“Since the Jina uprising, we are not who we were before.”Footnote 1
Statement of Feminist Collectives and Groups on the Occasion of the First Anniversary of the Jin, Jian, Azadi Revolutionary Movement
This epigraph, from a statement written by Iranian feminists located in Europe and North America, boldly asserts that it is not only people in Iran, but also Iranians in diaspora who have been changed by their participation in an unprecedented and almost unimaginable feminist-oriented revolt. The “we” referred to above did not exist prior to September 2022 and the state killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini. It indexes the intergenerational coming together of preexisting Iranian diasporic feminist organizations with new transnational feminist collectives constituted to build solidarity with the Jina movement.Footnote 2 In this essay, I focus on the politics of these new transnational feminist formations as an alternative to liberal rights–based feminism and as a mode of enacting a multi-sited critique of structural oppression in Iran and in the West. Although I have been a participant in this process in New York City, I draw on published statements, articles, webinars, and other public events as evidence of sustained efforts to manifest an anticapitalist, decolonial, and intersectional Iranian feminist politics in dialogue with liberation movements in many different parts of the world.Footnote 3
Due to ongoing organic relationships with people still in Iran and shared social media technology, these new transnational Iranian feminist collectives have blurred the boundaries between diaspora and home through direct forms of strategic collaboration. Such activities, described further below, compel a shift in how we understand the political space and potential of diaspora. As my previous work on the Iranian anti-Shah student movement in the United States has illustrated, Iranian activism abroad can constitute an important extension of Iranian freedom struggles and unfold in proximity to and in conversation with other liberation movements.Footnote 4 A mode of diasporic activism that is in solidarity with movements resisting state repression in the host country runs counter to the top-down Iranian nationalist versions of “regime change” that seek backing from Western governments and highlights instead the radical potential of diaspora as a site of internationalism—in this case a twenty-first century feminist iteration of a phenomenon often associated with the post–World War II era of decolonization.Footnote 5
Although diasporic subjectivity tends to express affective states of grief, loss, and melancholia, such an orientation may also make one attuned to the grief and losses of others with distinct histories of displacement and dispossession.Footnote 6 In diaspora, aspirations for freedom among different groups of people can resonate and overlap, generating what I have called “affects of solidarity,” or affective attachments to the liberation of others.Footnote 7 During the 1960s and 1970s, affects of solidarity circulated widely on Western college campuses, where Iranian anti-Shah activists participated in movements for liberation in Vietnam and Palestine.Footnote 8 Since the 1979 revolution in Iran, dominant diasporic nostalgia for the era of the US–Shah alliance combined with the global retreat or defeat of the left has had the effect of curbing Iranian diasporic participation in anti-imperialist and anticapitalist coalitions and movements. In a post–Cold War era in which revolution has largely been discredited as a precursor to authoritarianism—globally, but also specifically in Iran—feminism has been widely understood as the demand for greater rights within existing state and legal structures, rather than as the basis for a new kind of revolutionary politics.
The Women, Life, Freedom movement, and indeed the slogan itself, challenges this “common sense” by animating a capacious notion of feminism as a call to dismantle all of the existing forms of oppression impacting Iranian society.Footnote 9 This movement, which I argue is genealogically linked to Third World or Global South and women of color Global North feminisms, opened up political space for a nuanced understanding of how gender and sexual oppression are intertwined with ethnic, religious, and class oppression. These developments put revolution back on the agenda in Iran and in the diaspora, but in a form highly critical of previous masculinist and nationalist iterations, both religious and secular.Footnote 10 Indeed, rather than reproducing a conventional notion of revolution as the seizure of state power, the movement has combined the desire to be free of the existing order with an expansive understanding of revolutionary transformation at the level of the body and everyday social and cultural relations.Footnote 11
The opportunity to retheorize a feminist concept of revolution emanates from the collective praxis of those who took to the streets and campuses in Iran. Much of this on-the-ground knowledge was transmitted via social media and messaging apps, creating the direct and almost instant ability to promulgate new perspectives across borders. There have also been a handful of Iranian feminist analytical essays that have circulated widely outside Iran, including in English translation. For example, an essay collection published by e-flux Journal in May 2024 offers an array of reflections and theoretical insights drawn from participation in the movement in Iran. A recurring theme among the contributors is the assertion that the Women, Life, Freedom uprising cannot be adequately understood unless “we shatter certain preconceptions of what constitutes a revolution.”Footnote 12 The starting point for making sense of the power and potential of this experience is the critique and rejection of “sovereign revolution,” a model that invariably rests on “a kind of teleology” that becomes dangerously “self-referential”—which must develop mechanisms to determine “truth from untruth, purity from impurity” and draw red lines against the “enemies of the revolution.”Footnote 13 Instead, the Jina uprising expresses the “desire for life in all its contradictions,” its participants “struggling against a range of macho constructs that take many forms in the family, at school, around friends, at the factory, at the bakery, etc.” with the cumulative effect of “ingraining the habit of resistance.”Footnote 14
This brief gloss of some of the exciting feminist analysis emerging from those “present on the scene” in Iran is not intended to reinscribe a binary opposition between home and diaspora as sites of authentic versus inauthentic knowledge production, but rather to emphasize two key points.Footnote 15 The first is that the Women, Life, Freedom movement should be understood as a crucial site for the study of revolutionary praxis and feminist theory, from which scholars and activists concerned with transformative justice around the world can learn.Footnote 16 The second is that the insights emerging after more than a year of struggle inside Iran are deeply resonant with the views of some Iranian feminists who have only been involved in diaspora, revealing shared histories, shared affective responses, and the shared desire for a feminist revolutionary politics that will not repeat the mistakes of revolutions past. Below, I discuss three diasporic Iranian feminist formations that aim to advance new ideas and orientations emerging from the uprising in Iran. In the process, diasporic attachments to freedom in Iran have, as they did during the anti-Shah student movement, generated affiliations with other contemporaneous revolutionary movements, fueling affects of solidarity and joint organizing—this time on the basis of decolonial feminism.Footnote 17
“Permission to organize wherever you are”: New Iranian feminist formations in diaspora
At a webinar commemorating year one of the Jina uprising, New York City–based artist and activist Moreshin Allahyari described “something [that] happened in the diaspora that was very, very different than any previous uprisings.”Footnote 18 Whereas for the past several years being outside Iran was almost a disqualification for ethical involvement with struggles unfolding inside Iran, this time was different.Footnote 19
We gave each other permission to each experience and participate in this movement from wherever we were standing. We understand … you are dealing with some kind of connection with what’s unfolding in the country and we will give each other this permission for each of us to participate… . That was a huge shift that opened up many possibilities.Footnote 20
These possibilities included the formation of the Begoo Collective, which brought together Iranian feminist artists in New York City, all of whom had grown up in Iran and migrated to the United States in their twenties. Although many already knew each other, they had not worked together politically until the Jina rebellion began.
Their most immediate task was to ensure that information and images about the uprising could circulate widely, while minimizing risks for the activists on the ground. Doing this work, Moreshin “felt the shift, the permission … I felt it really deeply. These moments of having to build a system for collaboration between people inside of Iran and people outside of Iran. A really close friend of mine in Iran, every day she would go to the streets and then come back and send me everything on IG and delete them from her phone.” Sharing her friend’s images became “a way to be in this moment that was happening … for these voices and events to be amplified.”Footnote 21 Another NYC-based member of the Begoo Collective, who wished to remain anonymous, explained, “it felt necessary to use our highspeed internet connection for something good! A lot of my friends in Iran take photos and post and delete. It’s not safe for them to hold on to information.”Footnote 22 In response, Begoo set about building an archive of what otherwise would have disappeared, “documenting women and queer bodies in this resistance.”Footnote 23 These activists were acutely aware of the structural challenges of transnational solidarity with people in Iran. Not only were relationships with the diaspora criminalized by the Iranian government, but feminists outside Iran had privileged representational authority, given their open access to the Internet and greater ability to write and publish in European languages. Members of Begoo, therefore, proceeded with a sense of caution, humility, and responsibility. Rather than claiming to speak on behalf of their friends and comrades back home, Begoo documented and circulated the images and messages crafted by counterparts in Iran as the basis of a shared commitment to decolonial feminist politics and transnational solidarity.
The Feminists for Jina global network also formed in the immediate aftermath of Amini’s death, fueled by what Sama Khosravi Ooryad, a member based in Sweden, called “this feeling of multiple affects that have been heavy on our bodies for so long, but also this feeling of wanting to do something transnationally and also echoing the voices of resistance inside the country.”Footnote 24 Sama described another sense in which the borders between Iran and the diaspora were blurred as a result of the uprising: at the level of lived experiences and the embodied affective charge that remained. Like the members of the Begoo Collective, the majority of people who joined Feminists for Jina had grown up in Iran and shared an affective response to Amini’s death in police custody with the many thousands of people who took to the streets in Iran. With their own firsthand experiences of the mandatory hijab law, they too wanted to put their bodies into action to express shared feelings of rage, grief, defiance, and hope.Footnote 25
Several of the women who launched Feminists for Jina, including the award-winning journalist and activist Parvin Ardalan, had been organizers of the One Million Signatures Campaign in Iran, the largest post-1979 grassroots feminist movement until the Women, Life, Freedom movement.Footnote 26 Preexisting relationships, organizing experience, and a deep commitment to feminist politics enabled a rapid multi-city diasporic mobilization to support the Jina uprising. The network also became a pole of attraction for like-minded Iranians who had not necessarily known each other in Iran. Through word of mouth, and at public demonstrations, Iranian feminists found each other in diaspora and the network expanded, forging a new “we” based on shared affective responses and collective political purpose.
Noting the proliferation of diasporic feminist collectives in response to the uprising, Moreshin organized a digital panel in March 2023 featuring representatives of Begoo, Feminists for Jina, and Ozi Ozar from the Germany-based Women*, Life, Freedom collective.Footnote 27 Ozi spoke about the significance of this uprising coming at a time when the diaspora was composed of many among “the generation [that] actually was raised by the Islamic Republic … and had experienced with your whole body and your soul how horrible it is to be under such an authoritarian propaganda machine.”Footnote 28 The chance to finally talk about what they had experienced was a major factor bringing people together. The Women*, Life, Freedom collective was part of the broader organizing effort that drew over 120,000 people to a solidarity demonstration in Berlin on October 22, 2022—the largest political mobilization in the history of the Iranian diaspora.Footnote 29 Although this demonstration exemplified a “big tent” approach to diasporic organizing, fissures, splits, and conflicts emerged quickly. For example, the Women*, Life, Freedom collective drew a line against organizing in coalition with monarchists, and the Rome-based Women, Life, Freedom group split over the same issue. A clear tension exists between the goal of mobilizing as many as possible for solidarity and the focus on advancing intersectional, anti-imperialist, and antimonarchist feminist politics that are still outside the mainstream of the Iranian diaspora. For Ozi, part of the appeal of working through the collective model of organizing was the chance to challenge embedded hierarchies among the diaspora and import methods from Ozi’s theater background, such as “deep democracy,” to make space for “marginalized voices to get the chance to speak for themselves.”Footnote 30
Such practices, and indeed the proliferation of the “collective” as a preferred organizational form among transnational feminists in the Iranian diaspora, evince an embodied desire to oppose all forms of authoritarianism, which, as noted, has larger implications for the meaning and goals of feminist revolution. Wary of political parties, which tend to be hierarchical and to coalesce around particular leaders, and averse to institutionalization as nonprofits, these activists are experimenting with horizontal structures that can unleash creativity while maintaining collective accountability. At the same time, the lack of institutionalization and funding and leadership structures also renders collectives vulnerable to dissipation and collapse. The affective solidarities that bring collectives into being can prove difficult to sustain over time, especially when the mass uprisings that inspired them are driven off the streets by state repression. The central concern of this essay, however, is not the longevity of any particular formation, but the ways in which the collective form expresses a political orientation. It is to this orientation, or reorientation, in Iranian diasporic feminist politics that I now turn.
Decolonial feminism and the Iranian diaspora
At first it may seem odd to analyze liberation movements in Iran through a decolonial feminist lens, because Iran was never the direct colony of a foreign power and has been ruled for over four decades by a government claiming the legitimacy of a successful anti-imperialist revolution. However, there are a series of underlying premises that form the basis of an emergent form of Iranian revolutionary feminism—in Iran and in the diaspora—that converge with and contribute to decolonial feminist thought. These include the following.
• The notion that working through existing state structures in Iran to secure greater rights for women has hit a dead end and the entire system must go.
• The embrace of feminist critiques of the nation–state form as inherently patriarchal due to a constitutive preoccupation with regulating gender and sexuality in service of the nation.Footnote 31
• The rejection of “a hierarchy of oppressions”Footnote 32 and an engagement with “intersectional” feminist genealogies that theorize the intertwined workings of hetero-patriarchy, capitalism, religious and ethnic oppression, domestic dictatorship, and imperial aggression in the lives of Iranians.Footnote 33 This approach is embedded within a decolonial feminist understanding of “colonial difference” as the context for the development and policing of the modern binary systems of gender and sexuality.Footnote 34
• The use of the term “internal colonization” to describe the relationship of the central Iranian state to Kurdish, Baloch, and other oppressed regions and populations.Footnote 35
• The transnational feminist practice of making connections across differences, for example, between the forms of oppression targeting diasporic populations in the West, like racism and Islamophobia, and the imperial targeting of the home country.Footnote 36 Iranian feminists have added another layer to this analysis by including a critique of the Iranian state in relation to other iterations of patriarchal and militarized authoritarianism globally, including in the West.Footnote 37
Below, I share a few among many existing examples of how these ideas have circulated in the diaspora.
Begoo Collective’s social media messaging offers definitions of intersectionality and transnational feminism, in English and in Persian, quoting foundational Black feminist thinkers Audre Lorde and Kimberlé Crenshaw.Footnote 38 Another post summarizes transnational feminism as follows: “Rather than relying on the notion of a uniform global patriarchy, transnational feminism draws attention to how other structures, such as capitalism, imperialism, racism, religious fundamentalism, etc., intersect with patriarchy and create multiple social realities worldwide.”Footnote 39 Beginning with local specificity and accounting for differences of positionality, two core tenants of women of color and transnational feminism, makes it possible to connect the Women, Life, Freedom movement to many other liberation movements that may be confronting different conditions, such as foreign occupation or neocolonial economies, while sharing a common opposition to hetero-patriarchal state violence.
At the first public action organized by Feminists for Jina, a global day of feminist solidarity that took place on October 2, 2022 in multiple cities, the group issued a statement that read in part: “We define ourselves as anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-homophobic feminists and, to this end, extend our hand to the feminists of the world, especially feminists of the region.”Footnote 40 In this list, each “anti” represented a rejection of a structural form of oppression that manifests differently, but persistently, around the world. When addressing the specificity of mandatory hijab and the oppression of Kurdish and Baloch people in Iran, the statement also refused to isolate or make an exception for Iran:
The gendered apartheid resulting from the suppression of women and LGBTQIA+ community members is by no means limited to Iran or the Middle East. The prohibition of abortion in some countries reminds us of how patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and the religious ultra-right are closely interconnected. We stand in solidarity with all those fighting against the fascist right-wing states in the West, which devalue and exploit the bodies of women and LGBTQIA+ individuals by promoting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic discourse.
This excerpt illustrates how intersectional, transnational, and decolonial feminist genealogies allow for a multipronged critique of conditions facing marginalized people in Iran and in the West, where most of the Iranian diaspora lives. As I have argued elsewhere, the revolutionary forms of Iranian feminism that emerged during the March 1979 women’s uprising in Tehran and its aftermath must be understood as part of these genealogies.Footnote 41 Moreover, the diasporic feminist collectives formed in the wake of the Jina uprising must be understood as the inheritors of Iranian feminist legacies as well as feminist concepts emerging from other specific contexts. The space of diaspora provides a unique opportunity for these histories, concepts, and imaginaries to circulate and combine in new ways that fuel affects of solidarity. This is due to many factors, including reduced censorship, proficiency in languages other than Persian, and greater proximity to activists from different parts of the world. The chance to meet, listen, dialogue, and organize in the same spaces—even virtually—without having to navigate the security risks and technological hurdles that constrain activists in Iran can facilitate cross-pollination among feminist movements. For example, Feminists for Jina organized multi-city rallies on November 25, 2022, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which brought together activists from local and national contexts alongside diasporic representatives of other feminist movements around the world.Footnote 42 A year later, in the fall of 2023, the network collaborated with other Iranian feminist groups in Iran and in diaspora to issue a powerful statement in solidarity with Palestine, titled “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi As in Free Palestine.”Footnote 43 On the ground, the affects of solidarity expressed in these words fueled activists’ practices of outreach, collaboration, and relationship-building. In cities like New York, Feminists for Jina members attended meetings with the Palestinian Feminist Collective and INCITE Palestine Force, mobilizing for joint actions such as the January 22, 2024, march to “Shut Down Colonial Feminism.”Footnote 44
The disillusionment with reform and the turn toward revolutionary feminist politics marked a major shift in Iranian modes of dissent—in Iran and the diaspora—and found global resonance at a conference in Berlin titled, “Beyond Equality: Feminisms Reclaiming Life.” This “internationalist gathering” took place at the end of June 2023, bringing together “Latin American collectives, Kurdish, Iranian, and North Africa liberation movements, as well as queer and trans-feminist positions.”Footnote 45 Feminists for Jina held a workshop there, placing “women, life, freedom” at the heart of efforts to move “beyond liberal feminist demands for ‘equality’ in capitalism” and toward “social transformation, anti-colonial resistance, revolution, and reclaiming life.”Footnote 46
In conclusion, the conceptualization of “life” that is at the heart of the Kurdish slogan—that serves as the bridge between “women,” as historically marginalized agents of revolutionary change, and “freedom” as the basis of a radically reimagined future—has been interpreted by some Iranian diasporic feminist activists in ways that contribute to intersectional, transnational, and decolonial feminist praxis. To “reclaim life,” as the Berlin conference title proposed, is to stand against all oppressive structures and ideologies, all forms of subjugation and exploitation: of labor, of the environment, of marginalized racialized and gendered bodies. It is this ethos that inspires and orients the feminist collectives discussed here, and many more which I do not have space to include. Especially in times of severe state repression, such as prevails in Iran at the time of this writing, the affects of solidarity and cross-pollination among movements that are possible in diaspora may prove crucial for sustaining the capacious and revolutionary vision of Women, Life, Freedom and the new organizational forms it generated.
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