to be left behind to achieve freedom both from the common enemy and to a new future. The book shows us that it is through different art forms (poems, movies, and dream images) that a universal vision of freedom can be elicited by particular social movements. To conclude, I approach this book as a provocation to think about the relationship between the particular and the universal to interrogate the possibilities of a transnational struggle that not only diagnoses what needs to be upended but strives to create a vision for the day after liberation.
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In Vital Decomposition, Kristina Lyons (2020) discusses the conditions of life, argroecology, and politics in Putumaya, an Amazonian region in Colombia, where the impact of colonialism, US war on drugs, state and paramilitary violence, has engendered such an alienation that people do not know “where they are standing.” Lyons illustrates how her interlocutors realize that under these circumstances, “There is no outside or self/collective assured position from which to take action.. no guaranteed paradigm to follow”. They hence embrace a “form of life .. that may find a delicate balance between opposing, enduring, and transforming”. In attempting to see the tenacity of life in the midst of war and violence, hope when hoping is risky, and resist when one does not know where one is standing, they disrupt conventional meanings and boundaries of politics, life, death and revolution. Similarly, dealing with the struggles for social justice and freedom in post-revolutionary Iran, the book centered in this roundtable unsettles the binaries of everyday life and politics, challenging various conventional scholarly approaches to resistance in post-revolutionary Iran.
The dominant discourses often contribute to the condition that renders it hard for many Iranians to know where they are standing. The book narrates how upon the intricately shaky grounds some Iranian activists strive to conjure a different mode of living, dreaming, imagining, and resisting, embracing a notion of life and politics that are not confined in conventional binaries, or tied to monotonic fixed identities. They struggle to enliven those forms of life that are at once local and global, grounded in the everyday yet refreshingly transformative. Viewing life and politics as intertwined allows the author to highlight how they sink into the existing reality "to turn it over, breathing in new life that also potentiates different possibilities for and relations with death."
