Transnational Mediation of State Gendered Violence: The Case of Iran
By Gilda Seddighi and Sara Tafakori
The Facebook page “My Stealthy Freedom” was launched in May 2014 by Masih Alinejad, an exiled Iranian journalist based in the United Kingdom. through making calls for Iranian women to send and share unveiled pictures of themselves taken in public settings (Golam Khiabany 2016; alison n. Novak and Emad Khazei 2016), Alinejad initiated a campaign with the principal aim of supporting Iranian women’s struggle against the state’s mandatory veiling policies. in the country’s Islamic Penal Code, a note to article 638 states: “Women, who appear in public places and roads without wearing an Islamic hijab, shall be sentenced to ten days to two months imprisonment or a fine of five hundred to fifty thousand Rials” (IHRDC 2013). it is, of course, imperative to attend to the differential applications of such laws over the past three decades. nevertheless, women undergo monitoring at public institutions, and in the streets where they might be stopped, or even arrested by the morality police. the “my stealthy Freedom” campaign has also highlighted and protested against other forms of gendered violence in Iran, including the state’s failure to protect women’s rights, illustrated by the case of acid attacks against women in Isfahan in 2014.
How can gendered violence be represented without reinforcing the same popular rhetoric that has been used in the politics of military interventions?
However, although “my stealthy Freedom” focuses primarily on state gendered violence, its message has been disturbed by challenges arising from the embedded normativity of conceptualizations of gender and sexualities in relation to middle eastern women in general and Iranian women in particular. in this respect, as will be discussed below, the Facebook campaign’s transnational spatiality has at times been in tension with the “local” character of its aims.
On April 7, 2016, the administrator of the “my stealthy Freedom” campaign and its Facebook page, Alinejad, posted a video of her short speech about Iranian women’s quest for freedom from the hijab which she had just delivered at the “Women in the World” conference in New York. in response to this post about her intervention at the “Women in the World” conference, which was attended by such luminaries as former us First Lady Laura Bush, many Iranians posted on both the campaign Facebook page and Alinejad’s personal page, articulating their fear, anger, and anxiety that the campaign was another neoliberal vehicle, generating yet more “war on terror” propaganda. the text below is a comment on a post shared by Alinejad after the conference. the comment has been re-shared many times on Facebook, as well as on other competing social media platforms such as telegram, Viber, and Twitter.
The way that Masih Alinejad addresses the problem of women in the middle east is flawed and distorted. this version so loved in the West is distorted, simplistic and shallow, but beautifully decorated. it’s an attractive, oriental fantasy way of highlighting “the hijab question”, and women in Iran and the middle east. (Masih Alinejad Facebook page, April 12, 2016)
Alinejad is accused here of aestheticizing a vexed political issue in a way that recalls the classic imagery of Orientalism. the following comment, posted by another user on Alinejad’s Facebook page, goes much further:
the phrase “traitor” is a word made explicitly for people like you, Mrs Alinejad. You worked so many years for the Iranian parliament and toadied to them, then you went to Voice of America, which has the blood of thousands of our youth on their hands, and every day you just say worse and worse and worse things about Iran. You have been painting a black picture [sia namayi] of Aran. (Alinejad Facebook page, May 1, 2016)
These comments, in their different ways, display concern and even fury about women’s rights in Iran being discussed in a climate in which the actions of human rights activists in the diaspora have at times been utilized as a means of legitimizing the intensification of economic sanctions against Iran. Sima Shakhsari (2012), for instance, has argued that a number of Iranians in the diaspora have used forms of online social media such as blogging as a means of self-entrepreneurship to produce information on Iran which potentially feeds into the discourse of the “war on terror”; in other words, this “expertise” frames the state’s suppression of human rights in such a way as to justify Western arguments of an interventionist character.
Therefore, a key challenge arising from these contested transnational mediations of state violence concerns the interruption of the focus by “my stealthy Freedom” on the local state as the initiator of violence, and a refocusing on the West as the principal perpetrator. Furthermore, this change of focus highlights an Islamophobic agenda and suggests that the real target of Western violence is Islam. thus, one comment on Alinejad’s Facebook page questioned whether her defence of women was really a universal one: “do you have the same courage to talk in the West about the pain and suffering Muslim women experience in Western societies [facing islamophobia]?” (Alinejad Facebook page, May 20, 2016). these shifts together disturb the campaign’s emphasis on Iranian state violence.
In response to the flurry of criticisms, Alinejad posted in Farsi on her personal page that “those people who attacked me saying that I went to the West to further fuel the fire of islamophobia didn’t really listen to me” (Alinejad Facebook page, April 13, 2016). as proof, she added an interview in English with a us network where she talked of her dream of walking with her hijab-wearing mother in America and bareheaded in Iran, and not receiving harassment either from Islamophobes in the first case or from the religious police in the second.
The tensions that have surfaced as a result of this transnational engagement with state gendered violence derive from in the way in which veiling has developed as a signifier in domestic and international politics. in other words, online campaigns against the Iranian state’s gendered violence should be contextualized within a history of the intersections between local struggles against both state violence and the violence of international interventions in the middle east, in a colonial and postcolonial framework.
As Homa Hoodfar (1993) highlights, the West’s obsession with veiling in Muslim societies did not emerge until the late eighteenth century. While earlier European travellers would describe the Muslim Orient as male and barbarian, the emphasis slowly changed to the theme of women mistreated by men (Hoodfar 1993). the images of women, including veiling and unveiling, were central to the creation of the colonial representation of the Other. Yet unveiling as the symbol of liberation and self-definition has been used by Muslim women since the early twentieth century. it has also been used by middle eastern states. in 1936, Reza shah Pahlavi enforced Western clothing for women and banned the hijab in public settings. as Hamideh Sedghi (2007, 207) points out, the Westernization of women was a symbol of secularization and modernization of Iran. in 1980, after the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, the new Islamic government introduced compulsory veiling. Haideh Moghissi (1994, 141) argues that “the re-veiling of women symbolized the re-establishment of Muslim identity and culture” in Iran.
Since the early twentieth century, then, veiling has signified both the Othering of Muslims by colonialism, and the struggle against this colonialism. Veiling has stood for the victimhood of Muslim women, but has also symbolized the struggle for liberation from imperialism. this history of redefining and reconfiguring domestic and international politics through the symbolism of veiling bears upon the persistence of Western colonial images of Muslim women in a time of political and military interventions.
As Lila Abu-Lughod (2013) pointed out in her critique of the ways in which Muslim women have been portrayed during the so-called “war on terror,” the social, economic, and physical violence against women in the middle east is rarely represented as state violence in the American and European media and political discourses. Violence against women has rather been viewed as cultural or religious violence, and specifically a violence caused by the religion of Islam (Abu-Lughod 2013). For example, Iraqi and afghan women have often been viewed primarily as victims of cultural and religious violence (Abu- Lughod 2013), which in turn has led to justifications of Western interventions that are redolent of the notion of “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 1987).
Accordingly, the mediation of the state violence of mandatory veiling in and through the Facebook campaign “my stealthy Freedom” becomes intertwined with this rich history of definitions of and self-definitions by middle eastern women. Thus, the objections by some Iranians inside and outside the country towards the campaign founder’s participation in the New York conference point to the complexity attendant upon the representation of women’s rights in the region, which is often seen as aligned with neoliberal agendas. We argue that this transnational awareness of dominant interpretive frames disturbs the local production of discourse on state violence.
To conclude, it is critical to emphasize that neither we nor Abu-Lughod deny the violence against women in the region. Abu-Lughod rather asks how we can claim our rights as Muslim women without being trapped by the same discourse that has been used in the “war on terror” (Abu-Lughod 2013). This question can be reformulated into the theme of this paper: How can gendered violence be represented without reinforcing the same popular rhetoric that has been used in the politics of military interventions? In engaging the question of transnational mediations, we need to ask why and how specific campaigns are recognized as critical and as acts of resistance, and to consider the colonial and postcolonial genealogies of their recognizability.
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