Woman Life Freedom encompassed so many different struggles, but at the end of it all, it reshaped how women exist in Iranian society, both in reality and in perception.
In “To Summon Life in a Cemetery,” Nihal Nakan explains how women were stripped of their individuality and their personhood until the grave and beyond. Womanhood only existed in the context of religious teachings and government impositions. Nakan said women were perceived as larger than life yet docile and submissive— through Woman Life Freedom, women had “broken free of metaphors” to now exist simply as they are in their own bodies. Drawing on Maryam Alemzadeh’s "Revolutionary Politics of the Normal," women existing in their natural form as they are was a return to a normalcy that never really existed. Creating that new sense of normalcy was in fact the revolution.
Woman Life Freedom also reshaped how women in Iran collectively view themselves. As more women willingly shed the hijab, they had to confront the jarring break from patriarchal rules for clothing. In “Heads without Headscarves,” Negar Hatami explains the instinctual shock of seeing women publicly unveiled after only perceiving them with a head covering for so long. Ultimately, these changes in social dynamics— while they took some getting used to— represented the convergence of “formal and informal” bodies that were previously divided by public and private spaces. Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, this divide was most prominent during the Qajar Empire, where there existed these private, homosocial spaces solely for women. In the past, one wouldn’t be able to grasp a veiled woman’s full identity from simply looking at her on the street since her public image was different from her private ones. As less women adhered to government-imposed hijab, the line between the public and private image was blurred to the point of negligence. These changing social norms “bring bodies closer together,” Hatami says, emphasizing the collectivity of the liberation that Woman Life Freedom sought.
In their piece "Jina, the Moment of No Return," Aram argues that this collectivity went beyond Iranian women, extending to a variety of struggles. Struggles once detached-- mandatory hijab, Kurdish liberation, and the plight of the working class-- were united in "the Jina uprisings." Barriers of ethnicity, class, and even geography were broken down in Woman Life Freedom, allowing the movement's ideals to go beyond the street. Aram contends that the large demonstrations following the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini were vital to the movement, but its lasting impact came through the drastic changes to everyday life. Some had hoped Woman Life Freedom would pave the path to the overhaul of the Islamic regime, but this revolution was one of ordinary people, not of the political system. Ordinary women, now experiencing themselves as part of a collective struggle, took the ideals of Woman Life Freedom to their homes, schools, and jobs, rather than just the streets. The result was a revolutionary change in social norms, most notably women unveiling en masse.
Although it didn’t bring about the total regime change some hoped for, Woman Life Freedom redefined womanhood and normalcy in a system where women's bodies were policed beyond measure and subjugated in their glorification.
-M.A.
References
Alemzadeh, Maryam. “Revolutionary Politics of the Normal.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 55, no. 4 (2023): 724–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823001381.
Aram. "Jina, the Moment of No Return." e-flux Journal, no. 145 (May 2024). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/145/606390/jina-the-moment-of-no-return/
Hatami, Negar. "Heads Without Headscarves." e-flux Journal, no. 145 (May 2024). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/145/606004/heads-without-headscarves/
Nikan, Nahal. "To Summon Life in a Cemetery." e-flux Journal, no. 145 (May 2024). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/145/604938/to-summon-life-in-a-cemetery/
