The Bewitched City: Psychopolitics in the Wake of the Social

Abstract This paper is a feminist critical reflection on the acid attacks on women in Esfahan, Iran, in October 2014. In this paper, I argue that the state-nation relationship in Iran led to the introduction of legislation that was even more patriarchal than it was before. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the marginalization of women shaped a different silhouette, and in accordance, the configuration of women’s resistance was different in a way that the autocratic state could not tolerate. As a result, a series of acid attacks occurred in one of the most well-known historical cities of Iran, Esfahan, in which, at least based on news reports, four women were victimized. This article, analyzes the social, cultural, religious, and political aspects of this attack and women’s resistance and its impact on the law of the current constitution of Iran. Keywords: acid attack, state-nation, Shari’ah, Islam, women’s rights, identity, violence against women

Global Policy , 2018

Beginning with the 1891 Tobacco Protest, women have played a vital role in revolutionary Iran. In opposition to the post-9/11 zeitgeist's hegemonic framing of the Middle Eastern Woman, as bereft of agency, this paper highlights the agency of the Iranian woman and their involvement within revolutionary struggles in the modern history of Iran. What is of particular concern here is the ways in which hijab is utilized as a revolutionary symbol and the particular narrative of this performative trope as designated by "the West". The 1979 revolution provided a discursive space in which to rearticulate the hegemonic gender identities as formulated under the Pahlavi regime. Here, the ruptures and continuities of dominant gender identities are highlighted through the use of the chador as a placard for political action. Drawing on this framework of gender (re-)identification, the notion of Iranian womanhood was again contested during the 2009 Green Movement. In considering the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, this paper identifies the re-articulation of the masculine discourse of martyrology as a means of contesting the ideological apparatus of the state. Following from the Green Movement, "the Girls of Enghelab Street" again bring the issue of Iranian womanhood to the forefront of revolutionary action. Here, hijab is utilized, quite literally, as a revolutionary flag. While the use of the hijab here appears in stark contrast to that of the 1979 revolution, this protest draws on a definitive history of the headscarf as a marker of female revolutionary action.

Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, 2022

Iran is currently experiencing one of the largest anti-government protests since 2009. The protests were ignited by the death of #MahsaAmini, a 22-year-old woman detained by the Morality Police on accusations of violating the hijab mandate, which compels women to cover their hair and wear loose-fitting clothing. Women have led the demonstrations, with some ripping off their scarves and waving and burning them while men applauded. How did hijab become politicized in Iran? This case analysis provides an overview of the “worlds’ first feminist revolution,” based on a new formulation of the importance of veiling in the construction of power in the Islamic Republic. Considering the veil as a patriarchal political technology to control the female body, this paper argues that the current movement, centered on the “Women, Life, Freedom” slogan, is challenging the basic governmentality of the Islamic Republic, and the dancing of unveiled women reveals a new political orientation to bring down the patriarchy. https://www.dohainstitute.org/en/PoliticalStudies/Pages/a-report-from-inside-the-first-female-revolution-in-iran.aspx

2023

Jina was bundled into a police van with other female detainees bound for the notorious Moral Security Headquarters to undergo what is called 're-education'. The patrolmen threw insults at the women in the van. Jina resisted their taunts. They pushed her out her seat and slammed her head against the van several times. At the police station, as she was trying to convince the police that she was observing Hijab, she clutched her head suddenly and collapsed. Blood trickled from her ears. By the time they got her to hospital, Jina was in a coma. Three days later, she died. A heart attack, said the police, forging medical documents. A brain tumor from childhood, said a neurosurgeon on state TV. Her family confirmed that Jina was a healthy young woman with no pre-existing health conditions. Leaked medical scans confirmed the cause: a skull fracture, cerebral hemorrhage, and brain edema from severe trauma to the head. Protests began as soon as the news broke-first outside the hospital, then all around Tehran, before spreading across the country and igniting protests across the world. Women and girls throwing off their headscarves and tossing them onto pyres, police stations torched, burning wrecks of cars, protestors rounded up as riot police fired water cannons and pellet guns, the state blockading streets, shutting down communication networks and launching mass arrests. Eight months on, the initial spark of outrage has grown into a revolutionary movement on a monumental scale. The rage building in Iranian women and men for months, years, decades, has finally found its moment to erupt. The initial epitaph on Jina's tombstone read: 'You will not die. Your name will turn into a codeword-a symbol of not just women, but all marginalized, oppressed people, rising up together against an oppressive regime. Jina's death galvanized an intersectional identity of otherness,

Visual Anthropology Review, 2009

This article concerns representations of popular Muslim belief and practice in modern Iran. Of primary interest here will be a horror film called Khvabgah-i dukhtaran/Girls' Dormitory, in which a young woman becomes the target of a crazed killer claiming to be under the command of jinn. I discuss how the film, which some have reported is of particular appeal to young girls and women, engages with elite discourses on the essentially female character of popular (religious) culture. I also examine what the “horror” of the film reveals about many people's understandings of cosmology and anthropology in Iran, especially with respect to the modern articulation of a “national theology.” Such understandings in turn problematize the film's place in horror cinema from a Western perspective and perhaps explain the genre's relative absence from Iranian screens over the years. Finally, I turn to the broader significance of this release in terms of filmmaking and filmgoing in Iran as well as its possible connections to female-centered horror film movements elsewhere.

In 2006 the courtyard of Sanati Sharif University in Tehran became a battleground over the geographies of life and death. The conflict transpired between students who protested the burying of state martyrs on campus, while the state and its supporters carried out the act regardless of the protest. In analyzing this act this essay traces the genealogy of the transforming geographies of life and death in modern Iran. It strives to demonstrate how the imposition of the dead in the eyes of the living and the struggles against it are informed by modern discourses and rationalities and are in keeping with, while transforming, the presumed boundaries between life and death and their sociality. The author sees the incursion of state martyrs into the public eye as a means to marginalize and render invisible the deviant ''other,'' the dissident martyrs. It demonstrates how the conflation of the vicinities of the dead and the living by burying corpses in public arenas reveals the stark contrast between the hyper-visibility of the state martyrs and the discriminatory invisibility and lack of recognition of dissident martyrs. In its corporeality this invasion echoes the previously symbolic, metaphoric and discursive dimensions of the visual presence of state martyrs as the eye of the power. It illuminates how state martyrs are employed to play the role of eternal soldiers for the state, be utilized as its eyes to oversee obedience to its laws and the safeguarding of taboos. The event that followed the post-presidential election of 2009, however, showed the contested role and position martyrs play in post-revolutionary Iran.

Women, Islam and the state, 1991

Feminist Review #102, 2012