Why “Jîna”: Erasure of Kurdish Women and Their Politics from the Uprisings in Iran

A sign with "Woman, Life, Liberty" (Jin, Jiyan Azadi) on it in Kurdish and English. Photo by Pirehelokan via Wikimedia Commons. A sign with "Woman, Life, Liberty" (Jin, Jiyan Azadi) on it in Kurdish and English. Photo by Pirehelokan via Wikimedia Commons.

Why “Jîna”: Erasure of Kurdish Women and Their Politics from the Uprisings in Iran

By : Farangis Ghaderi and Ozlem Goner

The future of Iran could be changed forever by the protests in September 2022 sparked by the death in police custody of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini, a Kurdish woman from the city of Saqez who was arrested for wearing her hijab “improperly.” 

The protests have generated an inspiring and newfound solidarity among Iranians of all ethnic backgrounds, as well as promising internationalist feminist solidarity. However, as two Kurdish women, we have been deeply disappointed to see Jîna’s Kurdish background routinely ignored by mainstream media and among allies in diasporic solidarity rallies and in expressions of international solidarity. 

In particular, we focus on three types of erasures we see even among progressive and feminist circles. The first relates to the ways people use or don’t use the name “Jîna” and the broader significance of such choices. Second, we draw attention to a patterned failure in acknowledging the origins of the slogan “Woman, Life Freedom,” which was developed by the Kurdish women’s freedom movement affiliated with the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK) against colonial, patriarchal states and societies. The third points to a wider dismissal of the significance of Kurdish struggles and demands both inside Iran and beyond it.  

Dismissing Jîna’s Kurdish identity, downplaying the systematic and structural oppression of ethnic minorities, and ignoring the origins of the now popularized chant, “Women, Life, Freedom,” risks fueling rifts, distrust, and resentment among Kurdish populations. To start, overlooking the likely relationship of Jîna’s Kurdishness to the fatal violence she was subjected to, reveals deeper patterns of violence that Kurds have experienced in modern Iran. In short, Jîna’s Kurdishness is critical to understand marginalization in Iran and the broader Middle East and a feminist movement that is simultaneously anti-colonial and anti-imperial.

Say Her Name


Jîna means “giving life.” Her grave is inscribed with the words: “Dearest Jîna, you shall not die, your name will be a symbol.” The Iranian state has denied Kurdish families the ability to give Kurdish names to their children, and it is common for many to have two names, a Kurdish name at home and an administrative name. Article 20 of Iran’s Civil Registration Law prohibits names that “denigrate Islamic sanctities as well as repulsive and obscene titles.” The same law empowers Iran’s Supreme Council of National Organization for Civil Registration to decide if the chosen name is prohibited or not.

While it is often at the discretion of local Iranian government authorities to decide whether a name is acceptable or not, the law has been systematically used to deny ethnic and religious minorities to choose their children’s names. Moreover, some Kurds living in Iran would be wary of giving an official Kurdish name to their children as it could intensify social and economic discrimination if they move outside the Kurdish regions for education and employment. And given the Iranian regimes’ colonial underdevelopment policies in such regions, looking for job prospects outside their own communities has become more necessary for many Kurdish youths. 

More broadly, there is a general suppression of the Kurdish language. In an article on language policy and language rights in Kurdistan-Iran, Kurdish scholar Jaffer Sheyholislami notes the prohibition of the use of Kurdish signs and names in public by some government departments. He cites a memorandum issued by the Ministry of Commerce (West Azerbaijan branch), which states: “In public places, signs must be in Persian […] and only Persian language [are to] be used on billboards, signs, windows or doors of places and stores.” Sheyholislami’s article cites another example, a letter issued by the Security Forces Office of Public Domains (Fars Province) to the Culture and Guidance Office declaring the name of a particular business cannot be a non-Persian word. The name chosen in this instance by the business was interestingly “Jîna” and the reply reads “since this name is not Iranian but Kurdish it is not allowed.”

Without understanding this history and what it means to preference “Mahsa” over her Kurdish name, Iranian protestors and their supporters around the world are knowingly or unknowingly participating in a type of erasure. For instance, the National Women’s Studies Association in the United States released a statement using the name “Mahsa” alone, and referring to her as a 22-year old Iranian woman, with no reference to her Kurdish name, identity, as well as to the struggles of Kurdish movements. Similarly, in their episode on the protests, the Democracy Now hosts, who are usually attentive to issues of oppressed groups, referred to Amini as “Mahsa” alone and touch upon her Kurdishness in passing only. 

The lack of reflection among experts and solidarity statements on why Amini had two names has been an opportunity missed to recognize the intersectional struggles of Kurdish women in Iran. 

“Women, Life, Freedom”: More than a Slogan


Beyond the issue of ignoring Jîna’s Kurdish name, many analysts, activists, and even artists inside and outside Iran minimize or overlook the significance of decades of Kurdish struggle and resistance, as well as the impact of this history on this current revolutionary moment. 

One of the clearest examples of this is the way commentators and activists ignore the Kurdish revolutionary origins of the slogan now being used for the Iranian movement: “Women, Life, Freedom” or “Jin, Jîyan, Azadî.” What many do not understand is that the slogan was developed by the Kurdish women’s freedom movement in Bakur and Rojava and built from Abdullah Öcalan’s theories of women’s central role in creating a free society. Those analyzing the protests completely disregard this history and connection. For instance, in an interview with BBC Persian, Abbas Milani, Professor of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, gave a convoluted answer to a question on the origin of the slogan with no reference to Kurds. Other commentators have similarly been either too vague on the history of this slogan, or like Milani, erased its history entirely.

Beyond the slogan itself, there are other ways that the Kurdish struggle are being ignored or sidelined by protestors and those who support them. Kurds constitute almost fifty percent of Iran’s large body of political prisoners despite only making up ten to fifteen percent of Iran’s population. The Kurdish struggle for recognition and freedom in Iran predates the Islamic Republic. Iranian nationalism is Persian-centered and an erasure and assimilation of non-Persian identities has been at its core. Following 1979, Kurdistan has witnessed intense securitization and militarization. It is not a coincidence that the state’s response to Kurdish protesters has been harsher. Kurdish regions have been the scenes of bloodiest clashes and security forces have fired heavy machine guns into civilian houses. And yet these facts and history are ignored.

Chia Madani, a Kurdish musician and songwriter, published a song in response to the very popular protest song by Iranian singer, Shervin Hajipour, titled “Baraye” [for the sake of], in which Hajipour used protest Tweets starting with the word baraye written in support of the protests—a song that resulted in Hajipour’s arrest by Iranian authorities. In his song, Madani acknowledges Hajipour’s words that “made the pains of millions into a flying message” but offers to share “some of his endless pains” about ethnic oppression in Iran, which is absent in Hajipour’s song, although he mentions Afghans’ suffering. As Madani says, “forgive me for saying my wounds are older and deeper than yours/ there are thousands of ‘fors’ in my heart.”  Madani begins his words by referencing Jîna and the erasure of her Kurdish name in life and after: “For Jîna, who was not allowed neither in life, nor after death, to be called by her own name, nor written in history by that.” Madani sings of the “invisible” pains of “Kurds, Lors, Arabs, Balochs;” for “centuries of oppression, of submission;” “for cultures and identities buried alive;” and for “an imprisoned language.” Diyako Khaleqi also published a Kurdish rendition of Hajipour’s song, which references violence against “kulbars” [Kurdish cross-border porters,] [1] and “Shin Abad” [2] among others. These are cries from a people unheard to remind fellow Iranians of their unseen pains, at a time of emerging solidarities. 

There have also been reports that Kurds have been shut down in solidarity demonstrations in the diaspora for raising a Kurdish flag or objecting to the erasure of Jîna’s Kurdish name/identity. An article in the Welsh paper, Nation Cymru, noted that the Kurdish All Wales Association (KAWA) was not allowed to bring Kurdish flags to the Senedd and “the only flags visible in photos of the demonstrations are those of the flag of Iran prior to the Islamic revolution of the 1970s”. As a result, Kurds held their own demonstrations in Cardiff.

More promisingly, inside Iran, never-before-heard protest chants such as “Kurdistan, the light of Iran” in various non-Kurdish parts of Iran and slogans such as “Azerbaijan is awake, and standing by Kurdistan” in Turkic cities of Iran, show there is a new form of solidarity forming on among those on the streets. For example, university students in Tabriz chanted “Jin, Jîyan, Azadî” in Kurdish to show solidarity with Kurdish cities under the siege of the state. This is a promising sign of unity in a country that has long been deeply-divided.

Kurdish Feminism and Feminist Solidarities


Women on the ground in Iran weaving such solidarities among different groups in their resistance against the gender-apartheid system is both exciting and promising. However, without due attention to the marginalization of these various groups, as well as their struggles of freedom, mainstream representations and calls and statements of solidarity can play into two conservative and essentialist types of feminism rather than a progressive, anti-colonial feminist movement with a broader freedom agenda, signs of which are present on the ground. 

The first is an imperialist pseudo-feminism, which seems to support women’s struggles in the Middle East without problematizing the role of European/North American governments and institutions in the criminalization and oppression of the people in the region. While it is a good sign that women in Europe and the U.S. are showing support for the women in Iran in their struggles, solidarity messages in the West otherwise silence around their governments’ anti-immigrant policies impacting the lives of millions of women in the Middle East raises questions. For example, a Swedish member of the European Parliament, Abir Al-Sahlani, cut her hair in solidarity with the protestors saying “Until the women of Iran are free, we are going to stand with you”.  

While asking for concrete actions by the European Parliament to show their solidarity, it was most ironic that Al-Sahlani ended her speech, with “Women, Life, Freedom”, a slogan of the Kurdish women’s movement that Sweden decided to further criminalize to appease the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has objected to Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership. In a trilateral memorandum, signed in June, the governments of Turkey, Finland, and Sweden outlined a plan to monitor Kurdish and pro-Kurdish political movements in Finland and Sweden. This memorandum further criminalizes many Kurdish women who have actively created mechanisms and procedures of gender equality in the Kurdish movement. Hence while standing in solidarity with the protests in Iran, Western feminists need to stand against their governments’ criminalization of freedom movements and refugees’ escaping the very regimes in the Middle East they recognize to be oppressive.  

A second type of feminist gaze one needs to be wary of is an essentialist feminism with a universal category of “woman” devoid of layers of class, racial and colonial oppressions and divisions. Kurdish women in Iran have faced religious, ethnic, and gender marginalization, and have decades of civil disobedience and activism experience. Kurdish women in the broader Middle East have been criminalized and assassinated by other regimes, exemplified by the recent assassination of Nagihan Akarsel by the Turkish state in Sulaymaniyah within the borders of Iraqi Regional Government. The timing of Akarsel’s assassination is most ironic because as the editor of Jineology Magazine [3] and a member of the Jineology Committee of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom movement, she was personally involved in coining the chant “Jin, Jîyan Azadî.” While the chant went viral around the globe, there was complete silence around her assassination.

For Akarsel and thousands of other Kurdish women, the emancipation of women and a revolution toward a free society led by women must go hand in hand. Similar to intersectional theories and methods developed by Black women in the U.S.,[4] Kurdish Women’s freedom movements have been aware that a feminist movement that is centered around “equality” of women alone or “women’s empowerment” in otherwise racist, capitalist, and colonial societies will not bring the ultimate freedom that all women need. That is why the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement has organized women’s autonomous institutions and practices like self-defense to fight simultaneously against the colonial states and patriarchal structures and mentalities within their own societies. This conception of women freeing societies in all spheres of life from patriarchal states to male-centered positivist sciences and more is the core of “Jin, Jîyan, Azadî.” 

For Kurdish women in Iran more specifically, leading anti-assimilationist cultural activities despite gender codes and against ethnic oppression is already an intersectional struggle. Playing key roles in decades of Kurdish resistance and activism, Kurdish women activists have paid the heaviest price for resisting gender and colonial codes of the state. A case in point is Zara Mohammadi, Kurdish language teacher living in Iran and co-founder of Nojîn cultural association, who was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for teaching Kurdish in 2021. The intersectional oppression these women resist on a daily basis, as well as their aspirations for freedom, is a lesson for a democratic feminist struggle with broader demands of freedom. As such, centering their struggle has an emancipatory potential for Iran and the broader Middle East. 

Protestors know Jîna is Kurdish and have shown a courageous readiness to face their own privileges and recognize the state has been built upon the marginalization of women, and ethnic and religious minorities. 

Call Jîna by her Kurdish name and remember the struggle behind the slogan of “Women, Life, Freedom.”. It is a vital act of recognition, as well as a call for an intersectional feminist movement that is simultaneously anti-racist and anti-colonial.



[1] According to Hengaw Human Rights Organization in 2019, “at least 74 Kurdish kulbars were killed on Kurdistan’s borders and roads, and 174 were injured. Of those killed, 50 were directly shot by security forces and border guards, 23 lost their lives after falling off the mountain, avalanches and freezing to death, and one was killed when a landmine exploded. Of the injured, 144 were directly injured by security forces.”

[2] Shin Abad is a Kurdish village in Piran Shahr. In 2012, a girls’ school caught on fire due to inefficient heating facilities. 29 students were burned, 3 of whom lost their lives. 12 students were in critical condition and had to undergo numerous surgeries, but they have been struggling with expenses, despite the efforts of campaigners.

[3] Jineology is a scientific approach centered on women’s experiences and perspectives and provides an alternative to patriarchal positivistic theories and methods of science dominant in capitalist societies.

[4] From Sojourner Truth’s activism in the mostly while Women’s Suffrage Movement in the US, to the Marxist feminist Claudia Jones in the Communist Party of the US in the 1930s, to Frances Beal’s theories of “Double Jeopardy” against Black women in the 1960s, to the concept of intersectionality first developed by the Black feminists of the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s, Black women have advocated for a struggle that is simultaneously anti-racist and anti-patriarchal.

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]