The Women Protesting in Iran.

After seeing the video of the Iranian protester Neda being shot through the heart, the world has been forced to think about role of women in the fight for a democratic Iran. Dana writes at Tapped a little bit about why women might be so involved,

Only 13 percent of Iranian women participate in the paid work force, compared to over 25 percent of women in Turkey and over 38 percent in Indonesia. With the permission of a court, fathers can arrange marriages for daughters under age 13. Polygamy is legal, and under Ahmadinejad, Parliament even tried to ease restrictions on the practice. Women cannot run for president, and family law discriminates against them when it comes to divorce, child custody, and inheritance. Dozens of feminist political leaders have been arrested and detained since 2006, when police violently attacked a women’s rights demonstration in Tehran, leading to the founding of the One Million Signatures Campaign for women’s legal equality.

Women have a lot to lose if Ahmadineajd returns to power. Mousavi clearly has a better stance on gender with more room to change policy concerning the lives of women and specifically because his wife, Zahrad Rahnavard, is a known advocate of women’s rights.

It is in historical moments like this that I often reflect on a powerful book I read in my MA program in Women’s Studies called the Eloquence of Silence by Marnia Lazreg. I continually go back to the chapter on nationalism and how nationalism produces itself in times of conflict. She calls out feminists that minimized the involvement of women in the Algerian resistance as women somehow being duped into fighting. She was writing about Algeria and the fight against colonization so the context is different, but she discusses specifically this idea of how women in the Middle East are homogenized and not written about in their full complexity.
Similar to previous forms of feminism, the mainstream media sometimes represents women protesting in Iran with shock and awe, even heralding them as fallen angels or martyrs. This is not to downplay the tremendous power being built by women in Iran or to suggest all the coverage has been in this vein, but this shock directly stems from assumptions about a homogenized group of women “Middle Eastern” or “Arabic” that are complacent, oppressed, without agency or will. Ultimately, my hope is that as the conversation expands and more and more talk about the role of women in the historical fight for democracy in Iran, perhaps this trend is changing.
But finally, the video that has been passing around the internet is creating that similar “shock,” which is not to say its content isn’t jarring. I haven’t watched it actually, I can’t get myself to. Kate Harding has a good explanation of why she couldn’t either and I think the point she makes of exploitation is a solid one. In deciding to finally watch the video, she writes,

And I can’t help noticing that, even for people who report that they were moved to tears, shakes and nightmares by the video, Neda’s murder has already become abstracted. Says Ulrike Putz, writing in Der Spiegel (and republished on Salon), “she has … become an icon, a martyr for the opposition in Iran. Neda has given the regime’s brutality a bloody face and a name. Overnight ‘I am Neda,’ has become the slogan of the protest movement.” An icon, a martyr, a symbol, a slogan. Not so much a person anymore. We don’t even know for sure if Neda, which means “the call” or “the voice” in Farsi, was her real name or an embellishment for the cause. (For that matter, as Putz points out, we can’t actually confirm that the video is real.) While her family grieves for the woman they loved, the world tweets, “Neda is my daughter, I have one just like her.” Really?

I have a similar feeling. Is watching a video of a woman being shot through the heart another way for women’s bodies to be exploited for the purpose of vouyerism or is this moving people to solid action? Who can we target in our actions from far away other than show we stand in solidarity? This question of exploitation and women’s bodies through news media is not a new phenomena, there is almost a necessity to publish shocking images of women to show us the gruesome things that are done but I have yet to see how that actually changes material conditions for women.