Woman Life Freedom Uprising Main Menu Woman, Life, Freedom Iran, Islam & the Inevitable Contextualizing the Islamization of Iran The Making of the Modern Woman Icons & Personas of Woman Life Freedom Origins of the Uprising Freedom through the Female The Writing in the Margins Nasleh Zed's Youthful Uprising Soundtracking Woman Life Freedom Urban Canvases of the Uprising Feminist Placemaking of a Digital Uprising Afterlives of Woman, Life, Freedom WLF Resources Here you will find our sources all compiled in one place

South of Heaven

45871 Hatcher Stanford
Plainly, as Nahal Nikan puts it, “mandatory hijabs and other discriminatory policies have transformed life into death and the realm of the living into one huge graveyard,” (e-flux, 2024). Since 1979, women have faced brutal subordination at the hands of the regime, in the name of
preserving the religious sanctity of the Iranian people. This burdening of Iranian women with representing the religious adherence of a nation has contributed to ‘Death’ becoming the foundation of ‘Life’ (Nikan, 2024). As Nikan outlines for us, women in Iran have become,
“guardians of the world after death,” and thus, are deprived of life in the now, for the sake of guaranteeing prosperity in the after-life. This notion that women as a collective must endure authoritarian regulations of all sorts in the name of ‘after-life’ was rejected at the funeral of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, when groups of mourning women began to lament her death. These women, who have also faced subjugation as Kurds in Iran, began the Women Life Freedom movement as a, “life-affirming,” movement. The protests of Women Life Freedom were connected through a consciousness focused on the, “feminine and earthly,” as a stark reversal of the regime’s focus on, “the otherworldly, sacred and religious,” and the ‘after-life’ (Nikan, 2024).

It's important to note, as Nikan does, that this movement’s emergence came from years of stifled grief and thus repressed anger towards the regime’s violent policing tactics. In past
decades, the morality police were tasked with discouraging the lives of women through violence of many forms, but always discreetly. During this time, the Iranian public was largely unable to demand any form of justice that didn't fit into the regime’s legal resolutions that were futile to
curb the internal colonialism inflicted upon Iran’s minorities. Furthermore, advocacy for changes in rule were stifled through a system of, “red lines,” in which discussion of topics and expression of ideas that call the regime’s authoritarian rule into question are met with violent repression.
These red lines have governed public and private discourse for decades, and have time and time again stamped out the would-be sparks of an uprising life Women Life Freedom (Makaremi, 2023).

As Nikan ironically notes, “no idea has been as costly and problematic for its creators as the establishment of a morality police,” (e-flux, 2024). Indeed, the regime’s own violent attempts to stifle resistance to its authoritarian rule has done just the opposite, in which public demonstrations of state violence preceding and culminating in the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini had erased the regime’s own red lines that had protected it. These public acts of violence (that have hardly decreased in frequency or occurred more secretively since) were broadcast to Iranians in Iran and in diaspora, in which digital connections fostered a, “super-collective”, as coined by Asef Bayat, that united all subjugated peoples of Iran and enabled them to finally grieve the victims of the regime’s dedication to the ‘after-life’ (Bayat, 2022, Nikan, 2024). The regime’s erasure of its own red lines that governed the lives of the Iranian people allowed the Iranian super-collective to dismantle, “the pact between society and state that has held since the 1979 Revolution,” and begin to protest and target the previously untouchable facets of the regime’s authoritarianism (Makaremi, 2024).

This consciousness was driven by a collective mourning of those whose lives were violated by the regime. As Elaheh describes in Cleansing Personal Archives and the Birth of the Black Hole of Collective Memory, many Iranians practiced a cleansing of personal memory when they removed evidence of anti-regime sentiment from their personal devices,

Setting the messages to self-destruct, annihilating the most quotidian daily interactions; at the end of the night cleansing the expressions of love and terms of endearment that you’d have liked to go back through and savor throughout the day, the group chats, the jokes. The daily reminders to one another, insisting that you must not keep anything on your devices. Any insignificant thing might be used to build a case against you. You might have to undergo hours of interrogation on account of the most ordinary sentence.

This self-erasure furthered the dependence on a collective consciousness, wherein Iranian’s reached into the memory of the future when lacking the taken-for-granted immediacy of the present and past. Elaheh describes a destructured and abstract fog of memory that aligns personal memory with the collective memory of the uprising, “at so many points in the Jina uprising, following every image, slogan, and protest, together we shared our awe and joy and trained our eyes on a collective image,” (Elaheh, 2024).

Combining these ideas of a collective consciousness and a reclamation of life, we can fully understand the power of a female driven movement, that is, “instigated and led by women, but is not exclusively about women's rights”, (Alemzadeh, 2024). As mentioned above, this uprising has accurately been described as the greatest threat to the regime since its establishment. Given the concepts put forward by Nikan, this should primarily be attributed to the uprising’s life-affirming nature, that prioritizes the genuinely lived experiences of women as Women, not as an instrument of power.

- Hatcher Stanford

References

Bayat, Asef. 2022. “A New Iran Has Been Born — a Global Iran.” New Lines Magazine. October 26, 2022. https://newlinesmag.com/argument/a-new-iran-has-been-born-a-global-iran/.

Elaheh. 2024. “Cleansing Personal Archives and the Birth of the Black Hole of Collective Memory - Journal #145.” E-Flux.com. 2024. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/145/606117/cleansing-personal-archives-and-the-birth-of-the-black-hole-of-collective-memory/.

Makaremi, Chowra. 2023. “Crossing the Red Lines.” Society for Cultural Anthropology. June 29, 2023. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/crossing-the-red-lines.

Nikan, Nahal. 2022. “To Summon Life in a Cemetery - Journal #145.” E-Flux.com. 2022. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/145/604938/to-summon-life-in-a-cemetery/.

This page has paths:

  1. Afterlives of Woman, Life, Freedom Kimia
  2. Hatcher Stanford Hatcher Stanford

This page references: