Women’s rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran in the light of protests 2022: the ‘Janus face’ of feminism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34767/SIIP.2023.02.07Keywords:
Iran, protests, feminism, Islam, revolutionAbstract
The aim of the presented analysis is to reflect on the dynamics of the struggle for women’s rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). The article consists of three main elements. The first is a factual and ideological analysis of the protests through the prism of statistical data and the content of the song Woman, life, freedom (Persian: zan, zendegi, azadi). The second element is a discussion of feminism in Iran through the prism of the clash of different value systems, clarified as a result of restrictions after the 1979 revolution. The third element of the analysis is the phenomenon of awakening awareness among activists fighting for women’s rights during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005). The analyses will be carried out on the basis of source texts of specific legal acts, statutes of the organization and other cultural texts, such as autobiographies and lyrics of the song Zan, zendegi, azadi. The basic research methods are content analysis and hermeneutical text analysis. A review of the literature on the subject and the state of research allowed to identify a research gap, expressed in the question about the values underlying the fight for women’s rights within oppressive systems: cultural, identified as patriarchal and political identified with broadly understood Islamic law in the Shiite version. The analysis of the dynamics of the struggle for women’s rights will allow us to forecast the further development of events that began with the protests in autumn 2022. The conducted analyses led to the conclusion that the impending revolution has the face of a woman and is aimed at the patriarchal system – an ossified, oppressive system that stifles the individual. It will blow up the political system from within, destroying its structures. However, it will not bring a solution to the problem of the clash of two patterns of ordering social relations expressed in two varieties of feminism in Iran: “classical” and “Islamic”.
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