Let us remember that it is in “our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.”  - Audre Lorde

On 16 September 2022, a young Kurdish woman named Jina (Mahsa Amini) died in the custody of Iranian moral police (gasht-e ershad). Jina’s death sparked national protests: girls and young women have been taking to streets, burning veils, cutting hair and roaring to demand an end to an abusive regime.

The protest is unprecedented in the history of the Islamic Republic. It is the culmination of decades of anger against gender apartheid – legal and normalised discrimination, state-sanctioned violence and daily humiliation. For more than 40 years, women and girls in Iran have lived under oppression and terror imposed by the government of Iran, experiencing humiliating restrictions on their outfits, behaviours and the most intimate and private aspects of their lives.  

For too long, female bodies and sexualities have been a political tool to preserve the patriarchal system in Iran, as in elsewhere. As Audre Lorde said: “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being.”

It is this anger against patriarchy that fuels this feminist uprising. Led by women, this movement has united everyone across gender, age, sexual orientation and gender identity, ethnic belonging, and socioeconomic status to reject abusive compulsory veiling laws, the restrictions on women’s autonomy and bodily integrity, infringement on privacy, and disavows any attempts to silence one’s freedom of speech. It aims to end the oppression of women’s sexuality and violation of their sexual and reproductive rights. This revolt also gives space to the expression of anger in a life permeated by political persecutions, economic corruptions and environmental erosion.

This new wave of courageous feminist resistance has shaken the foundation of the patriarchal and archaic theocracy. The Iranian government is responding with brute force, arbitrary detentions and public executions. Amnesty International reports that over 300 people have been killed by Iran’s security forces, including 44 children (and many believe these numbers are grossly underestimated.) Stories from inside Iran reveal disappearances, torture, abuse and violence, which are shattering psyches and driving detainees toward suicide after release.  
The future of Iran and Iranian people, in particular women, is uncertain. While our fellow sisters and brothers continue their fight with their lives at stake, it is our moral obligation to support their cause and amplify their voices: “Jin, Jian, Azadi” (“Women, Life, Freedom”). Let us remember that it is in “our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.”  

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