Appropriations of ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Solidarity

• In Event: Guiding Social Justice: Educators as Duty Bearers for Student Action

Proposal

Following the September 2022 killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in police custody in Tehran for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic of Iran’s laws on observing proper hejab, widespread protests emerged across Iran that captured global attention. Protestors within Iran, particularly women and girls, developed “repertoires of contention” (Tilly & Tarrow, 2006) to challenge the state’s mandatory hejab laws and to challenge the legitimacy of the state itself. These practices included appearing in public spaces without hejab, collectively burning headscarves in public bonfires, publicly cutting hair, and the use of the slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” first used by revolutionary Kurdish women in Syria and Turkey, before becoming popularized in Iran.

In the wake of the protests, international celebrities and diasporic Iranian communities also adopted these practices as their own demonstrations of solidarity with Iranian women protesters. Social media outlets were highly visible platforms for the documentation and dissemination of these solidaristic practices, as well as for status updates of state repression and violence against demonstrators in Iran when the Islamic Republic restricted internet connectivity and access to sites and platforms. In the face of these violent reprisals and restrictions on the flow of information, activists in Iran reportedly urged those with information about Iran and platforms for dissemination to “be our voice.”

Yet as international attention to the protests in Iran progressed, the terms of “Woman, Life, Freedom” have been increasingly mobilized to signify revisionist demands and visions. This paper presents two such examples to analyze what I am calling a technique of ‘recuperative temporality.’ In the first example, I analyze videos of (unveiled) women and men engaging in leisure and convivial interactions in pre-revolutionary Iran circulated on diasporic Iranian and non-Iranian social media accounts to document putative freedoms ‘lost’ to in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution. Semiotically, images of unveiled women work to depict the pre-revolutionary past in Iran as ‘paradise lost’—and suggest a political horizon to recuperate—without acknowledgement of the repressive rule of the ancien regime. The second example is that of diasporic hashtags in social media spaces to convey a conditional solidarity with protests in Iran: #iranrevolution and #iranianrevolution,” which proliferated in captions and diasporic narratives across different social media platforms in Fall 2022.

Making use of different theories of revolution (Lenin, 1913; Arendt, 1963; Abrahamian, 1982; Bayat 2009; El-Ghobashy, 2022), I argue two points: first, invoking “revolution” to make meaning of the Fall 2022 protests is more reflective of diasporic political visions for Iran rather than support for the heterogeneity of contemporary protestor demands, including those of Iranian students and educators. Second, because social movements are not linear nor predictable, and emerge within situated material and ideological conditions, solidarity (diasporic or otherwise) with protesters in Iran similarly must be iterative and a space of ongoing learning and praxis, rather than deterministic and aspirational labeling. I conclude with reflections on the importance of reflexivity in solidaristic practices and in articulating political interests, as well as on the pedagogical implications of such approaches.

Author

• Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota