Ash from the Fire: The Iranian Woman, Life, Freedom Movement Rekindled
by
Mahdiyeh Govah
On November 2, 2024, numerous social media posts chronicled the defiant courage of Iranian student Ahoo Daryaei, whose act of walking with crossed arms while wearing nothing but a purple bra, purple and white striped panties, and gray socks became a viral symbol of what Pamela Karimi has called the "gestural feminism of Iranian Women" (Karimi 2024). Removing her clothing to protest compulsory hijab laws, the 30-year-old student of French literature at Azad University in Tehran stood up to security guards who routinely harass women on the campus. Daryaei’s long black hair—running down her shoulders—accentuated the boldness of her disobedient act. She appeared to be patiently awaiting the consequences without showing guilt, shame, or fear.
Daryaei’s half-naked body challenged the hyper-masculine spatiality of the streets of Iran, bringing to the foreground the ways in which the state-owned and state-controlled space of the university is centralized around women’s bodies. Daryaei’s public act of reclaiming the space marks a critical shift in the form and approach of Iranian women’s protests since the highly publicized death of Mahsa Zhina Amini in September 2022. Daryaei’s protest is the ash from the fire lit two years prior by the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which incited extraordinary social changes. To demonstrate the unique qualities of this movement, I will examine the affective underpinnings underlying the interactions between space, the human body, and temporality in the body-centered, activist work of women who challenge the authority of the Islamic Republic. I will argue that the Woman, Life, Freedom movement’s affective turn from 2022 onward represents a political approach to collective resistance through disorientation.
As photo journalists often face imprisonment, most photographs and footage of such incidents remain anonymous.
My use of the term “disorientation” draws on the work of feminist scholar Sara Ahmed. Ahmed (2006) argues that “disorientation” is a political possibility that challenges normative systems of power. She contrasts disorientation with “orientation,” which refers to how bodies are directed towards objects, spaces, or others in particular ways. This directionality is often rooted in history, tradition, and power dynamics, leading to a series of normative trajectories. “Orientation involves aligning body and space,” Ahmed notes, and “we only know which way to turn once we know which way we are facing” (2006, 7). Spaces are therefore never neutral; they are made to fit particular bodies and objects, marginalizing and excluding other bodies that fall beyond the boundaries of norms. As a result, Ahmed suggests that “disorientation” may disrupt conventional expectations. In the context of Iran, disorientation takes place through making familiar the unfamiliar and by challenging what is considered normative, which is manifested in radical actions at the cost of bodily safety and survival.
Woman, Life, Freedom
Woman, Life, Freedom was a response to years of bodily exclusion and harassment in Iran. The movement started when Mahsa Zhina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, died in police custody after she was arrested for wearing an “improper” hijab. To marginalize and exclude unruly bodies, the Islamic Republic has long mobilized a false dichotomy between women with “proper” and “improper” hijabs. Signs on government-sponsored buildings ban women from entering governmental spaces without the compulsory hijab or “Maghnaeh” scarf that must be worn in state-owned spaces. These dress codes are among the strategies that the Islamic Republic has been using to exclude women’s bodies from public and governmental spaces.
Amini’s death led to nationwide protests during which, for the first time in Iran’s history, women reclaimed the streets. Women who led protests cut their hair, set their scarves on fire, danced, and climbed utility boxes. These bodily acts ended almost half a century of their exclusion from public spaces. Women’s active participation in street protests “reoriented” the normative trajectories of their bodily existence and experiences in Iran. Women without hijabs, or who wore them improperly, were, for the first time, viewed as defiant, brave, and worthy of respect. Men and women stood in solidarity and confronted attempts to harass women defying the compulsory hijab laws in public spaces. This dissent made the regime’s supporters less inclined to continue the practice of “enjoining good and forbidding wrong,” according to which every Muslim individual has the religious duty to tell others how to follow the rules of shari’a.i This shift in women’s corporeal relation to space has challenged traditional affectivity, triggering new forms of resistance through bodily gestures: Women who defy hijab laws are now potently aware that their spatial-corporeal resistance encourages a feminist defiance that can help shape collective solidarity.
After Daryaei’s Arrest
While Mahsa Zhina Amini’s death received wide international media attention, the recent activism of feminists around Daryaei’s arrest has been widely ignored in Western media. Daryaei displayed no overt signs of emotional distress during her sober act of dissent. However, the Iranian regime soon dismissed the courage and conviction of her unabashed undress by way of a formulaic pathologization: a few weeks after her arrest, it announced that she suffered from mental illness. Pathologization is the regime’s favorite strategy in the face of public acts of resistance by women. Most women whose brave acts of resistance received public attention have been treated similarly in Iran (Kamal 2024). In line with this strategy of pathologization, the Islamic Republic announced on November 14 that “hijab treatment clinics” would be established to hospitalize women who defy compulsory hijab rules (Parent 2024).
We should understand the high-risk bodily actions distinguishing the Woman, Life, Freedom movement from other political alliances in the context of these punitive and disciplinary state responses. Just a few days after Daryaei’s act of resistance, 16-year-old Arezoo Khavari committed suicide after constant conflicts with her school’s officials over the laws around compulsory dress codes (Penty 2024). In mid-November, activist and journalist Kianush Sanjari demanded the release of several political prisoners some of whom were imprisoned Woman, Life, Freedom activists (Nikounazar 2024). Sanjari announced on X that he would commit suicide if the regime did not accede to his demands and ultimately jumped off a high building. Following Sanjari’s death, the recurrently detained and imprisoned rights activist Hossein Ronaghi also demanded the release of Woman, Life, Freedom activists and sewed his lips shut in protest. Twenty days after Ronaghi’s powerful gesture—his wounds by then infected—the Islamic Republic gradually began to release political prisoners, including singer and songwriter Toomaj Salehi and feminist human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi. After their release, Ronaghi unsewed his lips.ii This chain of events demonstrates a connection between bodies, space, and freedom (as a within-reach object of desire), with men and women both playing a role in creating and recreating this spatiality.
The Islamic Republic has played a very active role in intensifying this spatial-corporeal transformation and encouraging extreme forms of protest through bodies. The regime’s long history of corporal punishments and its direct attacks on bodies have dialectically led to more extreme forms of bodily protests, including suicides. Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, anyone who expressed any form of resistance to Islamic ideology has been shamed and harassed through torture, solitary confinement, lashes, and other forms of corporal punishment. Woman, Life, Freedom has shed light on how a fight against bodily discipline and punishment can only happen through bodies. A couple of months after Daryaei’s arrest, the Islamic Republic—desperate to take back the streets of Iran—adopted another extreme body-oriented strategy to prevent men and women from taking part in the protests: maiming. As the regime’s last resort, police forces started shooting protestors in the eye from very close distances. While this extreme corporal punishment led to decreased participation in street protests overall, it gave rise to a new social force: protestors who wore eyepatches, either to protect their injured eyes or in solidarity with the injured.
How does this corporeal-spatial transformation challenge the traditional temporality of social movements? Why do such extreme forms of protests habitually get ignored and receive little to no international coverage, or humanitarian aid? As a participant in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement who now lives in the diaspora, I have observed two approaches to feminist movements in the region. The first, which is based on a linear and unidirectional understanding of regime change, measures the success and significance of social movements in the Middle East by their potential for immediate political transformation. As a result, in times of apparent political stability, international media do not prioritize acts of resistance and fail to recognize that such acts of defiance are circularly connected to former and future social movements. The second approach prioritizes concerns about economic instability, unemployment, and corruption over feminist ones because the former are falsely assumed to affect more people. Thus, feminist movements are either conflated with activism and campaigns against other forms of social inequality or they are completely ignored.
While women’s corporeal-spatial fight against the Islamic Republic constitutes the main force that is driving change, international media mostly recognizes and covers political moments that would potentially lead to immediate regime change. This is partly because Woman, Life, Freedom, as a circular movement, is at odds with normative interpretations of how movements work. Most broadly, the international press does not formally recognize the significance of grassroots fights against inequality in non-Western contexts, as there is an habitual lack of research and funds channeled into understanding social movements on the ground in “difficult” regions. Woman, Life, Freedom started as a grassroots movement and has remained so, still operating through chains of events that challenge the regime’s attempts at marginalizing and excluding women’s bodies through pathologization and coercion. What is worse, a loud opposition group led by the former Crown Prince of Iran has misappropriated Woman, Life, Freedom, drawing media attention to well-organized flag-flying events in numerous Western cities, which has eclipsed the fight over the public space that continues through extreme forms of bodily resistance.
As Ahmed has stated, “[t]he familiar is an effect of inhabitance; we are not simply in the familiar, but rather the familiar is shaped by actions that reach out toward objects that are already within reach” (2006, 7). In Iran, men and women have been actively shaping a new form of the familiar through their corporeal-spatial resistance. This new form of familiarity is directed towards the possibility of reaching freedom. In an image by Hamed Shamloo, an Iranian animator (Fig. 2), Daryaei breaks through the wall of the Islamic Republic. The wall is the regime’s flag, and Daryaei has made her way out from the middle, where the symbol of the regime's patriarchal ideology is located. Daryaei’s action reminds us that the object within reach, i.e., freedom, shines as a thread of light through a crack in the long-standing wall of the Islamic Republic. The crack keeps opening and more light comes through with each act of bodily resistance.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press).
Cook, Michael. 2001. Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge University Press).
Kamal Daanika. 2024. “Iran: Hijab ‘Treatment Clinics’ Echo Historical Use of Mental Illness to Control Women.” The Conversation, December 10, 2024. https://theconversation.com/iran-hijab-treatment-clinics-echo-historical-use-of-mental-illness-to-control-women-244979.
Karimi, Pamela. 2024. “Gestural Feminism of Iranian Women.” Hyperallergic, November 14, 2024. https://hyperallergic.com/965373/the-gestural-feminism-of-iranian-women-ahoo-mahla-daryaei/.
Nikounazar, Leili. 2024. “A Dissident’s Final Act of Protest Stuns Iran.” New York Times, November 19, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/world/middleeast/iran-kianoosh-sanjari-suicide.html.
Parent, Deepa. 2024. “Iran Announces ‘Treatment Clinic’ for Women who Defy Strict Hijab Laws.” The Guardian, November 14, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/nov/14/iran-announces-treatment-clinic-for-women-who-defy-strict-hijab-laws.
Penty, Sabrina. 2024. “Fury as 16-Year-Old Schoolgirl Jumps to her Death off Iranian Rooftop after being 'Threatened with Expulsion for Dancing without Hijab'.” Daily Mail, November 6, 2024. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14049713/schoolgirl-jumps-death-Iranian-rooftop-threatened-expulsion-dancing-without-hijab.html.