Decolonizing Voices From Rojhelat: Gender-Othering, Ethnic Erasure, and the Politics of Intersectionality in Iran

Abstract

The state murder of Jîna Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman in Tehran on 16 September 2022, while in custody of the Islamic Republic’s morality police, prompted a widespread uprising across Iran unprecedented in scale since the popular 1979 revolution. Adopting the Kurdish catchphrase ‘Jin, Jîyan, Azadî’ (Woman, Life, Freedom), this movement was largely centered in Kurdistan (known as Rojhelat) and Balochistan, two ethnically minoritized and economically de-developed regions, where the state deployed deadly violence and brutality to crush the protests. This article juxtaposes two competing narratives of this uprising. The first insists on branding the movement as a singular ‘national’ uprising of ‘Iranian women’. The second recognizes a plurality of women, particularly those from marginalized nations, such as Kurdish and Balochi women, and underlines the structural national, ethnoreligious, and linguistic oppression elided in the narrative of undifferentiated Iranian womanhood. Drawing on the notion of intersectionality, I argue that the elite nationalist discourse of Iranian womanhood reproduces the state’s ethnoreligious and linguistic suppression of non-Persian-speaking marginalized communities. Moreover, such a selective reading of gender inequality in Iran is unable and/or unwilling to embrace the intersectionality and multiplicity of women’s life experiences in Iran, particularly in its ethnic peripheries. This article offers a critical reassessment of Iranian feminism and its methodology of privilege, proposing instead a decolonized approach that invites nationalist Persian/Iranian activists to interrogate Persianness as a marker of official national identity and institutionalized supremacy.