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Citation: Ahmadi, Donya. 2024.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place:
The Intersectional Experiences of
Iranian Feminists from Minoritized
Ethno-National Backgrounds.
Religions 15: 533. https://doi.org/
10.3390/rel15050533
Academic Editors: Patricia Schor and
Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar
Received: 6 November 2023
Revised: 4 March 2024
Accepted: 8 April 2024
Published: 25 April 2024
Copyright: © 2024 by the author.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
religions
Article
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Intersectional Experiences of
Iranian Feminists from Minoritized Ethno-National Backgrounds
Donya Ahmadi
Department of International Relations, University of Groningen, 9700 CC Groningen, The Netherlands;
d.ahmadi@rug.nl
Abstract: Over the past decades, Iran has been witnessing the growth of a burgeoning feminist
movement. With its origins deeply rooted in the early 20th century, the Iranian feminist movement,
as such, is not a uniform body: it embodies various, opposing even, political ideologies under
the umbrella of feminism, reflecting the divergent social locations of its protagonists. While the
movement has been criticized for its centralist, middle-class and at times apolitical tendencies,
academic scholarship has yet to offer intersectional analyses that problematize historically rooted and
daily materialized relations of power within the movement, particularly in relation to axes such as
ethnicity (and race), religion, gender identity, sexuality, and (dis)ability. In light of this gap, the present
article aims towards documenting and theorizing the intersectionality of the challenges facing Iranian
feminist activists belonging to various ethnic nations and religious beliefs. Drawing on ethnographic
research, it argues that minority feminists find themselves between a rock and a hard place: the rock
being masculinist politics within their minoritized communities, which prioritize ethno-nationalist
demands over gendered ones; the hard place being a centralist liberal feminist movement that fails to
reflect the intersectionality of their experiences as non-Persian non-Shia women, thereby reproducing
hierarchies of power in relation to ethnicity, religion, and class.
Keywords: intersectionality; feminism; Iran; Iranian feminist movement; gendered discrimination;
gendered racism
1. Introduction
On 16 September 2022, 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian Jina (Mahsa) Amini died in the
Kasra hospital of Tehran. She had been taken to the hospital three days prior, due to head
injuries she had suffered while being arrested by the Iranian morality police, leading to a
cerebral hemorrhage that eventually resulted in her death (Strzy ˙
zy ´nska 2022). The shock of
Jina’s brutal and untimely killing turned into a widespread public outrage almost instantly,
sparking mass protests first in Kurdistan and soon after the rest of the country. On 17
September, Jina was buried in her birth city of Saqqez amidst high security, surrounded by
a protesting crowd that chanted the Kurdish slogan of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (Woman, Life,
Freedom). Some women reportedly removed their headscarves in protest to the compulsory
hijab rule that cost Jina her young life. The funeral ended in the violent suppression of
the crowd by security forces (Khatam 2023). The images of the state-initiated violence as
well as of Jina’s tombstone reading “Jina giyan, to namiri, nawit ebete remiz” (Dear Jina,
you won’t die, your name will become a symbol) circulated widely on social media and
sparked what was to become the biggest mass uprising since the 1979 revolution over the
next months. Known widely as the Jina uprising (“Khizesh-e-Jina”) or the Woman, Life,
Freedom movement (“Jonbesh-e-zan zendegi azadi”), the nationwide movement adopted
the Kurdish slogan and mobilized an unprecedented number of Iranian women (many
younger in age than Jina) across the country (Ahmadi 2023b). Jina’s name had indeed
become a symbol for the fight against the decades-long gendered oppression facing Iranian
women, especially those on the margins, in the name of political Islam.
Religions 2024,15, 533. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15050533 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions
Religions 2024,15, 533 2 of 15
For many Iranian ethnic minorities, however, Jina’s name symbolized an additional
fight, one against assimilation to a uniform Iranian identity and the systemic oppression
facing Iranian ethnic nations, in particular Kurds, for well over a century. While Jina’s
Kurdish roots are not unknown to most, her name has become a source of debate, and at
times, polarization. Some Kurdish feminists have gone so far as to call Mahsa a colonial
name, highlighting the assimilationist politics that necessitated opting for a Persian name
(Mahsa) over a Kurdish one (Jina) for official registration upon birth. The Jina uprising
marked an important moment in contemporary Iranian history, owing not only to its
prioritization of feminist demands such as bodily autonomy and gender equality. For the
first time in recent history, the systemic marginalization facing minoritized ethnic nations as
well as their political autonomy became topics of discussion nationwide. This was in large
part due to the frontline role assumed by historically marginalized communities in areas
such as Kurdistan and Baluchistan in spearheading the protests and the unprecedented
display of cross-ethnic solidarity among them, exemplified by the widespread use of
slogans such as “Kurd tanya nia, Baloch peshtiwania” (Kurd is not alone, Baluch is behind
you), and “Kurdistan Kurdistan cheshm-o cheragh-e Iran” (Kurdistan, Kurdistan, you are
the eye and light of Iran) in protests across the country.
Such cross-ethnic recognition and mobilizing did not go without backlash. Protests in
Sunni-majority Baluchistan and Kurdistan were largely dubbed by state media as separa-
tionist struggles, invoking century-long stereotypes that securitized many of Iran’s ethnic
nations, and in particular, those residing in border areas and with strong transnational ties
overseas, as threats to the country’s territorial integrity and border security. Likewise, parts
of the opposition to the Islamic Republic (hereafter IRI)—in particular, pro-monarchy and
nationalist factions—expressed similar concerns regarding the growing focus on ethnic
mobilization and sovereignty. In an interview with the London-based Manoto TV aired
in January 2023, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah, referred to territorial integrity
(“tamamiat-e arzi”) of Iran as his absolute red line, stating that if an ounce of Iranian soil
was moved, Iran would not be Iran anymore (Pahlavi 2022).
Nationalist sentiments are not exclusive to the masculinist forces within the oppo-
sition. Similar debates have surfaced within the Iranian feminist movement. With its
roots deeply embedded in the constitutional movement of late 19th century, the Iranian
women’s movement underwent various waves of suppression, co-optation, and revival
throughout the 20th century. Various scholars have pointed towards the importance of
the women’s rights discourse in constituting Iranian nationalism under both Pahlavi and
Islamic regimes (Paidar 1997;Sanasarian 1982). In her groundbreaking work on the story
of the daughters of Quchan, Afsaneh Najmabadi (1998) successfully demonstrates the
gendered origins of Iranian nationalism, showcasing how the concepts of the homeland
(“vatan”) and nation (“mellat”) emerged as feminine and masculine entities, respectively,
throughout the constitutional period. The homeland thus came to embody a feminized
object in need of male supervision and protection, while the nation evolved as the agentic
masculine subject tasked with protecting both the sovereignty of the former’s territories
and the purity of its women (Ahmadi 2023a).
The contemporary Iranian feminist movement, as such, is not a uniform body. It
embodies various, opposing even, political ideologies under the umbrella of feminism,
reflecting the divergent social locations of its protagonists. While the movement has been
criticized for its rootedness in the urban bourgeoisie, as well as its centralist, elitist, and, at
times, apolitical tendencies, academic scholarship has yet to offer intersectional analyses
that problematize the inner hierarchies of power reproduced within the movement, particu-
larly in relation to axes such as ethnicity (and race), religion, gender identity, sexuality, and
(dis)ability. As such, feminist scholarship on the topic has itself fallen prey to the centralism
(“Markaz-gara’i”) plaguing the Iranian feminist movement, rendering invisible the crucial
role played by women located at Iran’s margins (both literally and figuratively). In light of
this gap, the present article aims towards documenting and theorizing the intersectionality
of the challenges facing Iranian feminist activists belonging to various ethnic nations and
Religions 2024,15, 533 3 of 15
religious beliefs. Drawing on qualitative semi-structured interviews with six Iranian femi-
nist activists from minoritized ethno-national backgrounds, it takes an important first step
towards highlighting their contributions, modes of resistance, and lived experiences at the
intersections of gender, ethnicity, religion, and class (among others).
The structure of this article is as follows. The second section provides a brief historical
overview of the Iranian women’s movement and its role in the consolidation and expansion
of Iranian nationalism since the 20th century. Thereafter, a brief methodology section is
presented in which the chosen methods of data collection and analysis are introduced
and substantiated. The fourth section presents the empirical analysis, followed by a final
concluding section that synthesizes the findings and discusses avenues for future research
and praxis.
2. The Iranian Women’s Movement and Nationalism: A Historical Marriage
Iranian women’s bodies and political demands proved pivotal for the modernization
project of the Pahlavi I and II eras and the Islamization project of the post-revolutionary
establishment alike. Parvin Paidar (1997) posits that the establishment of the Pahlavi
dynasty in 1925 changed the foundations of Iranian nationalism. Reza Shah’s emphasis on
building a uniform nation, with his military-style leadership, effectively shifted the nature
and direction of Iranian nationalism from a domain of independent political activity during
the Constitutional era to a top-down state-led project, the success of which necessitated
the establishment of a centralized bureaucracy. Sanasarian (2000) similarly posits that state
policy on ethno-nationals and religious minorities during Reza Shah’s reign (1925–41) was
shaped with the goals of homogenizing society by doing away with ethnic, linguistic, and
religious diversity completely through assimilation into a homogenized ‘Iranian’ identity:
New dress codes, mandatory teaching of the Persian language in schools, aboli-
tion of titles (such as mirza, amir, shaykh, khan), changes in place names (streets,
towns, cities, provinces), and even the 1935 order to foreign governments to call
the country Iran instead of Persia were all aimed at creating a unified (nation-
)state. These changes reflected the policy of linguistic de-ethicizing of Iran by
merging territorial entitlement with the Persianized monarchical center (e.g.,
Lurestan became Kermanshah, Arabestan became Khuzestan). Tribal and ru-
ral communities were forced into compliance with the central government. To
destroy ethnic cohesion, segments of ethnic groups were moved to other areas.
Sometimes the lands belonging to one family were given to another in the same
ethnic grouping in order to weaken cohesion and to instigate intra-ethnic hostility.
Homogenization of society was the desired goal of the ruler (15).
Reza Shah’s suppression of independent political activity, including the grassroots
women’s organizations of the Constitutional period, further marked a new period in the
Iranian women’s movement. Through establishing a centralized women’s society called
“Kanoon-e-Banovan” to streamline women’s political activities, Reza Shah, on the one hand,
successfully depoliticized and domesticated the women’s movement. On the other hand, he
instrumentalized women’s involvement to project a modernizing image of Iran to the world.
Kanoon-e Banovan later acted as an important vessel for promoting the contested unveiling
decree of 1936 (Bamdad and Bagley 1977). The unveiling decree constituted an important
pillar in Reza Shah’s top-down women’s renewal program (“tajaddod-e-nesvan”), which
advocated a renewed vision of the modern Iranian woman as “depoliticized, domesticated,
and above all, [
. . .
] loyal to the state-led nationalist cause” (Ahmadi 2023a, p. 14; see also
Kashani-Sabet 2005).
Following in his father’s footsteps, Mohammad Reza Shah (r. 1941–1979) continued
to centralize women’s organizations and unified their leadership, further de-coupling
their activities from politics. Even though Mohammad Reza Shah’s pursuit of women’s
emancipation was partial and remained strictly in line with his modernization program,
the centralized women’s movement was nonetheless successful in achieving important
milestones during this period, such as suffrage and political appointment. Between 1963
Religions 2024,15, 533 4 of 15
and 1965, six women were elected to the “Majles” (Iranian parliament) as deputies, two
were appointed by the Shah as senators, and one was appointed as the first female minister
in Iranian history. The ratification of the Family Protection Law in 1975 and the legalization
of abortion up to 12 weeks in 1977 further brought about important changes in women’s
rights in the domestic realm (Paidar 1997).
While these gendered developments were crucial to reinforcing the image of Pahlavi-
era Iran as a country on its way to modernization, the impact they carried for Iranian women
belonging to different socio-economic, geographic, and ethno-national backgrounds varied
drastically. Paidar (1997) posits that middle-class and affluent women residing in urban
centers remained the main beneficiaries of Mohammad Reza Shah’s gendered reforms.
Meanwhile, the land reforms implemented by Mohammad Reza Shah in the 1960s as
part of his White Revolution program and the rapid urbanization that followed further
exacerbated the repressive conditions facing most rural and working-class women (Ahmadi
2023a). The breakdown of the tribal structure in rural Iran initiated by Reza Shah, and the
growing emphasis on Persian nationalism as the state ideology under Mohammad Reza
Shah, further resulted in the suppression (material as well as cultural) of rural communities
of non-Persian and non-Shia backgrounds. Mohammad Reza Shah’s approach towards
ethno-national and religious minorities resembled the divide and conquer strategy he had
adopted in relation to the women’s movement. The aim was to control and coopt those in
the opposition, including ethnic and religious elites. Sanasarian (2000) similarly argues that
while the late Shah’s minority policy emphasized assimilation and undermined the citizens’
diverse cultural values, ethnic and religious identities remained meaningful to the ruler
and were used to advance the cause of the centralized state. To Mohammad Reza Shah, the
homogenization of the Iranian identity thus did not require the complete erasure of ethnic
and religious difference. Rather, a combination of cooptative and coercive measures was
used to simultaneously appeal to the elite and ensure compliance.
This pattern of co-optation and coercion was continued and expanded by the Islamic
regime following the 1979 revolution. According to Sanasarian (2000), while the clerical-led
regime was cognizant of the ethnic and religious diversity of Iran from the onset and
acknowledged Iran’s plurality in its constitution, this did not preclude the use or threat
of use of coercion. In regards to religious minorities, the (partial) acceptance was never
extended to communities that are not recognized in the constitution, particularly Baha’is,
whom the state has routinely targeted for violence and prosecution over the past four and a
half decades. In addition to coercion, a wide range of political, economic, and socio-cultural
tools along with institutional arrangements and legal frameworks have been utilized
to effectively control constitutionally accepted religious minorities and ethno-national
communities (Ibid).
The revolutionary era provided Iran’s historically marginalized ethno-nationals with a
brief opportunity to organize around their national identities and express their opposition
to the monarchical regime’s decades-old policies of socio-political exclusion and economic
deprivation. However, their demands for socio-cultural and political autonomy quickly
placed these communities in opposition to the newly established provisional government in
the center (Hassaniyan 2019). Such tensions became apparent on 17 February 1979, a mere
six days after the so-called Islamic Revolution’s victory day, when the military garrison
in the Kurdish city of Mahabad was compelled to surrender to the Kurdish authorities in
the city. The Islamic government under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in turn, used this
occasion to accuse the Kurds of being anti-revolutionary. Following failed negotiations
between Kurdish delegations and the central authorities, tensions escalated into an armed
confrontation that continued until November 1979. Similar uprisings were simultaneously
taking place in Turkmensahra, where Sunni-majority Iranian Turkmens, joined by Marxist
Fada’iyan guerillas, had entered into an armed struggle against the post-revolutionary
government over the locals’ demands for land reform (Vahabzadeh 2010). The Iran–Iraq
war further provided the Iranian state with the opportunity to militantly curtail any form
of resistance, including demands for local autonomy. Sheyholislami (2012) is thus correct
Religions 2024,15, 533 5 of 15
in observing that despite paying lip service to plurality, the IRI’s policy in regards to
ethno-national minorities does not deviate much from that of the Pahlavi era. Both regimes
adopted the “one-nation one-language” approach as their official policy, treated ethnic,
religious, and linguistic diversity as a threat to the country’s territorial integrity and
national unity, and promoted the supremacy of the Persian language and culture as a basis
for unifying the heterogeneous Iranian body politic.
The Islamic regime’s response to the women’s movement was just as swift and heavy-
handed as its approach towards dealing with quests for ethno-national autonomy. Even
though Iranian women had contributed a great deal to the revolutionary uprisings of
1979, their rights came under direct attack by the provisional government within days of
its establishment:
The Family Protection Act of 1975 was the first comprehensive legislation of the
Pahlavi Era to be abolished as part of the new regime’s Islamization policy. In the
following weeks, the new government announced a range of new developments
targeting gendered relations and women’s civic rights; by the end of March
1979, only weeks after the victory of the revolution, women had been barred
from becoming judges, abortion had been declared illegal, sports had become
segregated and coeducation had been banned. (Ahmadi 2023a, pp. 37–38)
Much like the state nationalism of the Pahlavi era, the Islamization policy of the IRI
had a strong gendered dimension from the onset. The coming into effect of the mandatory
Hijab law in 1983 (Milani 1992) helped fully consolidate the government’s Islamization
program on the bodies of Iranian women. While Reza Shah’s Hijab ban and the IRI’s
compulsory veiling law may appear opposite at first glance, the policies were, in fact,
identical in their instrumentalization of the veil for advancing the nationalist identity of
each state, and the oppressive tools through which they were implemented. The veil,
previously used as a form of protest against the monarchy, thus became the emblem of
the new Islamic state, which was imposed through legislation and enforced via coercive
measures taken by the militia as well as official state agents. It further pushed women
into the domestic realm, restricting their access to resources for political organization and
participation (Moghadam 1992;Sedghi 2020).
The IRI’s hypersensitivity to the issue of gender, along with the continued violent
suppression of any form of political dissent, have severely undermined the women’s
movement over the past decades, resulting in its further atomization and individualization.
The short-lived periods of moderate rule in the post-war decades, particularly the 8-year
presidency of reformist Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), opened small windows of
opportunity for women’s activists to mobilize around various campaigns (such as the One
Million Signatures Campaign; see Bayat 2013;Sameh 2014). However, much of women’s
political activism during this period adopted a reformist approach that necessitated working
within an Islamic-and-feminist framework that would challenge but not undermine the
state (Sameh 2014). Sedghi (2020) similarly posits that reformist feminism in this period,
exemplified by the One Million Signatures Campaign, actively distanced itself from more
politicized iterations of feminist activism by claiming to avoid affiliation with any political
ideology or party (particularly leftist and ethno-nationalist ones). Nonetheless, even
the reformist feminism of the post-Khatami era, with its limited scope and non-violent
methods, proved to be too threatening to the IRI regime, resulting in mass arrests and the
widespread prosecution and harassment of feminist activists, which are ongoing to this
day. The political repression facing feminists, coupled with the increasing securitization
of ethno-national communities, have further contributed to the deepening of the center
vs. periphery divide within the movement, exacerbating its historically rooted centralist,
Persian nationalist, and elitist tendencies.
3. Methods
The present article draws on co-ethnographic research. Co-ethnography or collabo-
rative ethnography is “an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly em-
Religions 2024,15, 533 6 of 15
phasizes collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it—
from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and, especially, through the writing process”
(
Lassiter 2022, p. 16
). Co-ethnography is increasingly practiced in anthropological studies
that work closely with activists, local communities, and resistance movements, particularly
in the so-called Global South. The emphasis on collaboration allows for the possibility
of defining ethnographic research projects according to the priorities and needs of (local)
protagonists, thus carving out space for alternative research agendas as well as modes
of analysis less attended to in mainstream scholarship (Rappaport 2008). As such, co-
ethnography is an appropriate method for bringing to the forefront the analyses of the
historically marginalized. My approach to co-ethnography further builds on Jennifer Man-
ning’s notion of “decolonial feminist ethnography” (Manning 2021), which focuses on the
works and lives of the marginalized, enabling the researcher to address the coloniality of
knowledge and to actively consider and reflect the ethical and political implications of
knowledge production. Engaging in co-ethnography in the context of the present study
thus necessitated reflexivity and active engagement with questions of power and position-
ality throughout the research process, as well as foregrounding the final analysis in the
protagonists’ lived experiences, worldviews, and situated knowledges.
The empirical data for this study were collected through participant observations and
in-depth interviews, carried out between October 2022 and April 2023. The observations
took place in various feminist spaces (including gatherings, panel discussions, and demon-
strations) organized in the aftermath of the Jina uprising both online and in person (in the
Netherlands and Sweden). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six feminist
activists of non-Persian ethno-national backgrounds. The interview sample comprised
feminist activists from Kurdish, Gilac, Turkish, Baluch, Hazara, and Afghan backgrounds,
all of whom identified as women and were between the ages of 30 and 45. Out of the six
informants, two were of non-Shia religious backgrounds, with the other four being born
Shia Muslims. The interviews took place online, with individual interview sessions lasting
from 70 to 100 min. On multiple occasions, informants were interviewed more than once
so as to gain a deeper understanding of their experiences while allowing sufficient time for
reflection as well as breaks. The interviews were recorded with the informants’ permission
and later transcribed. The transcripts were then translated from Farsi to English by the
author and analyzed thematically.
Informants were identified through various channels including the participant ob-
servation sites, social media, and snowballing. Taking into account the IRI’s sensitivity
to the subject matter at hand and the potential repercussions facing political dissidents
inside Iran, the sample entirely comprised feminist activists in exile, residing in Europe
and North America. This was a conscious choice made by the author so as to prioritize
the safety of the research informants, albeit at the risk of missing out on the important
perspectives of ethno-national-minority feminists who live and are politically active within
the country. This study’s exclusive focus on voices in exile inadvertently means that the
findings may not be fully representative of the experiences of all Iranian feminist activists.
The contributions of this study should thus be understood in the context of its methodolog-
ical constraints. Verbal informed consent was acquired prior to each interview session. The
informants were further consulted regarding their preferences for anonymity; out of the six
protagonists, two requested anonymity, three did not express any preference either way,
and one explicitly requested to be named so as to counter the absence of ethno-national
voices within mainstream feminist discourses. The multiplicity of the informants’ places of
residence, and the subsequent logistical constraints in conducting fieldwork, informed the
decision to conduct interviews online.
This study builds on and contributes towards a growing body of work that investigates
transnational iterations of feminist activism, and in particular, the social justice struggles
of non-Western women and women of the Two-Thirds World (Mohanty 2003), through
the lens of intersectionality. Intersectionality provides an important analytical toolkit for
understanding the interconnected ways in which various categories of power dialectically
Religions 2024,15, 533 7 of 15
shape Iranian feminists’ identities and lived experiences. Collins (2015) defines intersec-
tionality as “the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability,
and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing
phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities” (2). The term was originally
coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. In her essay “Demarginalizing the
intersection of race and sex: a Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, femi-
nist theory and anti-racist politics,” Crenshaw problematized the single-axis analysis that
dominated anti-discrimination law, as well as feminist and anti-racist activism in the US, re-
sulting in the theoretical erasure of Black women. This entailed the implicit centrality of the
white female experience in conceptualizing sexist discrimination, on the one hand, and the
grounding of the experiences of male and/or class-privileged Black persons in anti-racist
doctrine, on the other. The taken-for-grantedness of the Black male experience in anti-racist
activism, according to Crenshaw (1989), further resulted in the specific articulation of Black
women’s political interests as well as the intersectional aspects of their subordination being
perceived as “dangerously divisive” (148). Black feminists thus found themselves caught
between a color-blind feminist movement that ignored intra-category differences among
women, and an anti-racist movement that prioritized race over gender, both ignoring the
intricate ways in which the two categories inform and shape one another.
Bell hooks (2000) likewise problematizes mainstream feminism’s lack of attention to
the ways in which racial politics and class structures shape the category of womanhood.
For hooks, much of contemporary feminist expression is characterized by “the conscious
mystification of social divisions between women” (4), which asserts that all women share a
common lot of oppression. However, conceiving of this collective lot does not preclude the
presence of the competitive, atomistic ideology of liberal individualism that has hitherto
dominated North American feminist discourse (Eisenstein 1981). The exclusive focus on
gender, foregrounded by a liberal individualist ideology that naturalizes class inequali-
ties, has left liberal feminism especially susceptible to cooptation. The ongoing pattern of
usurpation of the feminist cause by bourgeois women to support their class interests is a
case in point. To remedy these shortcomings, hooks (2015) calls for adopting a “politics of
location” (15) as a radical standpoint from which counter-hegemonic feminist scholarship
can be produced. The politics of location emerges in contrast to identity-based frameworks
that have traditionally defined oppression according to a single-axis, flattened, and disin-
tegrated understanding of social reality, resulting in atomized and fragmented forms of
resistance. Stuart Hall (1985) similarly speaks of a politics of “articulation,” meaning:
a connection or link which is not necessarily given in all cases, as a law or a fact of
life, but which requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, which
has to be positively sustained by specific processes, which is not ‘eternal’ but has
to be constantly renewed, which can under some circumstances disappear or be
overthrown, leading to the old linkages being dissolved and new connections—
re-articulations—being forged (113–114).
Hall’s call for “rearticulation” and his emphasis on the linkages as not necessarily
“given” or fixed realities requires looking into the specificities of particular articulations,
paying attention to both the conditions of their existence as well as the practices/processes
(discursive and material) through which these articulations are created and sustained. For
hooks (2015), rearticulation is intricately linked to the location from which marginalized
voices emerge, defining marginality not as the site of deprivation, but of radical possibility
and resistance. hooks’ politics of location thus compels us to revisit, or rather rearticulate,
the “common lot” of gendered oppression by grounding it in the lived experiences of
marginalized women. The following analysis section attempts such intersectional rearticu-
lation in the Iranian context.
Religions 2024,15, 533 8 of 15
4. Analysis
4.1. The Rock: Gender and Sexuality in Ethno-Nationalist Movements
For the informants, navigating the space of political activism as ethno-national-
minority feminists proves challenging on multiple fronts. Informants all attested to the
presence, and at times dominance, of masculinist and patriarchal forces within their respec-
tive ethno-nationalist movements. Sara, a Kurdish feminist activist and author, is critical
of the under-representation of Kurdish women in official political parties, despite their
widespread political contribution and radical forms of activism:
I think there is a misconception about Kurdish women that because of our tradi-
tional ways of dressing and the fact that we wore headwraps instead of traditional
hijab, or because of our Kurdish dance, we are somehow more liberated than
other women. The reality is that the same patriarchal mechanisms are working
against Kurdish women as much as anywhere else. Even as we have the Jin, Jiyan,
Azadi slogan, and we have Kurdish women guerillas and peshmargas, we still
don’t see women’s presence in Kurdish political parties and this is one of the
serious critiques I have always held towards these parties. [
. . .
] I mean we have
a lot of Kurdish women who are politically active but I rarely have seen any of
them in high ranks, or be the spokesperson of the party for instance.
Rana (pseudonym), a Gilac feminist activist, observes similar mechanisms in the Gilac
nationalist movement:
The atmosphere in the Gilac community is very male-dominant. Whenever you
want to speak of the issues facing women, they say you want to attack our honor
(aberoo). The term feminist itself is used as a slur. To call someone a feminist
is an insult. [
. . .
] I think a lot of the times, ethno-national activists also end up
resorting to regressive nationalism. Patriarchal and masculinist tendencies don’t
allow them to give space to women and queer people. Most of the conversations
get limited to how and where our borders are drawn and what our flags look
like. You see that they organize all-male panels, the topics and solutions are all
problematic and they only want to hear the Gilac woman’s voice when and how
it suits them.
The workings of such patriarchal and masculinist tendencies, as outlined by Rana,
thus become apparent in the limited space dedicated to women in politics as well as the
side-lining of their gendered analyses. For Aylar, a Hazara queer-feminist born in Iran,
sidelining and censorship are experienced at the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality.
Problematizing the cis-heteronormativity of Afghan diasporic spaces, she contends:
The discussion about national identity is an extremely sensitive topic. Another
[sensitive topic] is the issue of LGBT rights. This is considered a taboo in
Afghanistan. I think it is considered a taboo anywhere but what we observe
in the context of Afghanistan, and this is my personal experience and I don’t
want to compare it to other places, is that you can experience extreme forms
of violence when you talk about it. I have experienced this time and again in
Afghan spaces where I have been invited to a workshop and as soon as I said
that I am a queer-feminist or an activist from the LGBT community, even among
those who have not been living in Afghanistan for years and have been here (in
Europe), I easily got censored and then blacklisted from those spaces and was
never invited back.
As a result, women often find themselves caught in the double bind of supporting
the ethno-nationalist cause, on the one hand, and voicing their own feminist demands, on
the other.
Religions 2024,15, 533 9 of 15
4.2. The Hard Place: Centralism, Hierarchization, and the Race–Religion Constellation in the
Feminist Movement
While all informants strongly identified as feminists and prioritized gender in their po-
litical analysis, they expressed mixed emotions when it came to discussing the mainstream
feminist movement. For Zahra, an Afghan-Iranian feminist writer and researcher, the
Iranian feminist movement comprises an important resource that has historically brought
about advancements in the areas of feminist knowledge creation and political mobilization:
In the Iranian context we see that since the Constitutional period, and specifically
in the past forty-something years, the widespread gendered oppression has
resulted in the creation of circles and gatherings or collective efforts of some sort
to create up-to-date feminist knowledge here and there. Or to get acquainted
with concepts or worldviews or discourses such as critical feminist discourse
which, unlike the neoliberal discourse, is not only concerned with getting a piece
of the pie and this has also impacted public knowledge. That is why we see that
the slogan of the ongoing uprising is ‘Woman, life, freedom’, which is a feminist
slogan and, in my opinion, very avant-garde and transgressive.
While Zahra is cognizant of the important achievements on behalf of Iranian feminism,
she problematizes the existence of paternalistic tendencies and inner hierarchies of power
within the movement, particularly in relation to Afghan-Iranian feminists:
To be honest, I wholeheartedly feel that Persian-speaking Iranians in the center
are invested in the same relations of power that we as migrants have to face in
relation to white people here (in Europe). [
. . .
] Except for alternative and pro-
gressive feminist spaces and collectives, the issue of Afghanistan and the Afghan
subject is always approached through a paternalistic lens. Every Afghan subject
always carries the burden of a range of stereotypes and pre-judgements that come
before them, and I certainly have seen this many times, in my personal, political,
intellectual life. You end up getting categorized based on those perceptions and
if you don’t get essentialized, you will ultimately be treated as an exception. [
. . .
]
Because they look at you through that hierarchical lens. That nationalist and
regressive lens that does not go beyond identity politics. The Afghan me and the
Iranian you!
Here, Zahra speaks of the essentializations and stereotypes facing Afghan-Iranians
in the movement, specifically, and in Iranian society, more broadly. Afghan-Iranians
constitute the largest refugee community in Iran. While transnational regional migration is
by no means a new phenomenon in the region, various waves of forced migration from
Afghanistan to Iran have been witnessed since the Taliban’s rise to power in the 1990s.
In 2015, nearly one million registered Afghan refugees resided in Iran, more than half
of whom had been born in the country (Abbasi-Shavazi et al. 2015), and a further two
million were estimated to be undocumented (Landau and Achiume 2017). The take-over
of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2021, following the US troops’ withdrawal, has further
forced a new generation of Afghan migrants to seek refuge in Iran. Afghan-Iranians face
myriad challenges in the country. Obtaining residence in Iran has grown increasingly
difficult for Afghan refugees in the past two decades. Since 2003, the primary channel
for Afghan refugees to obtain residence in Iran has been through a registration system
that offers them a form of temporary protection, which has to be obtained periodically
through re-registration for a fee. Registered Afghan refugees are further granted limited
rights to employment and education while undocumented refugees are denied protection
altogether (Crawley and Kaytaz 2022). This has resulted in widespread poverty among
the Afghan-Iranian community. The lack of options for naturalization or obtaining non-
precarious registration has further resulted in many turning to irregular and black market
jobs, rendering Afghan-Iranians more susceptible to exploitation, workplace harassment,
and discrimination. For Zahra, the stereotyping and othering of Afghan-Iranians are by-
products of the decades-long marginalization and discrimination faced by the community:
Religions 2024,15, 533 10 of 15
These cliches are to a large extent due to the political history of the Afghan
community residing in Iran that inadvertently has placed them at the lowest
rank in the socio-political hierarchy and this has an impact. When you are from
Afghanistan or from the Afghan-Iranian community you become, willingly or
not, the representative for that community. Even if you do not subscribe to that
identity-politic, you become categorized based on those life experiences and
based on the historical-material processes that create the dichotomy of the haves
and the have-nots.
Aylar, a Hazara queer-feminist, similarly speaks of having faced othering in the Iranian
feminist movement:
I think Iranian activists and feminists haven’t done enough in relation to the
issues facing Afghans residing in Iran. It is forty years that we are talking of here.
I am asking why, even in feminist circles, I am still othered. For instance, they say
she is Aylar, a feminist from Afghanistan. This is while I was born in Iran and
grew up there. My whole family lives there and I have had to pay a high price for
my activism in Iran but even in the feminist discourse on Iranian ethno-nationals
we as Afghans have no place.
Zahra and Aylar both share having been categorized as the ethno-national other in fem-
inist circles in line with the nationalist discourse of the Iranian state. Zahra is critical of the
identity politics that divide feminists into the dichotomous categories of us and them owing
to their ethnic and religious backgrounds. As Aylar rightfully states, the discourse around
who belongs and who does not belong in the movement is aligned with discriminatory
immigration policies, which render even second- and third-generation Afghan-Iranians
non-citizens susceptible to removal. Borders are thus discursively reproduced by Iranian
feminists, just as they are materially constructed and policed by the Iranian state so as to
keep the unwanted other from entering or passing through. Essentialization and othering
are, however, not exclusive to the Afghan-Iranian community. Fariba, a Baluch feminist
activist, similarly asserts:
I started getting a lot of questions from people around me, like why aren’t we
seeing women in Baluchistan? Isn’t it because you (Baluch) people are funda-
mentalists that we don’t see women in protests? We have always faced such
allegations from Persian nationalists. Always been labeled as separatist. That we
are inherently different, that we have weapons, we are smugglers. These stigmas
have always existed and even though we have tried to defend ourselves against
them, we have not been able to change them much in the long run. I get so angry
and upset when people say that women are nowhere to be seen. Women have
always been there. You just chose not to see us.
According to Fariba, stereotyping and othering have gone hand in hand with the
invisibilization of Baluch women activists. The allegations of separatism and fundamen-
talism further derive from and feed into the historically rooted nationalist discourse that
frames ethno-national political mobilization as a threat to territorial integrity. For Sara,
territorial integrity is the keyword for ethno-national oppression in Iran. Underscoring the
interconnectedness of patriarchal oppression and ethno-racial discrimination, she posits:
I think even among feminists we still see such power structures being reproduced.
The same unequal structures that exist between men and women in the outside
world or the same patriarchal power relations that we are fighting against still
persist among feminists themselves because of the privileges they hold. Owing
to the fact that she lives in the center of the country, the language she speaks,
her religion, her monetary and educational privileges. These privileges give her
power and this results in her fancying herself as the absolute authority. To me it is
exactly like the patriarchy. Only what I say is right and you need to follow in my
footsteps. She only accepts me and gives me space if I do not say something that
Religions 2024,15, 533 11 of 15
turns me into a security threat in her eyes. As soon as I say I want ethno-national
autonomy in deciding my own future or I want to be able to access education
in my own language, she prioritizes the national issues over gendered ones and
labels me as separatist.
The reference to the prioritization of the nationalist cause over the gendered one
(through invoking the highly securitized allegation of separatism) renders explicit the
persistence of a single-axis analysis within the Iranian feminist movement, which does not
account for how gendered and ethno-racial oppression mutually construct one another. Sara
further expresses that she does not subscribe to a uniform Iranian feminist identity, since
the unequal social locations and positionalities of feminists inform their divergent demands,
placing them at different—and, at times, opposing—sides of the social justice struggle:
Our struggles don’t look the same because our political demands are not the
same. Maybe for a woman from Tehran, her biggest concern is compulsory hijab,
is kissing her lover in the street and all these other things we have heard. But
imagine for a Baluch woman that doesn’t even have a birth certificate, lives in
absolute poverty and doesn’t have access to the most basic of rights, do you think
her first demand is freedom to dress how she likes? Of course not. Or imagine
someone is a Kurdish woman who is also Yarsan, this means there is zero chance
of you ever getting hired in a governmental position. No way you can find work
in the public sector. You may get harassed in the educational system. You will be
forced to lie many times. There is no place for you.
For Sara, gendered discrimination does not happen in isolation from other markers
such as ethnicity, religion, and class. The quote moreover points to the workings of the
race–religion constellation in constructing ethno-national identities in contemporary Iran.
Following Topolski (2018), the race–religion constellation refers to the practice of racial
classification on the basis of religion, whereby the social construction and politicization
of religion as a racialized and racializing category give way to new forms of racism and
socio-political exclusion. In the context of modern Iran, the concept is useful, for instance,
in understanding the dialectical construction of the national identity of the Shia Persian self
against the backdrop of the non-Shia (or non-Muslim) ethno-racial other, and the latter’s
subsequent peripheralization, exclusion, or even prosecution (as has been the case with
Baha’is post-revolution). In relation to this, Sara reframes the problem of ethno-religious
discrimination in Iran as an inherently classed issue, emphasizing the material hardships
facing Sunni-majority Baluch women or the Yarsan Kurdish community in accessing
resources. Fariba similarly does not believe in the common lot of oppression facing all
Iranian women. She speaks of multiple instances in which she has faced discrimination
and micro-aggression in feminist events:
My sense is that I am not really desired unless there is something in it for them,
so they can say look we also care about Baluch people. I have been invited to
multiple gatherings and you sense this in how they give you less time and you
are the last person who gets to speak, that you are there as backdrop. This is
maybe a small thing, it is just a micro-aggression, but things like being interrupted
while I speak. This hierarchy of power between the center and the periphery that
determines who gets to speak first, and who goes last when everyone is tired and
their attention span is lower. Or those of us who speak with an accent, how much
harder we have to try to have our words and analysis be valued as scientific
or useful.
The quote above shows that the experience of othering in feminist spaces is an em-
bodied experience. Othering thus goes beyond discursive representations (or articulations)
such as stereotypes and labels and is exercised corporeally through micro-aggressions such
as frequent interruption, unequal time allocation, and even shunning. Othering further
does not necessitate complete exclusion. Rather, it is through tokenistic and conditional
inclusion that minority women are often made to feel inferior. Zahra characterizes the
Religions 2024,15, 533 12 of 15
conditional inclusion of ethno-national women into mainstream feminist spaces as an
opportunistic act that does not stem from an intersectional praxis:
We, as forward-looking feminist movements, have still not fully grasped or inter-
nalized the fact that our salvation only lies in joining forces with the progressive
transnational trans-nationalist movements at the regional scale or we have yet
to materially grasp this. Because I still believe that even among us women, we
are still looking to benefit from the dominant order, no matter how meagre or
conditional the benefits may be. [
. . .
] we still think that we are bestowing a
privilege upon an Afghan-Iranian or an Afghan feminist when we invite them
to our spaces. We do not look at it as a necessary feminist principle. We have
reached this in certain circles and spaces but even in those spaces there are still
glass ceilings and our agencies are limited. There are frameworks that prevent
you from being easily accepted or your knowledge or even lived experiences,
your ideas, your motives are not welcomed. You get placed at that margin. In
that situation.
Zahra speaks of the margin not as a fixed geographic entity but rather as a social
location that is temporally reproduced and bodily experienced. Sara similarly highlights
the processes and practices through which marginality, as an articulation as opposed to a
fixed reality, is reproduced in relation to ethno-national-minority feminists:
To me the margin is not a geographic location. It is true that we have cities that
are definitionally placed at the margin, that are border towns but I am talking
about the margin as a place that I, as a feminist Kurd, get exiled to even as I sit
here in Europe in the year 2023. I still get put in that place, my ‘rightful’ place,
by mainstream feminists from the center. How? By not giving me space, by not
seeing me and intentionally ignoring me.
Referring to the margin as her rightful place, Sara proposes an alternative articulation
of the margin, not only in relation to privilege but also to politics. Contextualizing the
processes of marginalization and cooptation within the movement in the ongoing Jina
uprising, she contends:
To me, even the translation of the Kurdish slogan of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” to Farsi
is an effort towards appropriation. The fact that they keep repeating the name
Mahsa and refusing to call her by the name that she herself preferred. The
mainstream feminist movement in the center really tried to appropriate and coopt
this uprising for its own gains but we have all seen that this movement started
from the margins. So, the margin to me is a place of hardship but also a place of
resistance and radical activism. It means that while the margin disempowers you,
all that oppression and suffering gets piled up and someday somewhere a radical
act comes out of it, like what we saw with women from Saqqez or with Baluch
women. Something that none of us expected. No one did.
Here, Sara proposes a new understanding of the margin, transformed from a space of
passive victimization to a place of agentic resistance and of radical possibility. Underscoring
the role of materially and discursively disadvantaged women in spearheading the current
uprising, she rearticulates the meaning of marginality in line with hooks’ politics of location.
Zahra believes that it is in this very rearticulation that possibilities for solidarity-making
and intersectional mobilization lie:
I think the atmosphere is especially ripe for us to listen to and learn from one
another, beyond all these pre-conceptions and prejudices. To listen to one-another
with trust. I think the crisis of trust is a big issue among us. Because we as women
have always been kept at an arm’s distance from political resources and therefore
have less experiences with collectivizing and independent organization. And still,
existing agendas and structural realities continue to divide us and we shouldn’t
ignore this. These pose challenges and can be decisive on the ground. I think
Religions 2024,15, 533 13 of 15
we need time. Time to practice in our own feminist circles. I am optimistic and I
think this time we can, in the aftermath of the Jina revolution, grasp the urgency
of transnational mobilization and coalition-building at the regional level and look
at it not as a possibility, not as a mere idea, but a necessity.
For Zahra, feminist organization thus transcends identity politics. While she is
adamant that discursively reproduced identities are also grounded in material realities
of inequality, she does not seek salvation in reproducing the discourse of patriarchal
nationalism that dominates many of the existing modes of ethno-nationalist political orga-
nization. Rather, underscoring the urgency of coalition-building at the transnational scale,
she envisions a hopeful future for feminist solidarity-building in the region, one that takes
account of social divisions, transgresses mental and material borders, and remains radically
committed to the politics of location.
5. Conclusions
The present article has made an attempt towards documenting and theorizing the
intersectionality of the challenges (as well as opportunities) facing Iranian feminist activists
belonging to various ethnic nations and religious beliefs. Drawing on co-ethnographic
research, consisting of participant observations and qualitative semi-structured interviews
with six protagonists from minoritized ethnic and religious backgrounds, it has shown
that minority feminists find themselves between a rock and a hard place: the rock being
masculinist politics within minoritized communities, which prioritize ethno-nationalist
demands over gendered ones; the hard place being a centralist liberal feminist movement
that fails to reflect the intersectionality of their experiences as non-Persian non-Shia women,
reproducing hierarchies of power in relation to ethnicity, religion, and class. The infor-
mants, therefore, frequently found themselves caught between the conflicting necessities of
supporting the ethno-nationalist cause and organizing around gendered demands. The
dominance of patriarchal relations is evident in how women are underrepresented in
political parties, especially in positions of leadership and decision-making. This under-
representation further goes hand in hand with the sidelining of feminist analyses and the
trivialization of gendered concerns. In some ethno-nationalist spaces, this goes so far as to
render the term feminist a “slur,” carrying a strong negative connotation.
Likewise, in feminist spaces, informants often faced stereotypes, labeling, and hierar-
chization. The invocation of the historical trope of separatism was a commonly observed
strategy to downplay the impact of ethno-religious discrimination, particularly in rela-
tion to Baluch and Kurdish feminists. Afghan-Iranian feminists, on the other hand, faced
a seemingly opposite strategy of always being deemed the ethno-national other and a
threat to national unity and uniformity. The analysis further showed how othering is a
discursively reproduced yet embodied experience, with factors such as accent and ways of
dressing (e.g., traditional clothing) playing a role in how non-Persian women are treated
in feminist spaces. Frequent interruptions, unequal allocation of time, and preferential
treatment were among the micro-aggressions most commonly experienced by informants.
Next to othering, invisibilization, appropriation, tokenism, and conditional acceptance
were problematized as strategies used to mystify social divisions among feminists and to
perpetuate the hierarchical divide between the center and the margin.
Earlier in this article, I stressed how intersectionality remains a vastly underutilized
tool in analyzing the experiences of the women of the Two-Thirds World, especially in
non-Western contexts. While documenting the challenges experienced by marginalized
women remains a timely and urgent task, the present work has aimed to go beyond merely
empiricizing the rock and the hard place. By centralizing the voices and experiences of
feminists from the margin, and echoing bell hooks’ prophetic call for a feminist politics of
location, this article contributes to a situated rearticulation of the margin not as a place of
destitution but as one of agentic resistance. To rearticulate the margin is not to romanticize
it in a way that euphemizes the realities of rampant inequality and material hardship
facing women in every corner of the world. Rather, it is an attempt at reclamation: of the
Religions 2024,15, 533 14 of 15
margin beyond victimhood, of feminism beyond imposed sisterhood, and of liberation
beyond borders.
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.
Data Availability Statement: Data is unavailable due to privacy or ethical restrictions.
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to my informants for their time, generosity and patience in sharing
their experiences and insights with me for the purpose of this study. I am further thankful to the
editors of this special issue, Patricia Schor and Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar, as well as the three
anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
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