Gender Violence, and the Struggle for Transnational Feminist Solidarity  – TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research

Embracing Intersectionality

What began as a women-led revolt against the enforcement of the Islamic dress code in September 2022 quickly snowballed into an intersectional struggle for all human rights in Iran. Under the Woman Life Freedom slogan, with its deep roots in the emancipatory Kurdish movement in Turkey, Syria, and Iran, women were joined by all those seeking justice: teachers’ unions, workers’ unions, persecuted religious minorities such as Bahais, marginalized ethnic groups such as Kurdish, Arab, Azari, and Baluchi communities, environmental activists and – perhaps most poignantly – queer activists, who put their lives on the line to protest publicly in a country where same-sex relations are still punishable by death.

Jina’s death created an intersectional identity of otherness, ushering in an era of collective political consciousness unprecedented in the country since the 1979 Revolution. For the first time in 45 years, protesters of all identities and ideologies marched together, united by one shared goal: to end the tyranny of state control over their bodies, voices, beliefs, and identities.

After decades of fighting unsuccessfully in isolation for specific causes (voting reform, utility shortages, ethnic oppression, oil prices, censorship, prison welfare), the 2022 uprising connected the dots between the ‘symptoms’ of life in the Islamic Republic and rallied protestors around the central cause. As Iranian sociologist Asef Bayat noted, the movement demonstrated “a paradigm shift in Iranian subjectivities…reflected in the centrality of women and their dignity, which related more broadly to human dignity.” (Bayat, 2023)

In the first few weeks of the uprising, a trend emerged on Twitter in which people listed their reasons for taking to the streets, beginning their posts with ‘Barāye…’ (For…).  The outpouring of issues extended far beyond women’s rights to encompass poverty, militarism, corruption, freedom of speech, the rights of children, animals, and refugees, environmental concerns, theocracy, and outdated social and religious taboos. A young musician, Shervin Hajipour, turned these tweets into a power ballad, Barāye, which went viral overnight, garnering 48 million views. With lines such as “For dancing in the streets” and “For the fear we feel when we kiss,” interwoven with the repeated slogan “For Women, Life, Freedom,” it became an anthem for the movement and won the inaugural Best Song for Social Change Award at the American Grammys in 2023. Immediately after its release, Hajipour’s house was raided, and he was forced to remove the video from the internet before being arrested and transferred to Evin prison. In August 2024, he announced he had received a 3-year-8-month sentence for writing the song.

Since mid-April 2024, when the authorities announced the implementation of a new nationwide campaign called the ‘Noor’ (Light) Plan, the crackdown on women and girls has intensified. By subjecting women to constant surveillance, beatings, sexual violence, electric shocks, long prison sentences, and denying them phone calls and medical treatment in prison, the Iranian authorities have effectively waged a ‘war on women’ to punish their collective defiance of forced veiling with long prison sentences under the inhumane conditions of women’s prison wards. Two detained Iranian Kurdish women activists, Pakhshan Azizi and Sharifeh Mohammadi have been sentenced to death. These brutal tactics expose a regime not only violating fundamental human rights but also committing egregious acts of violence with impunity.

While advocates for change within Iran have embraced intersectionality as central to their collective fight against multiple forms of injustice, the absence of a strong transnational solidarity network has allowed the regime’s brutal assaults on women’s rights to persist largely unchecked. With regional and international alliances lagging in offering recognition or support, the regime continues its attacks on women activists with minimal consequences. The international community’s failure to unite in meaningful action — action that transcends divisive binaries and clichés, such as conflating the ‘war on women’ with ‘Islamophobia’ or other potentially divisive political differences—has only exacerbated the challenges faced by persecuted activists, leaving them isolated in their struggle for dignity and justice.

Recentring Gender Justice at the Core of a Collective Struggle for Freedom

Another major legacy of Woman Life Freedom has been its recentring of gender justice as a core value of a nationwide social movement. In addition to its focus on intersectionality, the prominent visibility of women and teen girls at the forefront of the protests has served as a reminder that the fight for gender justice must remain at the heart of any social movement that fights for freedom and justice.

Women have been disproportionately affected by every regime change in Iran’s tumultuous past. From the forceful unveiling of women (1936) under the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi to the enforcement of hijab following the rise of an extremist clerical regime after 1979, women’s rights, bodies, choices, and freedoms have been sacrificed on the patriarchal altar again and again. Subsequently, this history of oppression has become entwined with counter-histories of courageous activism and top-down gender reforms of the second Pahlavi era. In the decades before the Revolution, suffragettes made great strides in achieving access to free education, the right to divorce and gain custody of children, the legalization of abortion, the raising of the marriage age from 13 to 18, and the end of state-enforced dress code. In 1963, they won the right to vote and run for parliament; by 1978, two million women had jobs, including positions of power in traditionally male-centric industries.

However, with the establishment of the Islamic Republic, women’s rights were dismantled overnight – rolled back not only to a time before emancipation but to a far darker past: gender segregation, strict Islamic dress code, exclusion from political spheres and the workforce, family rights revoked, widespread cultural censorship, travel bans without the permission of a man. The marriage age was set back to puberty, with brides as young as 9. Although this was later officially changed to 13, evidence collected by exiled Iranian feminist lawyer Shadi Sadr proved that 13,487 marriages involving girls under the age of 13 were registered between 2013 and 2020. (Sadr, 2024)

Nevertheless, women have remained influential actors, organizers, and mobilizers of mass non-violent actions to demand gender equality and to challenge patriarchal structures in Iran. Despite all gender-based constraints, they occupied more seats in higher education than their male counterparts. Their activism took many forms, including the 2006 sit-in outside the University of Tehran, calling for the removal of discriminatory articles from the country’s constitution and its Islamic penal code; the One Million Signatures Campaign, aimed at reforming family laws; campaigns against practices such as stoning and other forms of gender-based violence; drafting a comprehensive women’s charter in 2009, and the fight for equal access to public spaces, including sports stadiums. Even in exile, Iranian feminist activists continue to advocate for their rights.

In the wake of Woman Life Freedom and amid the birth of several feminist collectives within Iran and its diaspora, a group of Iranian women’s rights activists drafted Iran Women’s Bill of Rights for “inclusive and subjective equality for women in all their diversities with the intention of enshrining them in the future Constitution of Iran.” The formation of such collectives demonstrates that despite ideological differences, Iranian women activists have successfully united to present their demands to the state with a unified voice. While their voices are growing louder, achieving meaningful change requires global understanding, recognition, and solidarity. For the movement to succeed, the Iranian women’s struggle must be intertwined, like a helix, in the fabric of transnational struggles for justice across time and place.

Building a Transnational Feminist Solidarity Network Across the Region

The rise of the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran exposed the regime’s hypocrisy regarding freedom and justice. The Islamic Republic, through its brutal oppression of various ethnic and religious groups, has come to resemble an occupying force, colonizing its own citizens by subjecting them to systemic abuse and humiliation for 45 years. This collective realization was reflected in some of the movement’s slogans, which encapsulated the intersectional suffering of diverse groups across the country and beyond. Two key slogans, “From Kurdistan to Tehran, I give my life for Iran” (Az Kurdestan tā Tehran, Jānam fadā-ye Iran) and “From Zahedan to Tehran, I give my life for Iran” (Az Zahedan tā Tehran, Jānam fadā-ye Iran), highlighted the protesters’ recognition of intersectional unity across the country. Another slogan extended this intersectionality beyond Iran’s borders, calling the necessity of building regional solidarities. When in the face of police brutality, protesters chanted “Iran has become Palestine / People, why are you sitting down?” (Iran shodeh felestin, mardom cherā neshastin?), they poignantly drew on parallels between the struggles of Iranians and Palestinians in fighting against their oppressors. This chant not only denounced the regime’s exploitation of the Palestinian cause to advance its own colonial ambitions but also signalled a broader critique of the regime’s expansionist agenda within and beyond Iran’s borders. Recognizing the Islamic Republic as a colonial, occupying force at the heart of this slogan also served as a call to the international community to break away from outdated East-West binaries when applying such key terms as “colonialism” and “occupation” to the Middle East.

In the two years since Iran’s women-led protests erupted in Iran, the world’s attention has moved to the catastrophic situations escalating in different parts of the region from Kabul to Gaza. Renewed focus on Palestine has reignited a long-contentious debate in the West, with political soapboxing muddying already deeply troubled waters. As the old acronym ‘PEP’ (‘Progressive Except for Palestine’) re-enters circulation, the discussion risks dangerously over-simplifying an incredibly complex matrix of issues including nationhood, ethnicity, religion – and indeed gender.

A key takeaway from the Woman Life Freedom movement was the necessity of uncovering the history of systemic female subjugation in tandem with other forms of ethnic, religious, and socio-economic oppression that extend far beyond the present moment. As the assault on Gaza intensified following the Hamas atrocities on October 7th, the need to reframe the Palestinian struggle through a gendered lens became more crucial than ever. The brutal realities of war on women’s bodies across the region have once again underscored that women’s rights in the Middle East have been battered and erased by four oppressive forces: the US-Britain alliance, Israel, and Islamic militants from Afghanistan to Iran, to Palestine. Recognizing the shared responsibility of all these groups in the war on women is essential for building a transnational solidarity network rooted in gender. Such a network cannot be built without understanding the historical context that places contemporary crises within a framework of colonial and patriarchal pasts. The same reductionist perspective that has fetishized Iranian women’s struggle for bodily autonomy by narrowly focusing on the physical symbolism of the veil has similarly reduced the Palestinian struggle for autonomy and freedom to a simplistic narrative, framing it as merely the fight for the victory of Hamas’s Islamic militancy over the so-called ‘only democratic regime in the Middle East.’

A glance at the history of gender oppression in Palestine, however, offers a different view of the ongoing conflict. Feminist scholar Ryvka Barnard elaborates on this in her insightful article, “Palestine is a Feminist Issue,” where she explains:

Palestinian women have faced down gendered violence from Israel’s colonial regime since its beginning, leading the Palestinian struggle for freedom. In 1933, the British high commissioner in Palestine, Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, wrote in a letter his concern that a ‘new and disquieting feature’ of a protest in Jerusalem was the prominent role taken by women who led the protest and fought back against the colonial police.

Barnard, 2024.

In fact, women have remained at the forefront of the Palestinian struggle for freedom for almost a century, spearheading protests and boycotts, leading resistance movements, running community organizations and underground schools, campaigning for healthcare access, and defiantly speaking out against persecution and injustice. Their work has been strengthened by forming umbrella organizations, such as the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, which continue to face criminalization and office raids for their non-violent activities.

In November 2023, twelve of these organizations issued a global call for support, stating:

Women movements have historically been central to the struggles against oppression, discrimination, colonialism, and militarism… Palestinian women have been struggling for decades against the intersection of national, social, and economic oppressions, calling out the inherent patriarchal core of Israel’s regime of oppression. We, women’s unions and grassroots movements representing Palestinian women. Inside historic Palestine and in exile, call on women and women’s organizations worldwide to speak up and rise up, to support our struggle to end this genocide.

Despite abundant evidence from the UN and other agencies that women are disproportionately affected by the current invasion –in terms of murder; sexual violence and abuse; and access to health, reproductive, and obstetric care – we are yet to see gender appear as prominently as it deserves in global intervention and debate.  

For Palestinian women, this is not surprising. Even within feminist circles, they have always struggled to have their voices heard. While we may have come a long way since the 1985 UN Conference, in which leading American feminist Betty Friedan warned Egyptian feminist Nawal al-Saadawi to “not bring up Palestine in your speech. This is a women’s conference, not a political conference,” Nada Elia’s bold and enlightening paper “Justice is Indivisible” (2017) shows how far we still have to go:

            There are few Palestinian feminists who have not experienced some degree of
            suspicion, misunderstanding, or outright hostility, within … feminist communities.
            For, while it was obvious to some of the more radical Global North activists that our
            struggle was no different than the struggles of any colonized people, our yearning for
            liberation was all too often misread by many as anti-Semitism, rather than as an
            organic impulse to cherish freedom, dignity, self-determination.

Elia, 2017.

It is frustrating to have to state the obvious: politics and female empowerment cannot, and must not, be separated. As Nawal al-Saadawi later reflected about the Friedan remark:

            Of course in my speech, I did not heed what she had said to me since I believe that
            women’s issues cannot be dealt with in isolation from politics. The 
            emancipation of women in the Arab region is closely linked to the regimes under
            which we live.

Regimes which the US and some European countries have been hesitant to criticize – out of fear of retaliation, fear of appearing Islamophobic, and fear of acknowledging their role in colonialist legacies which have led to the catastrophic situations as they are today.

Feminist Praxis and Solidarity with Decolonial Struggle

It is impossible to discuss and understand today’s intersectional struggle of Iranian and Afghan women, queers, and marginalized bodies whose identities and basic human rights have been systemically and purposefully denied for decades, without remembering the history of systemic plundering and oppression by domestic, regional, and international powers throughout modern history. As external and internal forces of colonialism continue to reinforce each other, those who continue to pay the highest price are marginalized people – especially women. As Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian explains, feminism entails “understanding the nature and significance of solidarity with the dispossessed, something that global feminism, international law, and Israeli feminism have so far failed to do.” (Kevorkian, 2014).

Two years on, we feminist activists across the region must create meaningful connections among ourselves to help feminists in the US and Europe avoid conflating our struggle for bodily autonomy and dignity with Islamophobia or antisemitism. Woman Life Freedom was a call for everyone fighting for gender justice to revisit their perceptions of the ‘Muslim woman’ and her humanity, without getting caught in the commodification of the veil as an identity or cultural marker. The movement also powerfully exposed the Islamic Republic’s manipulative methods of subjugating women through ideological means, allowing it to twist its brutal war on women into a narrative of the West’s imperialist war on ‘Islam’. The harmful silence of Western feminists around issues of gender justice specific to Muslim women in the Middle East has, in effect, colluded with and strengthened the regimes’ goals. The time has come to challenge the simplistic and imagined East-West dichotomy and critically examine the reductionist conclusions that often arise from applying postcolonial theories to the nonviolent resistance of Iranian women for autonomy and dignity to decolonize their own bodies. Without asking uncomfortable questions, without untangling the origins of these twisted roots, we will never gain the solidarity and intervention we need.  As Nada Elia eloquently urges, campaigners and activists worldwide must “finally grasp…that feminist praxis entails engaging in solidarity with the decolonial struggle.” (Elia, 2017)

Women’s rights are human rights, regardless of ethnicity or religion, and cultural squeamishness cannot be an excuse for inaction. Parallels could be drawn from the history of campaigning to end female genital mutilation (FGM) – a movement that began 100 years ago in Egypt and gained momentum in the 1970s through transnational feminist solidarity. Nawal aal-Saadawi, herself an FGM survivor, was a leading voice in the debate, her books banned and her career as director-general of public health in Egypt terminated as a result. In 1975, a groundbreaking study by Rose Oldfield Hayes ushered in a new age of serious global engagement with the issue by renaming it ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ instead of ‘female circumcision’.

But it would take another thirty years for the UN to recognize it as a form of violence against women, making it a human rights violation rather than a medical ambiguity, and it wasn’t until the early 2000s that serious action began to take at an international policy level, with the practice banned in many countries and criminalized in the West.

In their century-long struggle to protect the bodily autonomy of women and girls, FGM campaigners have come up against – and continue to come up against – concerns about cultural insensitivity and moral relativism, and accusations of Christo-colonial erasure of indigenous beliefs. The division emerged between feminists (advocating equal rights for all women) and anthropologists (advocating cultural tolerance). In 1981, at the height of the debate, the French Association of Anthropologists stated that a certain feminism resuscitates (today) the moralistic arrogance of yesterday’s colonialism. With this case study in mind, it is easy to see why some may feel reluctance to forge transnational cooperation and intervention around women’s rights in Islamic countries today. But as feminist academic and theorist Neferti Tadiar wrote, after visiting Palestine and listening to women in grassroots organizations:

            To  take  a  stand  in  solidarity  with,  and  to  be  involved  in,  the  struggle  of 
            Palestinians  to resist and transform the conditions of their own dispossession and
            disposability—to join in their aspiration for collective freedom and self-
            determination—is also to participate in the remaking of global life, which cannot but
            be a paramount feminist act.

Tadiar, 2012.

‘The Inescapable Network of Mutuality’

This, then, must be the driving force for solidarity: a shared vision of “the remaking of global life.” It will take time, patience, and generosity. Solidarity is indeed a process, requiring “intentional work in getting to know each other’s histories, in prioritizing strategies, in enacting and reciprocating solidarity when someone else’s body (is) on the line,  because  of  a  deep  understanding  of  intersectionality” as eloquently argued by Elia:

            Our struggles are not parallel—a term which suggests that  they  will  never 
            meet—but intersectional,  coming  together  at  various  nodes… Reciprocal
            solidarity is a long-term movement, not a “moment”… ebbing  and  flowing  as 
            circumstances  evolve. With the understanding that the system we are fighting  is 
            global,  we  can  better  appreciate  that  solidarity  amongst  disenfranchised,
            criminalized communities is not self-serving, but mutually beneficial.

Elia, 2017.

Women Life Freedom is the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface are layers of institutionalized patriarchal abuse, so systemic, so pernicious, that it is time to call it what it is: Gender Apartheid. Pressure on the UN and other human rights agencies to legally recognize gender apartheid and take urgent legislative action has been growing since February of this year, when a special report from the UN Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls demanded it be recognized as a crime against humanity, stating:

            Gender apartheid is not merely a theoretical possibility or legal construct, but a real
            threat and lived reality for millions of women and girls around the world – a reality
            that is currently not explicitly codified in international law.

United Nations, 2024.

While forms of gender-specific crimes exist, they fail to capture the deprivation of rights at a systemic level. Highlighting evidence of female experience since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in 2021, the report is ardent that “(o)nly the apartheid framework can fully grasp the role of intent, ideology and institutionalization in gender apartheid regimes.”