“Woman, Life, Freedom”

Abstract

In this editorial, we want to recognize and align ourselves with the courageous women and girls of Iran who, at the time of writing, are out on the streets shouting their rage against a repressive regime run by elderly clerics and religious patriarchs. These men have declared women’s lives to be worth half those of men. Indeed, this is a regime built on the systematic curtailment of women’s rights. Confronted by a ruthless security apparatus, some of the protesters are paying with their lives as they demand “Woman, Life, Freedom.” The death of Mahsa Amini – imprisoned and ultimately killed for a “bad hijab,” a wisp of hair escaping the legally mandated headscarf – has rallied them. Women’s hair has become their symbol – shaved off in mourning, cut in protest and solidarity, but also set free and displayed proudly in public as it prefigures a new freedom. We should not forget that Iranian women have resisted this regime in various ways from its inception more than 40 years ago, as documented in various articles in this and other feminist and decolonial journals (Erfani 2020; Hassani 2017; Hoominfar and Zanganeh 2021; Sameh 2010). Furthermore, while their struggle is no doubt unique in many ways, it resonates eerily as we observe right-wing, populist, and fundamentalist movements entering governments around the world, doing their grotesque best to assert control over particular sexed, racialized, and gendered bodies, rolling back the gains that feminists have made through decades of struggle, denigrating migrants and others at the bottom of colonialist hierarchies, and fostering violence and hate. These agendas have propelled gender politics into the center of global power politics (or made this centrality more visible), where stifling moralism fuels our anger and increasingly our resistance. The relationship between feminisms and “the state” has long been fraught, but today we see unusual levels of complexity and contradiction. On the one hand, feminists continue to lobby governments to change policies and laws, to better “govern” sex/gender in its multiple intersections – from demanding control over our own bodies to claiming a seat at the tables of power. Indeed, feminisms of a particular kind have entered a range of governance arenas, including not only state bureaucracies and the United Nations but also universities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and even private corporations, where initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion proliferate. On the other hand, feminist values are under attack in Iran and beyond, in a