An exposed lock of hair for wearing the scarf “inappropriately”. Something so absurd led to the murder of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Moral Police, but Iranian women have made it a symbol of his rebellion. What is happening in Iran speaks to us about the dialectic of vulnerability and resistance that sometimes emerges under a system of domination. It also speaks to us about the power of collective action and symbolic politics in the struggle for real openness (yes, revolutionary) in a country that offers them no horizon for the future. We are so used to hearing the personal, individualized voice of so many intellectuals and political leaders that it is sometimes difficult for us to interpret other forms of political expression that are far from the intended rationality of our speeches. But these days we get those powerful images that circulate through our networks, taken by women with their own mobiles: bonfires into which they throw their cut locks, women singing and dancing with their hair blowing in the wind and their faces visible, free of the veil that it removes them from a public life.
Their collective action serves them to show themselves in all their individuality, without the veil that erases and standardizes them. The appearance of other bodies of tortured young women, such as that of Nika Shakarami this week, does not give rise to deception: it is the bodies and lives of these women that are at stake, the only thing they have to affirm themselves, to be themselves and not an instrument of a medieval regime. Hence the importance of maintaining their access to the internet, of amplifying and magnifying their own voices. The regime portrays them as puppets of foreign influence, victims of the diabolical Western plot. They do risk everything, and that is why the effectiveness of those videos of Spanish and French actresses and artists that circulate on the networks is doubtful.
While in Iran they fight against the stench of a theocratic regime, in Afghanistan women play it against the Taliban, although here we have already forgotten them. Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad pointed this out on Twitter, pointing to the very heart of oppression: the religious and male dictatorship. The danger of that message explains the complicit silence of the neighboring countries of the Middle East, because at the cry of “Women, life, freedom!” the one of “Death to the dictator!” is already added, and not so long ago those Arab springs (remember them?). But the power that the West still wields is strange. Now that we are talking about our decline everywhere, a hypothetical end to the mandatory veil in Iran would open the door to Western modernity, “as feared in Tehran as in Putin’s Kremlin”, wrote the journalist Alain Frachón. But do you remember the Syrian women, the Tunisian women, do you know what happens in Libya or Jordan? Let us hope that the struggle of Iranian women is not silenced in the heat of the next event. Let’s not abandon them this time.
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