The Political in Iraq’s Thawra Teshreen

Abstract This article explores the meaning and significance of the political in the October 2019 uprising in Iraq, commonly called Thawra Teshreen, through the lens of gender, space, and emancipation. It looks at the spatiality of the protests, considering both discursive and material dimensions and centering the experience of the gendered body. At the same time, it breaks with binary lenses of agency and resistance and with preconceived and universalist notions of rights and claims to representation, instead proposing a situational understanding of power and subjectivation. The article analyzes the gendered and sexual dimensions of Thawra Teshreen and explores the discursive, material, and imaginary space production through the massive corporeal presence in the streets and cybermobilization. It shows that protesters have put forward their own politics of life and death in mobilizing against the political, structural, and infrastructural forces of death that shape their experiences. It argues that women’s participation constitutes an emancipated subjectivation that goes beyond the identitarian.