Anti-Disciplinarity and Solidarity with “Woman, Life, Freedom”
NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH
As I look back on the first few months of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising in Iran, a movement that sparked the imagination of feminists around the globe, now almost a year ago, I am struck by a distinction that one could make between activism in support of the women’s fight for freedom, on the one hand, and a mode of intellectual engagement that could, on the other, make the movement’s efforts consequential on a more global scale.
The distinction that I believe could situate the position and participation of intellectuals in ways that mirror the anti-disciplinary spirit of this uprising was made in the late 1970s by the French historian and philosopher, Michel Foucault. Foucault visited Iran during the Iranian Revolution and was inspired to write a number of articles in response to its visionary aspirations. The concept of anti-disciplinarity, however, takes shape in his reflections on the Cold War. In an interview titled “Truth and Power,” conducted by Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, Foucault identifies a significant break in the role of the intellectual; a break which gains in prominence with the scientific research of Robert Oppenheimer. While the work of the intellectual before Oppenheimer was concerned with consciousness-raising—changing people’s minds in the pursuit of truth—Foucault reflects that, “[t]he extension of technico-scientific structures in the economic and strategic domain” is what gave an “absolute savant” like Oppenheimer real importance as a specific intellectual (Foucault 1984:71). The figure of the new intellectual merges in this moment with that of the “strategist of life and death.” The arms race marks “a point of transition” that begins with the Cold War. And it is this historical juncture that activates the expertise of the intellectual (Oppenheimer) in ways that impacts the fate of the entire world. No longer seen as a writer or genius “who bears the values of all,” the intellectual becomes, in very specific terms, someone who can pinpoint, within his or her disciplinary preoccupations, the “political, economic, and institutional regimes” that are currently involved in the production of truth, as such. In that sense, the work of the specific intellectual implies a disaggregation of truth from the forms of hegemony that are operative within his or her specific disciplinary field. What I deem here to be the anti-disciplinary work of the intellectual in the context of a global anti-disciplinary protest is an engagement with the power of truth, with the intention of diverting it from the disciplining and disciplinary systems of power.
How this effort becomes relevant in the context of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement lies in part in our physical and cultural distance from the lived lives of the women and girls who are in protest in Iran.
“On Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, this is a long-practiced form of ‘clicktivism’ (a portmanteau of ‘clicking’ and ‘activism’) which is often fiery, sometimes creative, and always heartening in its eagerness to show support online. But how effective are these gestures as acts of solidarity?”
This distance became painfully clear for the movement’s early supporters outside the country. Conscientiously, many of my own friends and colleagues hesitated in the first few months of the movement, debating their role as such: How do we know what is going on when everything we can know comes to us through media networks? What can we say we know with any degree of legitimacy when it is already mediated? Can we speak to the media on behalf of the women who are fighting for their freedoms in Iran? Is their cause ours? Is theirs a feminist cause like ours? Are they starting a revolution and if so, to what end? Can we legitimately call it a revolution or project a coming revolution from the burning fires of this one? If so, on what do we base our input? On the images that go viral on social networks? On the stances we see the women and men take in posts and articles? On the slogans and voices we hear rising amidst the protesting crowds in their viral videos? A few months passed, others joined; and as they did, these questions took on a new valence: Has the movement been co-opted by other, unsavory forces? If so, by whom? What is their agenda? How can we know when this content, too, is mediated? On what grounds can we then measure the movement’s continued legitimacy as a feminist phenomenon?
Of the colleagues and friends that decided to join, support for the movement often came in the form of reposts and retweets of what was believed to be content posted from the ground in Iran. On Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, this is a long-practiced form of “clicktivism” (a portmanteau of “clicking” and “activism”) which is often fiery, sometimes creative, and always heartening in its eagerness to show support online. But how effective are these gestures as acts of solidarity?
In the case of “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the reposts on social networks momentarily raised consciousness about the women’s protests, the women’s names, their lives and their uniquely individual stories. As instances of citizen journalism, the retweets underscored the daily roster of crimes committed against the protestors, alternately breeding outrage, compassion, and awareness where news stories written by professional journalists felt limited.
This fiery focus on highlighting their stories blinded many of us to the fact that similar forces were at work for our own stories.
One suggestive example of this became apparent when Instagram blacked out content posted by Iranian users. An uproar ensued for several days about how we here were not receiving any news from the protestors: that their posts were being blocked, that Instagram itself was taking down the posts, etc. What was less clear in this uproar was the fact that the thing (the act of silencing) that users insisted was happening to the Iranian women and for us, was also essentially happening to us. To those of us, in other words, who were following the protests from outside Iran. The mere fact that Iranian posts were being taken down amid a crisis meant that Instagram as a global platform could, and more critically would, do the same to us—that is to our posts, here in the West, in the midst of a crisis.
“As a media scholar and an intellectual who is trained in Iranian and feminist studies, my sense of the work that I could do, that would mirror the anti-disciplinary activities of the women protesting in the public sphere in Iran, was to engage in a focused way around the civil liberties we have lost on social media platforms as governments and monied interests gain a foothold in these arenas.”
This is not a hypothetical concern. In fact, “Black Lives Matter” protestors and organizers pointed to this exact kind of activity in the summer of 2020 during the global COVID-19 lockdowns. As public interest waned with the news cycle, it became clear that #BlackLivesMatter posts on Instagram and Twitter were being deprioritized and pushed down—or not appearing on timelines at all—thus giving priority to other content in the heat of a social and political crisis in the United States.
Of course, one could argue that the Iranian government may have issued the internet blackout in the case of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement (and this isn’t inconceivable). But again, if an internet blackout is within the capacity of the Iranian government, is it not, to the same or even greater extent, within the capacity of governments in the West?
The legitimacy of this concern is exemplified in the fact that for U.S.-based researchers, access to material on Shia religious groups or resistance movements in Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine is currently blocked. To research movements such as these as they arise in certain areas of the world requires scholars and researchers to use an encrypted connection (VPN) to override enforced security blocks.
“As the protests gained momentum, and the blackout around the #WomanLifeFreedom hashtag became traceable, my posts highlighted the blackout itself. They pointed to the global character of our shared public sphere [...]. Our shared reality is equally conditioned by the operation of power, capital and profit, whether we are conscious of this or not. The blackout marked, in that sense, the devaluation of our own efforts to wrest truth from contemporary hegemonic compulsions.”
As a media scholar and an intellectual who is trained in Iranian and feminist studies, my sense of the work that I could do, that would mirror the anti-disciplinary activities of the women protesting in the public sphere in Iran, was to engage in a focused way around the civil liberties we have lost on social media platforms as governments and monied interests gain a foothold in these arenas. My students often insist that social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are our contemporary public sphere. These are platforms that we, like many young Iranian men and women, adopted to give voice to our identities, our desires, and our demands. What this suggests is that raising questions about the frameworks and rules that govern our speech and our content on contemporary social networks is the most specific and the most global act of anti-disciplinary engagement one could participate in on social networks in the midst of a feminist anti-disciplinary uprising.
To be in tandem with the ongoing protests in Iran, in other words, I had to ask myself if the most effective and specific intellectual engagement I could bring to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement was to: a) make a public post in which I symbolically chop off my hair in solidarity with women in Iran; or, b) act as a native informant for the press, regarding repression and compulsion in Iran, acting on my Iranian DNA; or, c) act as a spokesperson for the women who could very obviously speak for themselves about the nature of their demands from the ground. Admittedly, these are caricatures of larger visions and agendas that were activated as strategies of support. Many prominent figures (including those in my fields) subscribed to them, and admirably so. But the answer to these questions for me, personally, was a decisive “no.” As the protests gained momentum, and the blackout around the #WomanLifeFreedom hashtag became traceable, my posts highlighted the blackout itself. They pointed to the global character of our shared public sphere; how what was happening was happening in equal measure to our voices, though we would deduce contextually that these were effects of the operation of a repressive regime elsewhere. The deprioritization of the Iranian women’s acts of self-representation in image and content was not ideological, in the strictest sense. It was mirrored, rather, in our circumstances. Our shared reality is equally conditioned by the operation of power, capital and profit, whether we are conscious of this or not. The blackout marked, in that sense, the devaluation of our own efforts to wrest truth from contemporary hegemonic compulsions.
“Clicktivism on behalf of those we perceive to be ‘less advantaged’ is a relatively easy task, but we cannot forget that their fight for the liberation of truth from the current systems of power resonates with our own investments and interests in seeing a different kind of society come to be. Why else would a fiery anti-disciplinary rebellion in Iran speak so intimately to millions of women and men around the globe?”
From where I stood, what the women in the movement were up to was an anti-disciplinary uprising aimed to undo every disciplining compulsion. As the clarion call of the movement, the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” stood for the emancipation and the sovereignty of a global collective. And so, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, it seemed to me that to concern myself as an intellectual with the institutional and economic regimes of truth that govern the circulation of their speech, their power, their lives as well as mine on social platforms was the most specific, and therefore the most global anti-disciplinary act I could engage in in solidarity with the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. While joining in struggle with others elsewhere, we tend to forget that the disciplining and silencing of speech and of acts of rebellion and protest operate globally on mega networks, such as Instagram. Our public reality is a mediated reality. It is a global reality and as such, it is a mirrored reality. Clicktivism on behalf of those we perceive to be “less advantaged” is a relatively easy task, but we cannot forget that their fight for the liberation of truth from the current systems of power resonates with our own investments and interests in seeing a different kind of society come to be. Why else would a fiery anti-disciplinary rebellion in Iran speak so intimately to millions of women and men around the globe?
The sovereignty that the Iranian women and men of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement have achieved in the span of one year is enviable by any measure. And it is impossible to say whether or which symbolic acts of solidarity most effectively show our esprit de corps with the women in Iran, as feminists. But the notion of anti-disciplinarity rings true to me as I continue to watch women in Iran decouple and liberate truth from the compulsions of the social, economic, and cultural forms within which it currently operates. It is the activation of this anti-disciplinarity at the center of my life and work as an intellectual that I see as the most specific and yet most global reverberation of my solidarity with the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement.
REFERENCES
Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Truth and Power.” In Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 51–75. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH is a professor, cultural critic, and theorist who teaches media studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University. Her research on film, social media, and social movements in the Middle East has been published by Stanford University Press, Syracuse University Press, Duke University Press and in WIRED magazine, The Hill, Salon.com, The Observer, and the Wall Street Journal. She holds a PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota and a BA in International Relations from Mount Holyoke College.
