Subscribe to the FI press list to receive monthly IV’s and special alerts from the Fourth International.
We want International Viewpoint; To do this, we welcome your feedback. Help us take a few minutes to complete our reader survey.
International Viewpoint is published under the duty of the Office of the Fourth International. Signed articles necessarily reflect editorial policy. Items can be reprinted with an acknowledgment of receipt and a direct link if possible.
Saturday, October 22, 2022, via Catherine Z. Sameh
Tweeter
ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, Middle East News Jadaliyya held a live verbal exchange on its Facebook and YouTube channels with five feminist academics from Iran and its diasporas to discuss the ongoing anti-government protests sparked by the killing of Mahsa (Jina) Amini. , a young Iranian Kurdish woman arrested for “abusive” hijab. [1]
I have had the privilege of being part of this group. Below, I offer some highlights of our collective discussion through my individual post-event reflections.
Feminist activism in Iran is not new. The existing uprising is the latest bankruptcy in more than a century of feminist activism and women’s rights in Iran. From the constitutional revolution of 1905-11 to the revolution of 1979, from the million-signature crusade of 2006-2009 to the green movement of 2009 to the economic protests of 2019, women have been provided as key social actors.
They fought alongside broader sectors of society, and autonomously, for democratization and gender equality. In the years and decades following the revolution, they rejected a discriminatory legal scheme that contradicted their enormous presence in society.
This now reflects a break with the reformist struggles of recent decades. The intensification of surveillance of women’s dress through morality policing under far-right President Ebrahim Raisi, the government’s deep mismanagement of the COVID pandemic and the economy, the worsening socio-economic. Hardship, inflation, opposition to sanctions and isolation of Iran, all combined to provoke widespread impoverishment and anger among the population under the signal of Amini’s death.
The majority is the fact that women, mostly young women, are leading this movement, that radical justice and women’s liberation are at the very core of their demands, and that protesters are calling for an end to the Islamic Republic and any new form of authoritarian patriarchy. .
The first feminist demonstration in the weeks following the 1979 revolution in reaction to Khomeini’s imposition of the compulsory hijab. In the decades since, the end of the obligatory hijab has not been the central or most pressured factor around which feminists have organized.
In periods of reformist governments, specifically under Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), the policing of women’s dress and loosest hijab, and issues such as citizenship status, rights in marriage and divorce, and custody of the most pressing and potentially winnable children.
The physical tactics of existing protesters — burning their hijabs in the streets, cutting their hair in public and online, sitting in cafes with hijabs and mandatory baggy clothing — are now a determined call to end the compulsory hijab in Iran.
These are not protests opposed to Islam, nor to the choice to wear the hijab. It is a refusal to be recruited into a state regime that sacrifices women’s bodies and lives for the sake of sovereignty and national security. Women with and without hijab protest together, and there is widespread confidence in society that the hijab will have to be voluntary.
Although for the uprising, the end of the obligatory hijab is not the last frontier of the movement and its aspirations. This is a remarkable increase that unites many sectors of society: women, youth, ethnic and devout minorities, students,[2] industry unions, artists, homosexuals, who are fed up with politics as usual.
It is deeply feminist in that it dreams of a broad systemic substitution and an end to patriarchal authority and political structures that militate violently against freedom and democratic participation for all.
Women in Iran have fought for feminism and gender equality for more than a century, yet their specific visions and express demands have been separated through a “post-revolution” policy. In the existing struggle, a struggle for self-determination of Iranians People, women’s issues and feminists are the center and soul.
Protesters put their bodies in the streets to demand their physical and political freedom. Women are no longer willing to postpone their autonomy to a long-term that will never come. Women’s freedom is the signal under which this new fabric of the global unfolds. Jin. Jiyan. Azadi. Zan. Zendegui. Azadi. Femme. La life. Freedom.
As I write, we are heading into a full weekend (October 1 and 2) of demonstrations of solidarity with the Iranian people.
The October 2 protests are in particular a call through Iranian feminists, some of whom actively participated in the One Million Signatures crusade, to support them. patriarchal authoritarianism everywhere.
Foreign protesters are not easy to show solidarity. Without intervention, but solidarity. No sanctions, but solidarity. As transnational feminists, we will have to build these visions of solidarity from below and not give ground to the so-called anti-imperialist stance of Raisi (or Putin or any other patriarchal dictator), nor to the interventionist policy of the so-called sanctions targets.
Feminists from around the world, from Afghanistan to India to Sudan, have been encouraged through the motion in Iran, writing statements of solidarity. [3] They associate the feminist uprising in Iran with their own struggles for self-determination and physical integrity, and with an end to patriarchal nationalism and authoritarianism, Islamic, Hindu, secular or otherwise.
Many feminists in the United States, Iran, and elsewhere associate the Iranian motion with the struggle for abortion and reproductive justice in the United States. These kinds of strong connections around struggles that are situated but connected around physical autonomy, democratic participation and self-determination. Determination is exactly what transnational feminist activists and scholars have been building for decades.
This is the time to deepen and renew this political and intellectual tradition. Whatever the final results of this uprising, Iran’s astonishingly brave comrades and their multi-gender comrades are an inspiration for a global crisis.
They reject recruitment into patriarchal authoritarianism and the bureaucracy of national belonging that are based on gender-differentiated violence, surveillance, security, citizenship and belonging and a tendency to the bureaucracy of death.
They build on a long and deep history of feminist struggle and, at the same time, create something new. Standing in the streets, these protesters, like so many protesters around the world, are another world.
They need a global liberation from militarized violence, state and national policies that organize and divide other people in terms of inequality and oppression, gender-based violence and discrimination, incarceration, a lot of bureaucracy of socioeconomic impoverishment, precariousness and isolation.
They aspire to a feminist global of love and care, unity and solidarity, a global one that affirms women, life and freedom. In the face of enormous repression and state violence, they are building that global.
NOTE: “On September 27, a song through Iranian musician Shervin Hajipour ‘broke’ Persian social media. He sings about the mass protests that began in Iran after the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini. It went viral, noticed 40 million times in 48 hours.
Source: November-December 2022, ATC 221.
If you like this article or find it useful, make a donation to International Viewpoint paintings. Just follow this link: Make a donation and enter the amount of your choice. One-time donations are welcome. But normal state donations are also imperative to our ongoing operation. See the last paragraph of this article to know the main points of our bank and draw a status order. Thank you.
[1] “In Her Name: Women Rise Up, State Violence, and Iran’s Future. “
[2] As I write, academics protesting at Tehran’s Sharif University have been beaten and arrested, while others have been trapped on campus. When the police let the trapped academics go, they shot them with rubber bullets.
[3] Many of those statements will be here in the coming weeks: https://www. jadaliyya. com/Country/47/Iran
Catherine Z. Sameh is an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is a member of Axis of Hope: Iranian Women’s Rights Activism cross Borders (University of Washington Press, 2019).
“The announcement of the mobilization seems a desperate step and one for a regime that had opted for the depoliticization of the masses. “
“The truth of the attack on the living criteria of running elegance passes through pomp and circumstance. “
“We will stand in solidarity with our Ukrainian comrades and our Russian comrades to contribute to the defeat of the Russian invasion in every and every conceivable way and help rebuild an independent and democratic Ukraine. “
Petition proposed through the European Network of Solidarity with Ukraine.
Statement through Samajawadi Janatha Sansadaya (Socialist People’s Forum)
International Viewpoint is published under the duty of the Office of the Fourth International. Signed articles necessarily reflect editorial policy. Items can be reprinted with an acknowledgment of receipt and a direct link if possible.