Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-2023
Abstract
The vast uprisings across Iranian cities in the fall of 2022 caught many of Iranian studies scholars and academic feminists in the diaspora off guard. My first confrontation was with trauma. Like many others, I worried about the lives and safety of my loved ones, political dissidents and prisoners from different ethnic backgrounds, feminists and queer activists on the ground, and, of course, the millennials and Gen Z, who unexpectedly emerged as the new revolutionaries. However, with the first wave of emotional encounters settled, the uprising unlocked another level of cognitive puzzlement critical to my academic life. I struggled to find comprehensive theoretical frameworks and supporting scholarship within Iranian studies or Iranian academic feminism to help my media and scholarly audiences grasp what was unfolding. In this reflective piece, I discuss how the scholarship of Iranian studies and feminism/s formulated the question of gender in liberal and radical essentialist multiculturalism and argue that Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF) urges us to adopt an antiracist and radical democratic approach, deconstructing the imagined Iran in the scholarship, and reconstructing it as a welcoming and inclusive discursive space for racialized and queer Iranians.
Department
Gender and Women's Studies
Print ISSN
0020-7438
Online ISSN
1471-6380
Publication Title
International Journal of Middle East Studies
Recommended Citation
Hamidi, Y. N. (2023). Woman, Life, Freedom, and the Question of Multiculturalism in Iranian Studies. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 55(4), 744–748. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823001411
DOI
10.1017/S0020743823001411
Link to Publisher Version (DOI)
Publisher's Copyright and Source
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024.
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.
First published by Cambridge University Press at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823001411.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
