On 10 October 2022, the ACRPS Iranian Studies Unit (ISU) hosted Shirin Saeidi, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas, for a lecture titled “Historicizing Iranian Women’s Activism in Post-1979 Iran.” The lecture was moderated by Mehran Kamrava, Director of the ISU and Professor of Government at Georgetown University Qatar. In light of the recent protests over the killing of Mahsa Amini by the Morality Police, Saeidi provided a much-needed historical context on non-elite women’s activism in Iran, a social group she has engaged with through ethnographic fieldwork since 2007.

Saeidi began by briefly discussing the September 2022 protests, noting that “the initial protests were against mandatory hijab, the policing of women’s bodies and the government’s refusal to accept any kind of reform. Protests, on the other hand, quickly evolved into a critique of the state.” Young Iranian women are leading the current protests, which are centered on the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.”

Saeidi then emphasized the dominance of liberal feminism in post-1979 women’s rights activism. Liberal feminism, according to Saeidi, “remains state-centric and depends on advocacy, raising awareness, and lobbying to end laws that discriminate against women.” Saeidi claimed that women in the streets of Iran today have not been incorporated into the political vision of the government and women’s rights activists. Both the state and external actors have little influence on the aspirations of non-elite Iranian women.

She discussed how transnational gender activism is disconnected from local objectives and may endanger activists inside Iran. A good research practice, according to Saeidi, is to avoid categorizing and labeling women and attempting to predict their aspirations. “Years of research on this specific social group have taught me how much they despise categories, labels, orders, boundaries, and academic jargon,” Saeidi said. The September 2022 protests grew out of a long history of non-elite women’s “acts of citizenship” that challenge the state and its discriminatory laws. Most importantly, “the non-elite women who participated in these protests are not supporters of imperial feminism abroad, as Iranian leaders or the opposition may suggest, nor are they extensions of United States’ inhumane policies toward Iran or other parts of the region.”

Saeidi also focused on the political and spatial consequences of legal inequality and gender discrimination. The suppression of women’s rights activists in Iran have led to the emergence of informal spaces for feminist activism, on which most non-elite women rely for their needs and survival. By using examples from her fieldwork in Iran, she further clarified the concept of informal spaces, highlighting women’s ongoing attempts to express their concerns about the government’s disregard for their rights. On the active role of female university students in feminist activism, Saeidi stated that “the university dormitory and the lecture halls are spaces where feminist politics is formally not welcomed by the state, yet they can easily transform into informal spaces for feminist activism with a single spark.”

Lastly, Saeidi argued that intergenerational and intercommunal solidarity are dominant themes in post-2009 gender politics in Iran and are also bolstered by women’s activism in informal feminist spaces. To conclude, Saeidi stated that “acts of citizenship emerging in informal spaces are not state-centric, linear, or necessarily forward-thinking; these acts are about taking what one believes they are owed in a context where civil society is suppressed, and legal reform is not possible.”