Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died while in the custody of the Iranian Guidance Patrol, has become the symbol of the massive protests in Iran. Iranian women have been in the forefront of the protests, removing their hijabs and/or cutting their hair. In this conversation, Professors Yalda Hamidi, Minoo Moallem, and Fatemeh Sadeghi discuss the recent Iranian protests, the Iranian women’s movement, compulsory hijab, body politics, and the slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
This panel was organized by the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota and co-sponsored by AGITATE! Journal.
Speakers
Minoo Moallem
Dr. Minoo Moallem is a Gender & Women’s Studies professor and the Director of Media Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of Persian Carpets: The Nation as a Transnational Commodity (Routledge, 2018). Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, (University of California Press, 2005 ), and the co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and The State, Duke University Press, 1999. She is the guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on the Iranian Immigrants, Exiles, and Refugees.
Professor Moallem has also ventured into digital media. Her digital project, “Nation-on-the Move” (design by Eric Loyer), was published in Vectors. Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. Read her full bio and list of publications here.
Yalda Hamidi
Dr. Yalda Hamidi is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Minnesota State University. She is interested in transnational and Islamic feminisms, feminist pedagogy, and feminist cultural and literary studies. Her article, “Politics of Location in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis” is under publication in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. In 2020, she published “Locating Sickness: Disability, Queerness, and Race in a Memoir” in Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research. In the academic year of 2021-22, Professor Hamidi is a fellow of The Socially Just Classroom: Teaching for Equity 2030, and she serves on the Diversity/ Reducing the Achievement Gap Committee.
Fatemeh Sadeghi
Dr. Fatemeh Sadeghi is a political scientist specializing in political thought and gender studies. She previously researched on gender ethics in Islamic sharia and Zoroastrianism, gender in nationalism and Islamism, Islamist politics, and Iranian Revolution. She also studied the unveiling campaign of the first Pahlavi Iran and the compulsory hijab of the Islamic Republic. In recent years she worked on constitutional thought in postrevolutionary Iran. Dr. Sadeghi is currently a research associate at TAKHAYYUL, an ERC-funded project at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity. Her research is on redemptive aspirations inspired by political and intellectual traditions to make envisioning a different future possible. Focusing on Iran, she studies underlying cognitive historical procedures enabling individuals and groups to define their identities in a creative, cognitive process typically concerned with what is unreal, unknowable, hypothetical, or yet-to-be.
Sima Shakhsari
Sima’s work has been shaped by experiences of living through a revolution, a war, and displacement. Multiple itineraries, from Tehran to San Francisco, Oakland, Toronto, Houston, suburbs of Boston, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis have inspired Sima’s activism, poetry, and scholarship on immigration, queerness, refugeedom, and geopolitics. Sima’s commitment to social justice is informed by the relationship between people’s struggles transnationally. To learn more about Sima’s work, click ‘Sima’ above.