From Women’s Revolution to Jiyanist Democracy Available to Purchase

The original text of the following translation appeared in October 2022, in the early days of an unexpected opening in Iranian politics: a courageous women-led movement sparked by the death of a young Kurdish Iranian woman, Jina (Mahsa) Amini, under police custody, who was detained for “improper” hijab. The principal chant of the protests, the Kurdish Jin, Jiyan, Azadi, translated as “Woman, Life, Freedom,” signed Jina’s name into a national turning point. Her name, as Jina’s mother wailed at her grave, was designated as a “code” carrying plural meanings: women’s resistance to multiple and intersecting layers of discrimination, the fight against the oppression of ethnic minorities, the struggle for economic justice, and the uncompromisable demand for an antiauthoritarian politics. In the year since that day of mourning, the force of this chant has located the discourse of woman as the defining issue of the scene of Iranian politics. While...