Abstract This essay argues for a reorientation of transnational feminist praxis in light of the Women, Life, Freedom movement that began in Iran in September 2022. Drawing from the experiences and analyses of Iranian feminists who were at the forefront of efforts to organize a transnational feminist response, the author develops frameworks for thinking beyond the West vs. East, secular vs. religious binaries. These have not only governed the U.S.-Iran conflict but also distorted the politics of solidarity. This essay theorizes the “hesitancy” with which the uprising in Iran was met from some transnational feminist and progressive quarters as a fear of reproducing Islamophobic discourses about the oppression of Muslim women in the context of the ongoing U.S.-led “war on terror.” After mapping the fraught terrain of solidarity politics in relation to Iran—among mainstream liberals, the Iranian diaspora, anti-imperialist activists, and transnational feminists in the Western academy—the author shows how the politics of oppression and of liberation in Iran take shape at the intersection of domestic dictatorship and foreign domination. Using a framework she calls intersectional anti-imperialism, the author argues for alternatives to U.S.-centric forms of solidarity with Iran, and highlights the broader implications for building internationalism from below.
Manijeh Moradian (Wed,) studied this question.