On ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ and the War on Palestine: Gender Violence, and the Struggle for Transnational Feminist Solidarity
By Fatemeh Shams
August 2024 marked the third anniversary of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, after twenty years of US-led military occupation. As they retook control of the country on 15 August 2021, a new ban was imposed on girls’ education, preventing millions from attending school beyond sixth grade. The situation worsened in December 2022 when the ban was extended to universities blocking women from completing their advanced education. Afghanistan remains the only country in the world that restricts female education.
September 2024 marks the second anniversary of the rise of the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran and its diaspora in the aftermath of the state murder of 23-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in police custody after she was arrested for revealing some hair under her hijab. In terms of both breadth and depth, the movement imposed the most unprecedented challenge to the political regime and became the manifestation of centuries of struggle, with deep roots entangling gender, ethnicity, religion, political ideology, colonialism, and relations between East and West.
For the past 11 months, the Middle East has once again been plunged into the global spotlight as a devastating Israeli assault on Gaza continues to claim lives. The full-scale war on Gaza began following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, during which more than 1000 Israeli citizens were killed, and more than 200 hostages were taken, including civilian women and children. According to the U.N., 52% of those killed in Gaza are women and children. Tragic assaults on civilian women on both sides, alongside the horrific assaults against Iranian and Afghan women in the past three years, exemplify a broader pattern of systemic gender oppression in the region. This alarming reality highlights the need for urgent, unified global action to not only address the immediate violence but to dismantle the entrenched structures of gender-based oppression that fuel such similar cycles of suffering.
These events are not isolated; they are part of a regional struggle that resonates with historical movements like the global fight against apartheid and the civil rights movement in the US, both of which underscore the power of sustained international solidarity. Now more than ever, women’s rights activists across the world must channel their collective outrage into tangible actions—supporting those on the frontlines, amplifying their voices, and demanding accountability from global leaders. In a world increasingly defined by division and violence, the courageous stand taken by women activists in Iran, Afghanistan, Palestine, and beyond serves as a powerful reminder that the fight for justice and equality implicates yet transcends borders, racial, and ethnic identities.
As the second anniversary of the Woman Life Freedom movement approaches, revisiting its foundational accomplishments is essential to chart the way forward and foster meaningful transnational alliances among emancipatory movements in the region. But how can we harness the urgency of the present moment to usher in a new era of transnational solidarity, one that honours the fearless work of activists in the region, and beyond, and drives vital global awareness and legislative change?
Seeing Through the Veil
The Woman Life Freedom movement was triggered by the murder in police custody of Jina Mahsa Amini, a 23-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman arrested for accidentally revealing some hair under her hijab. Her state murder for this ‘crime’ was not the first and will not be the last. Thirteen months after Jina’s death, on October 1, 2023, Armita Garavand, a 17-year-old Iranian girl, fell into a coma at the Tehran metro station after a violent encounter with the hijab patrols. Like Jina, she was declared brain dead at a military hospital and died on October 23, 2023. Nine months later, on July 22, 2024, Arezoo Badri, a 31-year-old mother of two, was left paralyzed from the waist down after being shot by the Iranian police while driving. Later it was revealed that her car was targeted because she was not observing hijab. Arezoo remains paralyzed at the time of writing this piece and will likely never walk again.
These horrific accounts of gender oppression stem from the legalization of the Islamic dress code shortly after the 1979 Revolution, along with increasingly draconian state surveillance, policing, and punishment. The country swarms with Guidance Patrol officers, commonly known in the West as the ‘Morality Police’. Those who do not comply with the dress code are charged with ‘inciting corruption and prostitution’, sent for ‘re-education’, indefinitely detained—or worse.
When women are arrested, they enter a judicial labyrinth from which the lack of legal representation makes it difficult to escape. For 40 years, the clenched hands of the state and defiant hands of women have clutched opposite corners of this piece of cloth in an increasingly brutal tug-of-war. A piece of cloth that symbolizes the systemic violation of female bodily autonomy. A piece of cloth, without which women have their faces scarred by vigilante razor blades or acid burns, imprisonment, flogging, or extortionate fines. Over the past two years, tens of thousands of women have even had their cars arbitrarily confiscated as punishment for defying the state’s veiling laws. The hijab is a tangible object that physicalizes the wider struggle of women as second-class citizens under the rule of the Islamic Republic, a shorthand for the eradication of women’s autonomy and rights. It is a piece of cloth that doesn’t just cover women’s heads – it covers up the real issues of gender oppression in Iran. That said, it has become clear by now that the Iranian women’s fight for dignity and freedom goes well beyond the physicality of the hijab and represents a broader struggle to reclaim autonomy and choice. As poet, theologian, and women’s rights activist Sedigheh Vasmaghi declared a few months ago from Evin prison: “When even veiled women oppose compulsory hijab, the government’s efforts are futile.” Despite being hospitalized after suffering police violence in custody for her public unveiling, Vasmaghi insists the current movement is unstoppable. “There is no turning back. Despite attempts to intimidate the people, they will continue to advance.” (Vasmaghi, 2024)
To grasp the significance of this movement and form meaningful transnational alliances, it is crucial to understand the broader picture of women’s subjugation in Iran through a framework that transcends militant Islamic ideology—and the mere physicality of the hijab. The enforcement of Islamic dress code is a mechanism to render women invisible, stripping them of their individuality and agency. However, what is more alarming is that the continued international reluctance to challenge these laws as manifestations of systemic gender apartheid has perpetuated this invisibility on the global stage. Mandatory hijab is emblematic of the state’s broader efforts to control women’s bodies, visibility, and autonomy. Framing this fight as one against ‘Islam’ within and beyond the region feeds into dangerous and divisive narratives, whereas recognizing it as a struggle for dignity and fundamental rights recentres the need for solidarity from all fronts and pressures those who believe in justice to act. Acknowledging this nuance is not only crucial to combatting harmful stereotypes but also pivotal in building a united global response to gender oppression.
Embracing Intersectionality
What began as a women-led revolt against the enforcement of the Islamic dress code in September 2022 quickly snowballed into an intersectional struggle for all human rights in Iran. Under the Woman Life Freedom slogan, with its deep roots in the emancipatory Kurdish movement in Turkey, Syria, and Iran, women were joined by all those seeking justice: teachers’ unions, workers’ unions, persecuted religious minorities such as Bahais, marginalized ethnic groups such as Kurdish, Arab, Azari, and Baluchi communities, environmental activists and – perhaps most poignantly – queer activists, who put their lives on the line to protest publicly in a country where same-sex relations are still punishable by death.
Jina’s death created an intersectional identity of otherness, ushering in an era of collective political consciousness unprecedented in the country since the 1979 Revolution. For the first time in 45 years, protesters of all identities and ideologies marched together, united by one shared goal: to end the tyranny of state control over their bodies, voices, beliefs, and identities.
After decades of fighting unsuccessfully in isolation for specific causes (voting reform, utility shortages, ethnic oppression, oil prices, censorship, prison welfare), the 2022 uprising connected the dots between the ‘symptoms’ of life in the Islamic Republic and rallied protestors around the central cause. As Iranian sociologist Asef Bayat noted, the movement demonstrated “a paradigm shift in Iranian subjectivities…reflected in the centrality of women and their dignity, which related more broadly to human dignity.” (Bayat, 2023)
In the first few weeks of the uprising, a trend emerged on Twitter in which people listed their reasons for taking to the streets, beginning their posts with ‘Barāye…’ (For…). The outpouring of issues extended far beyond women’s rights to encompass poverty, militarism, corruption, freedom of speech, the rights of children, animals, and refugees, environmental concerns, theocracy, and outdated social and religious taboos. A young musician, Shervin Hajipour, turned these tweets into a power ballad, Barāye, which went viral overnight, garnering 48 million views. With lines such as “For dancing in the streets” and “For the fear we feel when we kiss,” interwoven with the repeated slogan “For Women, Life, Freedom,” it became an anthem for the movement and won the inaugural Best Song for Social Change Award at the American Grammys in 2023. Immediately after its release, Hajipour’s house was raided, and he was forced to remove the video from the internet before being arrested and transferred to Evin prison. In August 2024, he announced he had received a 3-year-8-month sentence for writing the song.
Since mid-April 2024, when the authorities announced the implementation of a new nationwide campaign called the ‘Noor’ (Light) Plan, the crackdown on women and girls has intensified. By subjecting women to constant surveillance, beatings, sexual violence, electric shocks, long prison sentences, and denying them phone calls and medical treatment in prison, the Iranian authorities have effectively waged a ‘war on women’ to punish their collective defiance of forced veiling with long prison sentences under the inhumane conditions of women’s prison wards. Two detained Iranian Kurdish women activists, Pakhshan Azizi and Sharifeh Mohammadi have been sentenced to death. These brutal tactics expose a regime not only violating fundamental human rights but also committing egregious acts of violence with impunity.
While advocates for change within Iran have embraced intersectionality as central to their collective fight against multiple forms of injustice, the absence of a strong transnational solidarity network has allowed the regime’s brutal assaults on women’s rights to persist largely unchecked. With regional and international alliances lagging in offering recognition or support, the regime continues its attacks on women activists with minimal consequences. The international community’s failure to unite in meaningful action — action that transcends divisive binaries and clichés, such as conflating the ‘war on women’ with ‘Islamophobia’ or other potentially divisive political differences—has only exacerbated the challenges faced by persecuted activists, leaving them isolated in their struggle for dignity and justice.
Recentring Gender Justice at the Core of a Collective Struggle for Freedom
Another major legacy of Woman Life Freedom has been its recentring of gender justice as a core value of a nationwide social movement. In addition to its focus on intersectionality, the prominent visibility of women and teen girls at the forefront of the protests has served as a reminder that the fight for gender justice must remain at the heart of any social movement that fights for freedom and justice.
Women have been disproportionately affected by every regime change in Iran’s tumultuous past. From the forceful unveiling of women (1936) under the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi to the enforcement of hijab following the rise of an extremist clerical regime after 1979, women’s rights, bodies, choices, and freedoms have been sacrificed on the patriarchal altar again and again. Subsequently, this history of oppression has become entwined with counter-histories of courageous activism and top-down gender reforms of the second Pahlavi era. In the decades before the Revolution, suffragettes made great strides in achieving access to free education, the right to divorce and gain custody of children, the legalization of abortion, the raising of the marriage age from 13 to 18, and the end of state-enforced dress code. In 1963, they won the right to vote and run for parliament; by 1978, two million women had jobs, including positions of power in traditionally male-centric industries.
However, with the establishment of the Islamic Republic, women’s rights were dismantled overnight – rolled back not only to a time before emancipation but to a far darker past: gender segregation, strict Islamic dress code, exclusion from political spheres and the workforce, family rights revoked, widespread cultural censorship, travel bans without the permission of a man. The marriage age was set back to puberty, with brides as young as 9. Although this was later officially changed to 13, evidence collected by exiled Iranian feminist lawyer Shadi Sadr proved that 13,487 marriages involving girls under the age of 13 were registered between 2013 and 2020. (Sadr, 2024)
Nevertheless, women have remained influential actors, organizers, and mobilizers of mass non-violent actions to demand gender equality and to challenge patriarchal structures in Iran. Despite all gender-based constraints, they occupied more seats in higher education than their male counterparts. Their activism took many forms, including the 2006 sit-in outside the University of Tehran, calling for the removal of discriminatory articles from the country’s constitution and its Islamic penal code; the One Million Signatures Campaign, aimed at reforming family laws; campaigns against practices such as stoning and other forms of gender-based violence; drafting a comprehensive women’s charter in 2009, and the fight for equal access to public spaces, including sports stadiums. Even in exile, Iranian feminist activists continue to advocate for their rights.
In the wake of Woman Life Freedom and amid the birth of several feminist collectives within Iran and its diaspora, a group of Iranian women’s rights activists drafted Iran Women’s Bill of Rights for “inclusive and subjective equality for women in all their diversities with the intention of enshrining them in the future Constitution of Iran.” The formation of such collectives demonstrates that despite ideological differences, Iranian women activists have successfully united to present their demands to the state with a unified voice. While their voices are growing louder, achieving meaningful change requires global understanding, recognition, and solidarity. For the movement to succeed, the Iranian women’s struggle must be intertwined, like a helix, in the fabric of transnational struggles for justice across time and place.
Building a Transnational Feminist Solidarity Network Across the Region
The rise of the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran exposed the regime’s hypocrisy regarding freedom and justice. The Islamic Republic, through its brutal oppression of various ethnic and religious groups, has come to resemble an occupying force, colonizing its own citizens by subjecting them to systemic abuse and humiliation for 45 years. This collective realization was reflected in some of the movement’s slogans, which encapsulated the intersectional suffering of diverse groups across the country and beyond. Two key slogans, “From Kurdistan to Tehran, I give my life for Iran” (Az Kurdestan tā Tehran, Jānam fadā-ye Iran) and “From Zahedan to Tehran, I give my life for Iran” (Az Zahedan tā Tehran, Jānam fadā-ye Iran), highlighted the protesters’ recognition of intersectional unity across the country. Another slogan extended this intersectionality beyond Iran’s borders, calling the necessity of building regional solidarities. When in the face of police brutality, protesters chanted “Iran has become Palestine / People, why are you sitting down?” (Iran shodeh felestin, mardom cherā neshastin?), they poignantly drew on parallels between the struggles of Iranians and Palestinians in fighting against their oppressors. This chant not only denounced the regime’s exploitation of the Palestinian cause to advance its own colonial ambitions but also signalled a broader critique of the regime’s expansionist agenda within and beyond Iran’s borders. Recognizing the Islamic Republic as a colonial, occupying force at the heart of this slogan also served as a call to the international community to break away from outdated East-West binaries when applying such key terms as “colonialism” and “occupation” to the Middle East.
In the two years since Iran’s women-led protests erupted in Iran, the world’s attention has moved to the catastrophic situations escalating in different parts of the region from Kabul to Gaza. Renewed focus on Palestine has reignited a long-contentious debate in the West, with political soapboxing muddying already deeply troubled waters. As the old acronym ‘PEP’ (‘Progressive Except for Palestine’) re-enters circulation, the discussion risks dangerously over-simplifying an incredibly complex matrix of issues including nationhood, ethnicity, religion – and indeed gender.
A key takeaway from the Woman Life Freedom movement was the necessity of uncovering the history of systemic female subjugation in tandem with other forms of ethnic, religious, and socio-economic oppression that extend far beyond the present moment. As the assault on Gaza intensified following the Hamas atrocities on October 7th, the need to reframe the Palestinian struggle through a gendered lens became more crucial than ever. The brutal realities of war on women’s bodies across the region have once again underscored that women’s rights in the Middle East have been battered and erased by four oppressive forces: the US-Britain alliance, Israel, and Islamic militants from Afghanistan to Iran, to Palestine. Recognizing the shared responsibility of all these groups in the war on women is essential for building a transnational solidarity network rooted in gender. Such a network cannot be built without understanding the historical context that places contemporary crises within a framework of colonial and patriarchal pasts. The same reductionist perspective that has fetishized Iranian women’s struggle for bodily autonomy by narrowly focusing on the physical symbolism of the veil has similarly reduced the Palestinian struggle for autonomy and freedom to a simplistic narrative, framing it as merely the fight for the victory of Hamas’s Islamic militancy over the so-called ‘only democratic regime in the Middle East.’
A glance at the history of gender oppression in Palestine, however, offers a different view of the ongoing conflict. Feminist scholar Ryvka Barnard elaborates on this in her insightful article, “Palestine is a Feminist Issue,” where she explains:
Palestinian women have faced down gendered violence from Israel’s colonial regime since its beginning, leading the Palestinian struggle for freedom. In 1933, the British high commissioner in Palestine, Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, wrote in a letter his concern that a ‘new and disquieting feature’ of a protest in Jerusalem was the prominent role taken by women who led the protest and fought back against the colonial police.
Barnard, 2024.
In fact, women have remained at the forefront of the Palestinian struggle for freedom for almost a century, spearheading protests and boycotts, leading resistance movements, running community organizations and underground schools, campaigning for healthcare access, and defiantly speaking out against persecution and injustice. Their work has been strengthened by forming umbrella organizations, such as the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, which continue to face criminalization and office raids for their non-violent activities.
In November 2023, twelve of these organizations issued a global call for support, stating:
Women movements have historically been central to the struggles against oppression, discrimination, colonialism, and militarism… Palestinian women have been struggling for decades against the intersection of national, social, and economic oppressions, calling out the inherent patriarchal core of Israel’s regime of oppression. We, women’s unions and grassroots movements representing Palestinian women. Inside historic Palestine and in exile, call on women and women’s organizations worldwide to speak up and rise up, to support our struggle to end this genocide.
Despite abundant evidence from the UN and other agencies that women are disproportionately affected by the current invasion –in terms of murder; sexual violence and abuse; and access to health, reproductive, and obstetric care – we are yet to see gender appear as prominently as it deserves in global intervention and debate.
For Palestinian women, this is not surprising. Even within feminist circles, they have always struggled to have their voices heard. While we may have come a long way since the 1985 UN Conference, in which leading American feminist Betty Friedan warned Egyptian feminist Nawal al-Saadawi to “not bring up Palestine in your speech. This is a women’s conference, not a political conference,” Nada Elia’s bold and enlightening paper “Justice is Indivisible” (2017) shows how far we still have to go:
There are few Palestinian feminists who have not experienced some degree of
Elia, 2017.
suspicion, misunderstanding, or outright hostility, within … feminist communities.
For, while it was obvious to some of the more radical Global North activists that our
struggle was no different than the struggles of any colonized people, our yearning for
liberation was all too often misread by many as anti-Semitism, rather than as an
organic impulse to cherish freedom, dignity, self-determination.
It is frustrating to have to state the obvious: politics and female empowerment cannot, and must not, be separated. As Nawal al-Saadawi later reflected about the Friedan remark:
Of course in my speech, I did not heed what she had said to me since I believe that
women’s issues cannot be dealt with in isolation from politics. The
emancipation of women in the Arab region is closely linked to the regimes under
which we live.
Regimes which the US and some European countries have been hesitant to criticize – out of fear of retaliation, fear of appearing Islamophobic, and fear of acknowledging their role in colonialist legacies which have led to the catastrophic situations as they are today.
Feminist Praxis and Solidarity with Decolonial Struggle
It is impossible to discuss and understand today’s intersectional struggle of Iranian and Afghan women, queers, and marginalized bodies whose identities and basic human rights have been systemically and purposefully denied for decades, without remembering the history of systemic plundering and oppression by domestic, regional, and international powers throughout modern history. As external and internal forces of colonialism continue to reinforce each other, those who continue to pay the highest price are marginalized people – especially women. As Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian explains, feminism entails “understanding the nature and significance of solidarity with the dispossessed, something that global feminism, international law, and Israeli feminism have so far failed to do.” (Kevorkian, 2014).
Two years on, we feminist activists across the region must create meaningful connections among ourselves to help feminists in the US and Europe avoid conflating our struggle for bodily autonomy and dignity with Islamophobia or antisemitism. Woman Life Freedom was a call for everyone fighting for gender justice to revisit their perceptions of the ‘Muslim woman’ and her humanity, without getting caught in the commodification of the veil as an identity or cultural marker. The movement also powerfully exposed the Islamic Republic’s manipulative methods of subjugating women through ideological means, allowing it to twist its brutal war on women into a narrative of the West’s imperialist war on ‘Islam’. The harmful silence of Western feminists around issues of gender justice specific to Muslim women in the Middle East has, in effect, colluded with and strengthened the regimes’ goals. The time has come to challenge the simplistic and imagined East-West dichotomy and critically examine the reductionist conclusions that often arise from applying postcolonial theories to the nonviolent resistance of Iranian women for autonomy and dignity to decolonize their own bodies. Without asking uncomfortable questions, without untangling the origins of these twisted roots, we will never gain the solidarity and intervention we need. As Nada Elia eloquently urges, campaigners and activists worldwide must “finally grasp…that feminist praxis entails engaging in solidarity with the decolonial struggle.” (Elia, 2017)
Women’s rights are human rights, regardless of ethnicity or religion, and cultural squeamishness cannot be an excuse for inaction. Parallels could be drawn from the history of campaigning to end female genital mutilation (FGM) – a movement that began 100 years ago in Egypt and gained momentum in the 1970s through transnational feminist solidarity. Nawal aal-Saadawi, herself an FGM survivor, was a leading voice in the debate, her books banned and her career as director-general of public health in Egypt terminated as a result. In 1975, a groundbreaking study by Rose Oldfield Hayes ushered in a new age of serious global engagement with the issue by renaming it ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ instead of ‘female circumcision’.
But it would take another thirty years for the UN to recognize it as a form of violence against women, making it a human rights violation rather than a medical ambiguity, and it wasn’t until the early 2000s that serious action began to take at an international policy level, with the practice banned in many countries and criminalized in the West.
In their century-long struggle to protect the bodily autonomy of women and girls, FGM campaigners have come up against – and continue to come up against – concerns about cultural insensitivity and moral relativism, and accusations of Christo-colonial erasure of indigenous beliefs. The division emerged between feminists (advocating equal rights for all women) and anthropologists (advocating cultural tolerance). In 1981, at the height of the debate, the French Association of Anthropologists stated that a certain feminism resuscitates (today) the moralistic arrogance of yesterday’s colonialism. With this case study in mind, it is easy to see why some may feel reluctance to forge transnational cooperation and intervention around women’s rights in Islamic countries today. But as feminist academic and theorist Neferti Tadiar wrote, after visiting Palestine and listening to women in grassroots organizations:
To take a stand in solidarity with, and to be involved in, the struggle of
Tadiar, 2012.
Palestinians to resist and transform the conditions of their own dispossession and
disposability—to join in their aspiration for collective freedom and self-
determination—is also to participate in the remaking of global life, which cannot but
be a paramount feminist act.
‘The Inescapable Network of Mutuality’
This, then, must be the driving force for solidarity: a shared vision of “the remaking of global life.” It will take time, patience, and generosity. Solidarity is indeed a process, requiring “intentional work in getting to know each other’s histories, in prioritizing strategies, in enacting and reciprocating solidarity when someone else’s body [is] on the line, because of a deep understanding of intersectionality” as eloquently argued by Elia:
Our struggles are not parallel—a term which suggests that they will never
Elia, 2017.
meet—but intersectional, coming together at various nodes… Reciprocal
solidarity is a long-term movement, not a “moment”… ebbing and flowing as
circumstances evolve. With the understanding that the system we are fighting is
global, we can better appreciate that solidarity amongst disenfranchised,
criminalized communities is not self-serving, but mutually beneficial.
Women Life Freedom is the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface are layers of institutionalized patriarchal abuse, so systemic, so pernicious, that it is time to call it what it is: Gender Apartheid. Pressure on the UN and other human rights agencies to legally recognize gender apartheid and take urgent legislative action has been growing since February of this year, when a special report from the UN Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls demanded it be recognized as a crime against humanity, stating:
Gender apartheid is not merely a theoretical possibility or legal construct, but a real
United Nations, 2024.
threat and lived reality for millions of women and girls around the world – a reality
that is currently not explicitly codified in international law.
While forms of gender-specific crimes exist, they fail to capture the deprivation of rights at a systemic level. Highlighting evidence of female experience since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in 2021, the report is ardent that “[o]nly the apartheid framework can fully grasp the role of intent, ideology and institutionalization in gender apartheid regimes.”
Narges Mohammadi, a leading Iranian human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate joined the plea to criminalize gender apartheid and recognize the plight of women in Iran as a crime against humanity. Speaking from her cell in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, she asserted that by “systematically and deliberately leveraging all governmental tools and powers, particularly legislation” the Islamic Republic “perpetuates the marginalization of women and violates their human rights.”
How long will it take to legislate against gender apartheid, explicitly addressing it in international law? How many more women, in Iran and Afghanistan and beyond, must die? We are sleepwalking into legalized femicide. And still, the UN drags its heels.
The draft of the Crimes Against Humanity Convention, currently under discussion, holds immense potential to “remake global life” by institutionalizing protections that could significantly enhance the rights, freedoms, and choices of women in Iran, Afghanistan, Palestine, and beyond. If adopted and effectively implemented, this convention could not only reshape international legal norms but also pave the way for a new era of protection for all victims of oppression and marginalization. However, its success will depend on the willingness of states to transcend geopolitical interests and truly commit to protecting marginalized groups, particularly women, whose rights have historically been overlooked.
This would mark a crucial step toward acknowledging what Martin Luther King Jr. so eloquently articulated—that “all life is interrelated,” bound together in an “inescapable network of mutuality.” Such mutuality reflects the foundation of transnational movements like Women Life Freedom, where diverse voices coalesce despite their differences. Yet, for these movements to thrive and achieve their goals, the international community must recognize that legal frameworks like the Crimes Against Humanity Convention are indispensable tools for ensuring justice across borders. Only through such global solidarity can we truly protect the human rights of all.
References
- Nadia Elia, “Justice is indivisible: Palestine as a feminist issue,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 6, No. 1, 2017, pp. 45-63.
- Ryvka Barnard, Palestine Is a Feminist Issue, Tribune (2024): https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/palestine-is-a-feminist-issue
- Shadi Sadr, “Living as Second-Class Human Beings: Gender Apartheid in the Islamic Republic of Iran”, 2024.
- Helle Krunke, Hanne Petersen, Ian Manners (eds.), Transnational Solidarity: Concepts, Challenges, and Opportunities (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity Press, 2020).
- Maylei Blackwell, Laura Briggs and Mignonette Chiu, “Transnational Feminisms Roundtable,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, Special Issue: Transnational Feminisms (2015), pp. 1-24
- “Gender Apartheid Must be Recognized as a Crime Against Humanity,” United Nations, February 20, 2024: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/gender-apartheid-must-be-recognised-crime-against-humanity-un-experts-say#:~:text=%E2%80%9CGender%20apartheid%20is%20not%20merely,%2C%E2%80%9D%20the%20UN%20experts%20said
Related Articles by Fatemeh Shams
‘Woman, Life, Freedom:’ Decoding the Political Poetics of a Woman-led Revolutionary Movement, 18 July 2023
Notes from Another Exodus: The Four-Month Struggle to Evacuate Afghan Poets and Scholars, 24 May 2022
About the Author
Fatemeh Shams is Associate Professor of Modern Persian Literature at University of Pennsylvania. Her area of expertise includes literary production under authoritarian states, the social history of modern Persian literature, ideology and literary production. She is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning poet with three poetry collections. Her third collection, When They Broke Down the Door, won the Latifeh Yarshater annual book award in 2017. Her first monograph, A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-Option Under the Islamic Republic has been published by Oxford University Press. In the academic years 2021-2024, she is a EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Citation: Fatemeh Shams, On ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ and the War on Palestine: Gender Violence, and the Struggle for Transnational Feminist Solidarity, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 12.09.2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/12ayf
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