Jina’s Uprising: A Feminist Look at Two Years of Struggle and Resistance, Developments and Dynamics
On the second anniversary of the “woman, life, freedom” uprising, Feminists for Jina, a transnational Iranian feminist network, held a panel discussion reflecting on the lessons and lasting impacts of this unprecedented, mass feminist revolt. While the events that precipitated the uprising are well known outside Iran, they nonetheless bear repeating because they crystallize the violent logics of heteropatriarchal authoritarian states everywhere.
Jina (Mahsa) Amini was arrested on September 13, 2022 while she was visiting Tehran from her home in Iranian Kurdistan. The so-called morality police detained her and beat her for allegedly failing to wear her state-mandated hijab correctly. Three days later she died in custody.
The revolutionary Kurdish slogan “woman, life, freedom” first coined by Rojava women fighters and soon to resonate across Iran and around the world was shouted at the cemetery by the women at Jina’s funeral in Iranian Kurdistan who refused to let her die in vain.
The slogan would eventually unite millions of Iranians across the unequal terrains of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and geography. It would also echo the slogans and political aspirations of many other feminists—from across the region and as far away as Latin America—who have insisted that gender and sexual liberation must be at the heart of anti-colonial movements.
Outside Iran, almost as soon as the uprising began, the slogan was subjected to cooptation by western governments and diasporic groups who have long hoped for “regime change” in Iran that would return the country to the status of an allied nation carrying out interests of western governments in the region. These geopolitical machinations threatened to profoundly distort the actual aspirations and demands of people on the streets of Iran who were risking and sometimes losing their lives for a vision of freedom beyond the binary of a pro-western state vs. Islamic Republic.
BCRW has sponsored the translation of the second anniversary Feminists for Jina panel to make it possible for non-Persian speakers to engage with the complexity of the “woman, life, freedom” movement from the perspective of intersectional, transnational, and decolonial Iranian feminists who grew up in Iran, who maintain a deep connection to Iranian society from their diasporic locations, and who have dedicated themselves to the difficult project of feminist solidarity across borders.
Among the topics covered in this panel are what makes a movement “feminist” and “revolutionary,” how consciousness is transformed through struggle, how to oppose multiple forms of oppression—domestic and foreign—at the same time, and how to assess the lasting impacts of the movement despite massive repression.
About the Speakers
Banafsheh Ranji is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. She has been teaching and researching media and communication studies as well as migration and racism studies.
Elham Hoomnifar is an assistant professor in the Global Health Studies Program at Northwestern University. Hoominfar is a critical sociologist whose research focuses on intersections of environment and society and understanding social movements with an interdisciplinary approach. She is currently researching environmental justice, water governance, the commodification of nature, and social resistance, emphasizing political economy in the Global South and North. She is working on another study about gender discrimination and women’s movements in Iran.
Mahtab Mahboub is an Iranian feminist and anti-racist activist and researcher. She fights passionately and patiently for social justice for all. In her research, she explores the experiences of Iranian migrant mothers in Germany at the intersection of class, racialization, migration status, and “integration”.
Manijeh Moradian is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022) won the 2024 Hamid Naficy Book Award for the best book in Iranian Diaspora Studies from the Association of Iranian Studies and the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. The book also received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Middle East Studies Association Nikki Keddie Book Award. She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Radical History Review, The Scholar and Feminist online, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of Feminists for Jina, a global network which formed in fall 2022 to support the “women, life, freedom” uprising in Iran.
Golnar Narimani is currently a PhD candidate in philosophy for her second PhD specializing in phenomenology and German idealism at Université Grenoble-Alpes, France, and Université de Fribourg, Switzerland. Alongside her academic career, she has worked as a translator into Farsi since 2010. She has notably translated Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment published by Herfeh: Honarmand in 2013 and five volumes of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy published by Qoqnoos from 2013 to 2017.