COSMOS TALK

23 November 2022 | h 14:00-15:30 (CET)

The long fight for Iranian women’s self-determination: a generational and sociological perspective

Aim of this presentation is to critically deepen some characteristics of the 2022 protests in Iran within an intersectional framework having gender and intergenerational relations as its analytical levels. Initially depicted as “anti-patriarchal” and “anti-hijab”, the revolts have rapidly proved to be much more complex in their demands and configurations. Multiple generations and diverse social groups rose up in protest; yet, significantly, this is an uprising where youth and teenagers play a central part, proving a paradigm shift in Iranian subjectivities. Moving from these premises, I will first outline a brief contextualization of the bargaining between the State and civil society; special attention will be paid to how different generations of women have conveyed and articulated their opposition to the State’s gender policies through time. The central part of the presentation will focus on the role and peculiarities of the so-called dahe-ye haftadi and hashtadi – the generations of young men and women born in the 1990s and 2000s. Labelled by analysts, the government and part of the population itself as passive, devoid of ideologies and political involvement, they have been the main target of social engineering processes aimed at influencing and channelling their commitment to the res publica – the lack of which has been long pointed to as the core dissimilarity with the previous generations. In contrast, I will stress how their involvement in the present-day protests sheds light on the innovative manners by which they express dissent, claim and occupy the public arena, and reinvent their relations with the society and the State. Indeed, some of the points I will emphasize are the positionality of the younger generations of men; the original role of the bodies – particularly young female bodies – in the public space; the reconfigurations of intergenerational dynamics in place within the society.