Essay: Iran's Feminist Revolution--Woman, Life, Freedom
SalamPix/Abaca/Sipa USA via CNN
Read also When Girls Erupt
And Dear White Women Cheering Iranian Women
Is it a feminist revolution
Is it a feminist revolution because they’re burning their hijab
Is it a feminist revolution because it was started and is led by women
Is it a feminist revolution if men are taking part
Is it a feminist revolution if nothing changes
What does hair have to do with the revolution
Glory and power to the women in Iran.
If we’re lucky, women are semi-colons in the stories written by men and other egomaniacs and “revolutionaries” who think we don’t know that they don’t know what they’re doing; who think we don’t know that they just want some more of that power that the State monopolizes and not liberation for us all.
Glory and power to the women in Iran who have seized the narrative and become object and subject. Women are too often the afterthought of a revolution, rarely its reason for being.
Listen to their chants: Jin Jiyan Azadi/Women Life Freedom!
The slogan is Kurdish and has its origins in the Kurdish Freedom Movement, with its emphasis on women’s freedom and the struggle for self-determination. The protests have spread across Iran and have been especially strong in the Kurdish areas. It speaks to the intersections of oppressions faced by the Kurdish woman Mahsa Zhina Amini whose death after being taken into custody by “morality police” was the spark of the uprising.
Glory and power to the women in Iran for serving us this challenge: If women (and men) in one of the most perfect police states are this unscared, then what are you doing to fight your oppressors?
The thing about revolutions is that you can never unsee them. You can never unsee people who are no longer scared rise up.
Their courage will set your very guts on fire. And put you on notice that you are next, whether you are an oppressor with a small o or a big-O Oppressor.
Glory and power to the women in Iran who have seized the narrative and become object and subject.
In too many revolutions women have died, been beaten, shot at, and sexually assaulted, fighting alongside men to rid their countries of that uppercase Patriarch yet so many lowercase patriarchs still oppress us.
We are no longer scared.
Glory and power to the women in Iran who burn their hijabs and in so doing set our imaginations on fire. The Arab uprisings were sparked by a man — Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor–who set himself on fire and in so doing sparked revolutions and uprisings in the region that have stumbled and remain incomplete. And here now are Iranian women reigniting our revolutionary hearts with the feminism those Arab uprisings lacked.
Iran is not an Arab country but here come the women there to take up the baton, not by self-immolation but by setting alight a tool of their Patriarchy; a tool many other women in the countries around Iran recognize all too well.
When I heard that Mahsa Zhina Amini died after being in the custody of the “morality police” who had taken her in because she was not wearing a “proper hijab” I immediately thought of other female lives sacrificed on the altar of a piece of cloth.
I thought of the 15 girls who died in a school fire in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 2002, after “morality police” in that country barred them from fleeing the burning building — and kept firefighters from rescuing them — because the girls were not wearing headscarves and cloaks required in public. And then, nothing happened. No one was put on trial. Parents were silenced. The only concession to the horror was that girls’ education was quietly taken away by then-Crown Prince Abdullah from the Salafi zealots, who have nonetheless managed to retain their vise-grip on the kingdom’s education system.
It is no surprise that the Iranian regime accuses the Saudi regime of orchestrating the revolution that has erupted in fury at Mahsa Zhina Amini’s death. Two theocracies so alike in their hatred for women and whose zealotry has for years wrecked lives in the region.
And that is why revolutions for and by women will liberate us all. Feminism liberates everyone. When women are free everyone is free.
The thing about revolutions is that you can never unsee them. You can never unsee people who are no longer scared rise up. And their courage will set your very guts on fire.
What does hair have to do with the revolution?
There is a scene in Abbas Kiarostami’s film Ten when a woman sitting in a car in Tehran traffic gingerly removes her hijab to reveal a shaved head. When I first saw that scene of the film, in New York City in 2003, I started to cry. It had been 11 years since I stopped wearing hijab and it would be another 17 years until I shaved off my own hair.
I rewatched the film soon after I shaved off my hair and that scene still seized me.
What does the revolution have to do with hair?
During the Irish Revolution, both sides would forcibly shave or cut off women’s hair as punishment as well as a way to control women’s bodies.
What does hair have to do with the revolution?
The Iranian Revolution was co-opted by the clerics who then claimed as an achievement the mass covering of an entire nation’s women’s hair. Who owns my hair, let alone my body, when a revolution in which women fought alongside men soon after declaring victory, enforced hijab? When you shave the hair under that enforced hijab, are you then the revolution of one, defying, disobeying, and disrupting? When you rip off that compulsory hijab in public and shave off your hair in public, are you finally completing the revolution that the theocrats and the misogynists stole from you?
You fucking bet you are.
You signal FUCK YOU, I OWN MY BODY in a way that both Patriarchy and patriarchy understand; oppressor and Oppressor comprehend.
We are more than what’s on our heads and what’s in between our legs.
During the Egyptian revolution, the chants were Bread Freedom Social Justice. The chants we hear in Iran’s revolutions today remind us that none of those are possible without feminism: Women Life Freedom.
Point to your “morality police” and what they have made compulsory and burn it to the ground.
A feminist revolution targets patriarchy in the State, Street, and the Home because it recognizes that there is no liberation without sexual liberation, without gender liberation, without queer liberation. It states as a revolutionary statement: I own my body, not the State, not the Street, not the Home. I do.
A feminist revolution dares to imagine liberation from the militarism of the State and from its echo in the conservatism of the Street and the Home. A feminist revolution recognizes that the hardest revolution of all is the one at the Home, because all dictators go home.
And a feminist revolution disobeys all those who insist “People are not ready,” because as revolutionaries we must recognize that if our communities are ready for us, we are too late.
Are you ready? If women (and men) in one of the most perfect police states are this unscared, what are you doing?
Theocracy must be fought by a feminist revolution otherwise it’s just another flavour of patriarchy
The thing about revolutions is that you can never unsee them. You can never unsee people who are no longer scared rise up. And their courage will set your very guts on fire.
As you see it, as you watch the glory and power of the feminist revolution in Iran right now, ask yourself (I’m looking at you people in the U.S. cheering on the feminist revolution against theocrats over there) what the fuck you are doing to fight theocrats and fascists over here, and make sure it’s more than hashtags and just voting.
Burn. Shit. Down.
Point to your “morality police” and what they have made compulsory and burn it to the ground.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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Great! Love
Thank you Mona. Woman, Life, Liberty!