Forging Online/Offline Subversive Spaces in the Iranian Women’s Movement

• In Event: Women's Movements and Organizations

Abstract

Since 2014, Iranian women have taken and shared photos and videos of themselves on social media showing their engagement in illegal activities throughout public spaces in Iran. Walking throughout busy city streets unveiled, dancing in front of national monuments, biking in public parks, and singing, all of which are prohibited for women by law, have become common expressions of protest to the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI)’s many gender discriminatory policies and patriarchal-authoritarian rule. In response, the regime has fined and jailed several identified activists, pointing both to a significant discrepancy between protest type and regime response, and to an effective enough women’s challenge provoking such extreme retaliation measures on the part of government authorities. This paper attempts to make sense of such outcomes by honing in one of the most significant elements constructing this form of protest: the subversive use of public space. It explores women’s use of digital media to disrupt notions of public space and its formation as a central practice of protest in women’s resistance efforts against the IRI. As other scholars have noted, the control, segregation, and regulation of public space constructs a significant pillar of IRI rule. I discuss the importance of this practice to the regime from the outset of the revolution in contextualizing its centrality to women’s protest and show its unique connections to another element of IRI rule: control over women’s bodies. Using social media to publicize women’s rebellious acts thus strikes at the heart of the IRI’s regime of power, making the circulation of digitally shared protest images an effective social and political challenge. I apply critical visual theory to a series of women’s protest images associated with the “My Stealthy Freedom” movement (the name of the Iranian women’s movement on social media) in understanding how this challenge takes shape and draw on theories of spatial production and feminist critical geography in deconstructing the significance of images showing peaceful, everyday women’s activities as a protest form.

Author

• Parichehr Kazemi, University of Oregon