News and Views.(Interview)

Iranian feminist activist, Jelve Javaheri, was interviewed by Nahid Keshavarz in October 2007. On December 1, 2007, Javaheri was imprisoned; in order to publicize her arrest, Mahsa Shekarloo translated the interview into English and posted it on the Internet. We reprint it here with Shekarloo's helpful introduction and notes written specifically for Feminist Studies readers to make us aware of the breadth of Iranian feminist activism during these trying times.

--Claire Moses

Introduction by Mahsa Shekarloo

Nahid Keshavarz and Jelve Javaheri are Iranian feminist activists who began their activism during the late 1990s, when newly opened political spaces in Iran allowed for a broadened civil society in which women and youth were particularly active. Both women helped to establish nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that contributed to the growing women's movement by demanding increased social and political participation and equal rights. Insisting on the universality of patriarchy, they analyzed the particular legal structures and social relations/constructs in Iran that maintained women's lesser status and formulated their discussions through magazines, journals, books, the Internet, and public seminars.

By 2004, many of these political openings had shriveled, and the state had rolled back civil society's access to print media and subjected secular communal spaces--such as neighborhood community centers--to increasing restrictions and control. In response, Keshavarz, Javaheri, and other feminist activists employed the Internet as a public platform and organized civil disobedience actions in public parks and street thoroughfares to attract wider attention to the issue of women's rights.

In 2006, a coalition of feminist activists held a second annual June 12th women's rights street protest in Tehran's Hafte Tir Square. The intention was to commemorate the previous year's peaceful sit-in protest in front of the University of Tehran, which had garnered wide national attention to women's demands. The organizers also aimed to institute June 12th as a popular day for women and an alternative to the official Iranian Women's Day, which is celebrated on the Prophet's daughter Fateme's birthday. The mostly women protesters were immediately attacked upon arrival by female and male security forces who beat, arrested, and dispersed participants before they had a chance to congregate. Thwarted by the security forces, deflated by the criticism later launched by other women's rights activists, and deprived of most public channels, the June 12th organizers decided to develop a women's rights advocacy campaign to raise awareness and mobilize a broader constituency around the problem of women's secondary legal status.

Taking inspiration from a similar initiative in Morocco, the One Million Signatures Campaign to end discriminatory laws against women was launched in the fall of 2006. The campaign intends to collect one million signatures to present to the National Parliament as a popular mandate to reform laws that currently accord lesser rights to women in matters such as inheritance, marriage, divorce, employment, and legal testimony, to name a few. Relying on a wide volunteer base to collect signatures and conduct person-to-person advocacy, the campaign aims to catalyze grassroots social debate and pressure for legal change from below. Despite government efforts at containment--the launch event was conducted on the street after authorities ordered the assembly hall owner to cancel its rental agreement with organizers at the last minute--the campaign has spread to twenty cities throughout Iran where seminars, meetings and workshops are held in private homes. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi is a campaign member, and non-Iranian public figures who have declared their solidarity include Arundhati Roy, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Helene Cixous, Italian pop singer Gianna Nannini, the Dalai Lama, and women Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Jody Williams, Wangari Maathai, Rigoberta Menchu Turn, Betty Williams, and Mairead Gorrigan Maguirethe.