GENDER POLITICS IN IRAN AND THE LAST FORTY YEARS: ELEVEN STORIES
2019 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. Yet the turbulent events of late 2019 and early 2020 are stark reminders that Iranians continue to resist for their liberation. These events once again confirmed that the history, legacy, and freedom dreams of the 1979 Revolution are still bitterly contested, forty years later. Since the very beginning of that uprising, the status of gender politics and its relationship to the revolutionary project has been a site of debate and contestation both among revolutionary actors and outside commentators. Unlike previous journal special issues marking anniversary moments of the Iranian Revolution, this collection of essays, art, and creative writing emerged over the course of conversations in 2019 that centered projects of gender justice, women’s leadership in popular struggles, and other forms of feminist political work which are a major force of societal transformation in Iran.
In this introduction, I contextualize the work featured in this special issue within Iranians’ current fraught political reality. What do we make of the fortieth anniversary year which witnessed yet another nationwide uprising in Iran that was met with deadly state brutality? How, once again, does heightened US militarism and intensified sanctions—including the US government’s unprecedented escalations to all-out war in early 2020—threaten to derail those very popular movements that continue to struggle for “bread, work, freedom?”[1] For Iranians, the period between November 2019 and February 2020 felt as though history was being compressed into brief yet powerful flashes of violence and resistance on both domestic and international fronts. First, outraged people took to the streets in what became known as the Aban protests (named for the month on the Iranian calendar during which the protests occurred) in response to a gas price increase. These protests were an expression of anguish at drastic domestic economic inequality within Iran. Those who took to the streets—working class and working poor people, the unemployed, and the impoverished middle class—were part of a wave of popular outrage against elite and wealthy sectors of society who wield great political influence in the government.[2] Shortly after, Iranians feared for their lives and livelihoods yet again—this time not as targets of state repression, but as collateral in a US invasion. On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration conducted a targeted assassination of top Iranian military general Qasem Soleimani, a powerful political figure in the Islamic Republic. The assassination was widely condemned internationally as an act of war and an unprecedented move towards an all-out invasion of Iran. As though this was not enough, news then broke that the Iranian military had accidentally downed a commercial passenger plane after it took off in Tehran, killing 176 people on board. Protesters filled the streets again, demanding prosecution of those responsible and condemning government mismanagement, corruption, and repression. Students at Amir Kabir University, the site of a major protest, condemned the “incompetence of the ruling order in Iran” and denounced both Iran’s “domestic despotism” and US “imperial arrogance.”[3] There was not much time to grieve, however, as the subsequent rise of the coronavirus pandemic further reflected and exacerbated this state of affairs. The botched Iranian government response was slow and dismissive during crucial early weeks, while US sanctions have severely worsened the distribution of vital medicine, equipment, and testing kits needed to fight the spread of the virus.[4] Yet the timeline of November 2019-February 2020 shows that in spite of a highly militarized and sensitive climate that threatens to derail popular movements, the most staunch movement participants on the ground take part in several layered refusals: 1) the refusal to be snuffed out by naked state repression; 2) the refusal to be cowed by US imperial designs, militarism, and economic warfare; and 3) the refusal to be silenced by the Iranian state’s appeal to wartime unity as an excuse for repressing internal dissent and grassroots struggles. These refusals became clear within the space of four months across the turn of the decade.
Iranians’ grievances are not simply economic but rather multidimensional. In one decade, there have been three nationwide uprisings, each led by different segments of the population. The first of these, the 2009 Green Movement, demanded political freedoms and was triggered by a non-transparent presidential election. Since then, some have expressed a fading hope in reformist politicians; one slogan that has emerged in more recent street protests is “conservatives, reformists, the story is over.” The rights of marginalized religious and ethnic groups, such as Kurdish kulbars who transport goods across the border to make ends meet, have also featured in public discourse increasingly in recent years. Gender politics have been central to people’s grievances. In late May 2020, widespread shock and outrage met the killings of Romina Ashrafi, a fourteen-year-old girl murdered by her father for her relationship with a man, and Asieh Panahi, a poor woman in Kermanshah who was killed protecting her home from demolition. The Amir Kabir students articulated an anguish that emerges when both local and international forces of domination lurk behind your back. While they know the United States and US-backed diasporic opposition groups are no answer to their predicament and in fact exacerbate their troubles, their frustrations also—and no less importantly—lie with their own leaders. For them, “popular politics” is the only force that can truly answer their desires for structural transformations in their society in the areas of civil rights, political freedoms, and economic justice.
The decades-strong Iranian women’s movement time and again has brought attention to the ways in which local state repression and violence interact with international geopolitical tensions stoked by US warmongering to produce toxic effects. In late May 2019, amid another spike in US-Iran tensions, over 170 Iranian “women’s rights defenders” published a collective statement.[5] It struck a clear-headed and resolute stance against both domestic and external threats to the women’s movement and other popular struggles. These grassroots organizers discussed the harmful impact of sanctions on everyday people while “powerful unaccountable mafia like groups and interests, which are able to evade sanctions, grow wealthier and more powerful.” US sanctions and the simultaneous enrichment of an Iranian ruling class—often discussed colloquially as the aqazadeh (noble born)—laid the conditions for two recent uprisings in Iran, the winter 2017-2018 protests and the November 2019 protests. Both revolts were reflective of a growing discourse over the 2010s condemning superrich individuals, including those connected to elite governmental sectors such as the military Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the so-called bonyads, large financial conglomerates holding billions of dollars in assets under the guise of Islamic charitable organizations.[6] The geopolitical US-Iran standoff, however, has meant that everyday Iranians are confronted with a false choice: embrace a US agenda that aims for control of their collective wealth, or embrace a domestic ruling class which currently exploits this wealth. In other words, the Iranian government’s claim that sanctions are the only reason for people’s misery rings hollow when everyday people see elites growing richer in spite of sanctions. This contradiction lay at the heart of the Aban demonstrations, which were met with the deadliest show of state violence against popular protest in the history of the Islamic Republic as many hundreds were killed in the streets by security forces.
The May 2019 statement from Iranian women’s rights defenders unequivocally condemned US warmongering, coming as it did in response to then-US national security advisor John Bolton’s hawkish push to war in public statements that month. The activists wrote, “As multiple experiences in the region have demonstrated, US wars have consistently resulted in increased instability, violence and the emergence of terrorist and extremist groups, while strengthening the hands of the most regressive and authoritarian forces in the region.” Here, the signatories again demonstrated a sobering analysis of the US position and pinned the lie to the mythology that US foreign policymakers act with the liberation of everyday Iranians in mind. They alluded to the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, another military incursion which promised liberation to a far-off people in the Middle East. The case of Iraq has showed us that war, external regime change, and their factional aftermath can have violent repercussions for years and even decades. Sixteen years after the invasion, a popular uprising emerged in Iraq in 2019 that demanded an independent future for Iraqis. The fact that this movement demanded an end to both US and Iranian intervention in the country is illuminating. It reveals the violent consequences of both the US regional agenda and that of Iran’s expansionism in the region. The ongoing struggle in Iraq is a testament to the resilience of transformative movements in the face of war’s haunting afterlife.
Key leaders of the Iranian women’s movement know all too well that the government gains even more fodder from this situation to repress dissent in the name of unity for the defense of the nation. The activists wrote, “the Iranian women’s movement as well as the workers’ and teachers’ movements, journalists and human rights activists have consistently demanded that pressures and limitations on civil society and citizens be lifted so they can organize around issues of concern. Today, as Iranians, we see not only our livelihoods targeted by sanctions and war, but our civil freedoms and rights curtailed by our own government at a time when the state should be easing pressures on citizens.” The writers’ stance against both local and external forces is also a message of solidarity to their fellow organizers and activists inside Iran. For example, a little over a year before the release of this statement, activists celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8th, 2018 by protesting at the Ministry of Labor in Tehran. Their demands centered economic justice for Iranian women. While different type of workers—including teachers, sugarcane workers, and nurses—went on strike across the country in every month of 2018 and throughout 2019 as well, these activists brought attention to working class and poor women’s vulnerable position in the current climate. This is a pressing concern, given that women’s share in Iran’s precarious informal labor sector has been on the rise in recent years.[7] A number of people were arrested at the March 8th action, which came on the heels of the nationwide winter uprising of 2017/2018 that saw many protesters killed by security forces.[8] It is this type of repression that the writers of the May 2019 statement condemned. For these grassroots leaders, the only way forward is solidarity in the face of both US intervention and Iranian state repression.
If this is the broader political context for Iranian popular struggles at the fortieth anniversary of the 1979 Revolution, then the essays and creative pieces featured in this collection have much to teach us about both the past legacies of and potential paths forward for gender politics in Iran. The works in this collection can be understood as a series of eleven stories, each of which touches upon our theme in its own unique way. These stories include four scholarly essays, five artist works curated by co-editor Azadeh Tajpour, and a short story and poem by a creative writer-scholar contextualized with an interview. Together, these stories explore gender politics and its relationship to the revolution’s legacy in arenas as diverse as those of art, law, and public space.
Tara Najd Ahmadi’s essay on Iranian women’s unfinished art explores the impact of gender and class dynamics on the invisibility of women artists at the time of Iran’s revolutionary upheaval in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This piece explores the work of one artist in particular, Shahrzad, an impoverished woman who began her career in the 1960s as a film actress. Najd Ahmadi shows us that Shahrzad continued to work in creative writing and filmmaking in spite of obstacles she faced both under the Shah and under the Islamic Republic due to her poverty and status as a woman. For Najd Ahmadi, women artists’ work that remained incomplete as a result of revolutionary turbulence and its aftermath forms an archive of deep value, not only to Iranians and to artists, but to people from all walks of life around the world. Such an “archive of incomplete,” she contends, can teach us much about the historical value of invisibilized Iranian women’s art in spite of its lack of market value. What I find so striking about Ahmadi’s exploration is the ways in which women’s incomplete art works, while understood as failures by standards of the market and the art world, are actually cultural treasures which prompt important interventions and alternatives to the dominant political values in a society.
Jaleh Jalili has written a thought-provoking piece on the gendered and class dimensions of public space in Tehran. Few scholars have explored this topic in the Iranian context and Jalili’s piece is an engaging introduction to the ways in which public space is a gendered terrain of negotiation, appropriation, and transgression. Using data collected in over nine months of field work between 2013 and 2015, she foregrounds the experiences of women from a variety of class backgrounds across the city’s North/South class divide. Her findings unsettle a number of assumptions about both working class and more affluent Tehrani women regarding questions of traditionalism and morality. Focusing primarily on a cohort that came of age after the revolution, Jalili shows that women often dominate public space in Tehran for a number of interrelated reasons. While women of all backgrounds deal with patriarchal attitudes and catcalling in different sectors of the city, working class and low wealth women from the southern neighborhoods face added judgement and class-shaming when they enter upscale northern neighborhoods and shopping districts. Jalili’s piece parallels the integrated framework of gender and class so central to Ahmadi’s essay, in which the story of Shahrzad explores poverty and patriarchy as interruptions in an artist’s work. On the other hand, Jalili’s vignettes of southern Tehrani women navigating different public spaces are themselves another kind of powerful interruption in a deeply stratified and unequal geography. Both Ahmadi and Jalili’s essays center narratives of working class and poor women who have thus far been marginal to accounts of the Iranian women’s movement.
Maral Sahebjame’s piece is a thoughtful discussion of how Iranians’ intimate relationships and experiences of marriage push a hybrid Islamic and civil legal system to adapt to changing attitudes. She primarily explores the growth in Iran of white marriage, the traditionally frowned upon cohabitation between intimate partners who are not officially married. “White” refers to the unmarked white space denoting “unmarried” on an individual’s birth certificate. Sahebjame’s extensive ethnographic fieldwork has much to show us about the ways in which men and women both navigate and impact the law, religious norms, and social attitudes to engage in intimate relationships on their own terms. Sahebjame adds an as-of-yet unexamined chapter to the story of how family law has changed since the 1979 revolution. Despite women’s crucial participation in the revolutionary movement, the Islamic Republic dealt major setbacks to women’s position in family law particularly in matters of marriage and divorce. In the years since, women have become the majority of filers of divorce petitions in the country and many have through legal ingenuity increased their rights.[9] Yet Sahebjame also adds that Iranians have created their own concept of “white marriage” with no regard for prior clerical or legal constructions of marriage. Her intervention changes the way we think of people’s relationship to the law. Everyday Iranians’ actions impact and transform not only the law, but also force Shi’i clerical interpretations to adapt. Scholars such as Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet and Arzoo Osanloo have explored the changing legal structures and social attitudes around marriage in Iran over the last few hundred years, and Sahebjame makes an important contribution to this work.[10]
Afsaneh Najmabadi’s essay on trans peoples’ use of the law in Iran shares some parallels with Sahebjame’s essay, in that both pieces analyze the law not as a rigid and fixed set of rules which overdetermines people’s choices but as a somewhat elastic terrain transformed by the very subjects the law seeks to regulate. Najmabadi’s piece explores trans activism not as a project controlled by the Iranian state, but as “an art of existence” among gender and sexual variant people. What is so salient about this exploration is her argument that trans Iranians both engage in ingenuity and subterfuge to survive while also navigating and impacting the law with great skill. A focus on trans Iranians prompts a broader discussion of gender variance and same-sex desire which complicates the way many Iranian feminists have typically discussed gender and gender politics. Moreover, the trajectory of trans lobbying and engagement with the state also gestures to what Najmabadi calls “sexual rights” and potential alliances among a broad-based group of “ ‘not-normal’ people” stigmatized by their gender expressions and same sex desires and practices.[11]
We have also included creative pieces in this collection which complement the scholarly essays. The interview with scholar, poet, and short story writer Orkideh Behrouzan, conducted by co-editor Azadeh Tajpour, illuminates much about the afterlife of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), and the role of storytelling in historical memory and healing. This interview was conducted in relation to two pieces by Behrouzan also included in this collection: the short story “The War we Lived” and the poem “Leica.” “The War we Lived” is written in the form of a letter by Behrouzan to an Iraqi friend which deals with the trauma that both have experienced as a result of the war. 2020 also marks the 40th anniversary of the war’s start, and to read this piece now at a time when the United States appeared at the brink of war with Iran is to explore a sobering account of the unimaginable human cost of war. In spite of the fact that Behrouzan and her Iraqi friend were on opposite sides of “a torturous line,” the story recognizes how everyday people across borders survive calamities which have tied their fates together. Wartime masculinities underscore the story, both in the ways that people are taught to fear the other side and in the constructions of a righteous nation of martyrs and war veterans. In spite of these narratives of wartime glory and heroism, millions of people pay the price of war over the course of decades. The poem “Leica” engages the same historical moment though the lens of an old polaroid camera which the author has kept and treasured to this day. The inclusion of Behrouzan’s creative writing and interview in our special volume alongside other conventional scholarly articles enriches the special collection overall and grapples with our theme from a different mode of storytelling.
Co-editor Tajpour has curated an excellent sampling of contemporary art to add a visual dimension to our theme. If the previously mentioned scholarly and creative writings form the heart of the collection, then these artworks are its spirit. This work by five artists—Hannah Darabi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Morehshin Allahyari, Nooshin Rostami, and Niloufar Keyhani—refracts many interrelated themes ranging from the so-called “Spring of Freedom” after the Iranian Revolution, the trauma of the Iran-Iraq War which followed, and intergenerational and diasporic relationships between family members since 1979. Darabi’s work is a collection of book covers during the immediate aftermath of the revolution in which for a brief moment, there was effectively no censorship in Iran. These covers attest to the diversity of voices and narratives during this revolutionary time—Marxist and Islamist among others. Her piece asks us to remember this brief euphoria in spite of the violence and state repression that preceded and followed. In Khoshgozaran’s work, newspaper archives of the Iran-Iraq war are juxtaposed against her own birth during the period. Rostami also creates art from an archive, albeit a personal one which carries memories of her own immigration and exile. In related ways, Keyhani’s pieces engage pain and healing, including the impact of sanctions on her cancer treatment. Allahyari’s work, in part inspired by her location on the other side of “the wall” during the US Muslim Ban, queerly reimagines a Quranic story with another wall. If Najd Ahmadi’s article brought attention to an archive of women’s incomplete art interrupted by the revolution’s aftermath, the work of these artists defies the very power-laden logics of incompletion and interruption and stands as a testament to the ways in which art survives, re-emerges, and remains.
With these guiding thoughts, we send you forward to explore and engage with these stories. As with any journal volume, these pieces are meant to encourage even more discussion, debate, and creative work. Our contributors shared these stories in response to our call centering the legacy of the 1979 Revolution. As we publish this collection, however, it has become clear that these stories prompt even more salient questions around the challenges and choices that Iranian gender justice struggles face in the contemporary moment.
Author’s Bio: Alborz Ghandehari is an Assistant Professor-Lecturer of Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. His forthcoming book, The Iranian Post/Revolutionary Condition, argues that Iranian writers, artists, and thinkers have provided powerful ideas for social change in the face of both state repression in their country and US interventionism. He has received recognitions for his work including awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Studies Association. Some of his publications appear in the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Jadaliyya, and Dissident Voice. Also an artist, he has showcased performance and film work in venues such as Golden Thread Productions, Salt Lake’s Spectra Arts Festival, and the “Building Bridges, Dismantling Borders” art show in San Diego. At the University of Utah, Alborz also serves as the instructional coordinator for the Diversity Scholars program, a college cohort program for underrepresented youth.
