Falsafa-Kolloquium Reihe: Interdisziplinäres Kolloquium „Leib und Leiblichkeit“ III
Unveiling the Feminist Revolution in Iran: Feminized Bodies as the Counter-Archive of Resistance
February 27, 2023│6 p.m. c.t.| Online Event
Despite its uniqueness and unpredictability, the ongoing Jin Jiyan Azadi revolution in Iran, sparked by the murder of Jina Amini by the morality (hijab) police in Iran, has its own genealogy. In this lecture, I would like to focus on account of the performative act of unveiling of feminized bodies during the revolution by tracing and unveiling their (dis)connections with the past(s) in the history of women*movement in Iran. In other words, Firoozeh Farvardin would like to answer what makes the performative protest of the feminized body, i.e., (un)veiling performance, such strong and significant for the history of the feminist movement and political protests in Iran.
For over a century, women* in Iran have struggled to publicly raise their voices and resist patriarchy, religious fanaticism, and domestic violence. Confronting the Iranian state's discriminatory policies, women* have demanded their rights, albeit with various strategies, due to their differences in perspectives, political projects, and approaches to addressing gender inequality and women's conditions. My very encapsulated and inevitably uncomprehensive account aims to contribute to a subjective history of contemporary feminist struggles by putting the feminized body and its performance at the heart of the political contestations.
I argue that the feminized bodies are the counter archives of (un)veiling. Thus, the performative act of unveiling of feminized bodies constantly (re)produce and (re)archiving a narrative of the power/resistance. I elaborate my argument by referring to Sara Ahmed (2014) where she defines the bodies’ testimonies of injuries (here through the performance) as an act of rejecting the power relations as well as the moment of rethinking the relations of the past and present (Ahmed, 2014). In this sense, the individual feminized body itself becomes the testimony and therefore the archive of the emotions and injuries. At the same time, through these testimonies, the collective bodies claim justice and thus, undo/deconstruct (Butler, 2004), in other words, (un)veiling gender.
Dr Firoozeh Farvardin is a feminist activist/scholar based in Berlin. She is currently a postdoc fellow of IRGAC (International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-strategies), Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, where she is working on gender/sexual (counter) strategies of authoritarian neoliberalism in Iran. She is also an affiliated researcher at MERGE (Middle East and Migration Research Network) and a former guest lecturer at the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM), Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Unter dem Leitthema „Leib und Leiblichkeit“ fand das interdisziplinäre Kolloquium im letzten Semester digital statt. Die im April 2021 gegründete gleichnamige Forschungsgruppe setzte nach ihrer ersten interdisziplinären Konferenz „Interdisziplinäre Einblicke in ‚Leib und Leiblichkeit‘“ ihre Arbeit durch die Kolloquiumsreihe fort, um eine Plattform für Ideen und den Gedankenaustausch über neue Forschungsergebnisse zu „Leib und Leiblichkeit“ zu schaffen.
Anmeldung per Mail über Ariana Jusufi (a_jusu01@uni-muenster.de)
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