The Woman Life Freedom movement: Class dynamics, gender oppression, national minorities and the state
Date
2025
Authors
Sadeghi Ronizi, Mohammad
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Abstract
This MA research aims to offer a new analysis of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” (WLF) movement in Iran, a popular uprising in response to Mahsa (Zhina) Amini’s death at the hands of Iranian authorities in September 2022. The study submits that gender oppression in the Islamic Republic cannot be separated from class relations. Theoretically, the research utilizes selected Marxist approaches and concepts, namely, “uneven and combined development,” “absolute capitalism,” and the “circuit of capital,” in order to register how class dynamics are associated with gender oppression contextualized in the WLF movement that ultimately faded in early 2023 in the face of state repression. This study uses historical sociology as its methodology and benefits form process tracing method. A detailed historical narrative of social and protest movements in the past two decades in Iran, constituting the bulk of this research, allows for presenting a substantive account of the causes of the WLF movement by using existing (secondary) sources, including scholarly articles and public venue publications and register the interaction between the WLF movement, women’s agency, the Islamic state.
The central research question can be formulated as follows: What were the social causes of the WLF movement? The research shows that historically, Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist discourse was centered on controlling women’s bodies by excluding them from public and imposing mandatory hijab laws. However, the state’s drive for capitalist accumulation and expansion in post-revolutionary Iran faced a contradiction: capitalist accumulation required, in significant part, an increase in female workforce participation, especially due to the fact that Iranian women outpace men in university education, in a country that imposed social restrictions on women. Exacerbating this contradiction, the adoption of absolute capitalist policies after 1988, coupled with the defeat of legal reformism, provided a foundation for alternative forms of political activity and increased movement participation of women in the 2010s. These contradictory processes culminated in women’s direct action, beginning with the protest action-performance of “Girls of Enqelab Street” in 2017. Simultaneously, several protest movements of the poor in the post-2017 period marked the end of reformism and irretrievable loss of state hegemony. The WLF movement mobilized almost all of the state’s diverse opponents under its main slogan. This study identifies three key characteristics of the movement: defiance, reclaiming, and re-imagining. The WLF defied the ruling elite’s ethos and its modes of acceptable political actions, reclaimed the public spaces and women’s sovereignty over their bodies, and illustrated a (main) new collective imagination of social life. The (main) imagination has articulated diverse demands and social groups—those subjected to violence of absolute capitalist restructuring, the crisis in the circuit of capital, and the disciplinary force of the state’s Islamist biopower— into a unity against a shared adversary: the state.
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Keywords
Woman Life Freedom movement, Class dynamics, Gender oppression, State, Social movements