DEBATE

Nice!! You should visit this site more often! God bless them!

Sorry I didn't read any of the writings! Have better things to do. Are they yours? God bless them!

For Negar

I'm a feminist theoretician and do understand the Iranian women’s movement (have participated in the formation of the first clandestine women’s/feminist groups during the 90’s.) However, I find the notion of Orientalism – obsolete in the age of Information and Globalization – to be an effective leftist tool (have been a leftist in the past and know it well) to justify the backwardness of a segment of the Iranian population who has fallen prey to 31 years of propaganda by a fundamentalist Islamic State that has legally and ideologically reduced Iranian women to the status of minors and sexual objects. Muslim clergy in Iran and the rest of the Middle East ARE generally BACKWARD and the Westerns awareness of this backwardness does not equate Orientalism or Racism.

As for Zakaria’s quotation where she says, “And just as a woman in a burka is complicit in the lie that the female form is the source of discord, so is the woman who displays her body complicit in demeaning it to a mere sexual object"  It is a typical MORALISTIC view of the woman’s body distinctive of the leftists, which implicitely does not recognise a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body.

Why should displaying their bodies be “demeaning” to women or reduce them to “a mere sexual object?”  What is wrong with a woman’s body? What about men learning to like a woman’s body instead of considering it a source of vice?

When a woman’s body is exploited by someone other than herself, when she is forced into undressing or dressing herself against her will, then you can begin speaking of her being “a mere sexual object.” Furthermore, heterosexual men’s cultural and/or psychological perception of women as “mere sexual objects” does not always correspond to the actions of women displaying or concealing their bodies.

In other words:

1)  From a feminist point of view, most of the Middle-Eastern Muslim Clergy ARE BACKWARD. This is Not a Western Orientalist construct nor a RACIST position. The majority of Iranian feminists inside the country agree with this position, while only a few misguided women who think Islam and feminism are compatible might disagree with it.

2)  Women displaying their bodies, whether for sunbathing or attracting attention DO NOT turn into sexual objects. Such a view is MORALISTIC and has its roots in patriarchal religions (even when one is an atheist) . Women who are FORCED into displaying their bodies or concealing them, DO turn into sexual objects. And even here, it is those who exploit these women who are demeaned, not the women themselves who are just victims of exploitation. Example: Kidnapping and trafficking of women and girls around the globe for the purpose of prostitution.

3)  The Globe’s economy is capitalistic. Consumerism exists in most societies on earth. There is no escaping this fact and socialism has failed to remedy this aspect of global capitalism. Every person, every action and every movement could fall prey to consumerism. This fact should not discourage women from fighting against patriarchal ideas the way they consider fit and appropriate.

Azadeh

Choices......and Coercion

Kjj1 - I found it very interesting that you did not address my assertion that it is odious to compare CHOSEN breast augmentation and nose jobs etc. to FORCED hijab or female genital mutilation. Please address this issue because it is an important one. Culturally relativist staements such as the one you are making are offensive to those of us who have knowledge of Iran's indigenous century old struggle for womens rights.

A systemic sexualisation of nine-year old girls in Iran is not on par with a girl watching a britney spears video and feeling peer pressured into wearing a bikini or having an eating disorder; i was a girl who grew up in this society and i never had a eating disorder but EVERY little girl in Iran has to cover herself without discrimination!

an escape from body shaming?

"I am most proud of growing up and living in a society that did not try and shame my body, and that did not fascistically attempt to shape my mind." 

My favorite part of the article above is the profession that prepubescent girls are not sexualized here because they're not being forced to cover, can bare their breasts, and ride bicycles. Its all that freedom that's leading to the rise of eating disorders in younger and younger women, giving rise to items like baby booties w/stiletto heels on them, and leading more and younger women to go under the knife for boob jobs and nose jobs. This reality, which Negar speaks to in the quote that ends her comment above, is the flip side of the fundamentalist and repressive, if not overtly fascistic, movements at work in the US.  Moreover, it is fundamentalist & conservative religious leaders in the US who have been the driving forces behind our decades-long march to right--the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, The C-Street Family in DC, not to mention the many clearly racist and neo-Nazi "christian" groups & militia that operate in the shadows of these allegedly mainstream groups. One thing that binds all these groups together is their desire to restrict women's freedoms and access to self-definition, sexual & reproductive freedom, restricted choices about family, education, and professional options. I am not glossing over the enormous distinctions between the situation in Iran and in Canada or the US--particularly for women. But the points of similarity, connections, and resonance are equally important and, I think, too easily dismissed here.

Brainquake-- a response.

Hi Everyone, I just wanted to thank Samira for her thought-provoking piece and say that I'm here and reading your reader comments.  Aside from that, I've had a chance to think through how the Boobquake and Brainquake campaigns went down in social media and in traditional media and wanted to take this opportunity share some of my thoughts with all of you.

I think it is clear that the Brainquake campaign on Fracebook and #Brainquake on Twitter was a response to the Boobquake campaign which was started by Jen Mc Creight. In other words, in my thinking anyway, there have been plenty of pronouncements of "the Sedighi variety" on women and women's bodies to which we could have responded with any number of campaigns, but we haven't and we didn't.

Brainquake was a direct response to Boobquake and an effort to celebrate the lives and achievements of women in Iran and elsewhere.  In my thinking, again, and I cannot speak on behalf of Golbarg, there is a lethal cultural context which harbors a blatant orientalism (a notion of backwardness vs. progress) in which Boobquake was born. Combine this with  misunderstandings of the Iranian women's movement and Iranian feminism & its historical, social, political and cultural contexts and mix in boobs and what you have is --wow-- explosive.

Now take this batter to social media venues such as Twitter, Youtube and Facebook where anyone can say anything, anything goes, and what you have is a total dissolution of a campaign with potential.

This was the subject of a very lively discussion on Twitter between myself and a group of social movement/social media strategists last night. We all benefited from seeing how both Boobquake and Brainquake played out and devolved to the lowest common denominator on April 26, 2010: Boobs and frivolity on one end and violent explosive anger on the other.

I want to point out the little known fact that Jen McCreight and I have been in close contact throughout both campaigns and that I have been in  support of the #boobquake hashtag on Twitter and in support of Jen herself personally. I told her, though, flat out, that I was dong Brainquake. This, because it was very clear, early on, that what she had conceived and what happened were going to turn out to be two different things.

Hers was a scientific experiment and a 3rd wave feminist response to a cleric's suppositions. She's an atheist, a soon-to-be-PhD-student, and a skeptic and she wanted to test out Sedighi's claims regarding the correlation of quakes and women's immodesty. Her curiosity is precious and I cannot look askance at that as a university professor myself. In addition, anyone who was on social media in the last week, knows that while the #boobquake hashtag brought attention to the situation in Iran and the post election crisis (and I saw this as an excellent development from where I stood) it also brought with it the hordes of heterosexual men egging women on for a cleavage show on Monday. Add to that, the commodification of breasts, cleavage & women's skn in the global context of the media, and the campaign, sure enough, became a piece ripe for porn magazines. Playboy of course picked it up.

All this put a great deal of stress on the direction of the Boobquake movement and lay the burden on those who understood what Jen was up to to explain it, defend it, and sometimes fight against the very things it was promoting, for example the exposure of women's bodies, in the context of commodification and commercialization. A healthy scientifically minded skepticism aimed and religious fervor and superstition in the context of a racist and orientalist culture that either willfully misunderstands and misrepresents or unknowlingly conceives of everything Middle Eastern as backward.

Also, while Jen was taking orders for Boobquake t-shirts that would make money for charities, capitalism and commodity culture dictated that a tongue-in-cheek social movement become a money making scheme for a sex - hyped-downturned economy, to the extent that just today, the University Store at Purdue where Jen studies, started selling "Boobquake t-shirts" without Jen's permission.

All this to say that while I understood Jen's mission and stood by her as a woman, a student, a skeptic and a scientist, I also could see that the combination of Orientalism (notions of backwardness vs progress) + misunderstandings of the Iranian women's movement / feminism & its cultural social and political contexts + boobs was doomed to a total failure.

Why not have a Brainquake then and quake some brains to freedom? And why not celebrate the lives and achievements of women? Why not celebrate individual lives instead of meat? These were my thoughts as I watched a science experiment devolve into frivolity, commercialism, and the commodification of women's bodies in social media and traditional media

My efforts and Golbarg's, as I see it, was to enable the stories of women to be heard. And if you look at the Brianquake Twitter feed and the Brainquake Tumblr site or even the photos put up on the Facebook Brainquake page you'll see this celebration in action in the midst of a battle ground that is determined to turn Golbarg, Jen and myself into rabid cats. We didn't succumb to this. Neither did we misunderstand or misrepresent the other's intentions knowingly. A critique of the direction of the campaigns themselves were taking,  one as a response to the other, one major and one minor was inevitable.

I've said enough. I hope this helps and inspires others to do better and achieve greater things on behalf of all of us. We all stand on the shoulder of giants and I am humbled by all the things I have seen and heard from each of the participants in the Brainquake campaign, Samira included. I leave you with this quote from Dawn.com by Rafia Zakaria

"In socio-cultural paradigms where women’s bodies symbolise familial and national honour, as in Iran or Pakistan, their covering is seen as corresponding directly to the piety and righteousness of society. Consequently, there is a brutal and obstinate disregard for women’s autonomy and their status as human beings equal to men.

Conversely, in western societies, a similarly reductionist calculus construes the exhibition of the female body as a sign of liberation, with an equally stubborn blindness to how such sexualisation debases women. Both versions are replete with untruths perpetuated by men. And just as a woman in a burka is complicit in the lie that the female form is the source of discord, so is the woman who displays her body complicit in demeaning it to a mere sexual object"

Negar Mottahedeh

Associate Professor

Program in Literature and Program in Women's Studies

Duke University

Thank You ...

Ms. Mohyeddin,

Excellent article, very well written and brimming with logical, thoughtful, and meaningful content.

Regarding Ms. Bashi and Ms. Motahedeh, I don't know either one, nor have I been to their "Brainquake" site.  However, based on your excerpts from that site, I suspect strongly that they like to dress like Maryam Rajavi, think like Maryam Rajavi, and generally emulate Maryam Rajavi !  Just a thought ! 

Thanks again.

Payandeh Iran, our Ahuraie Fatherland

Brainless Brainquake

Thank you, dear Samira, for this logical and enlightening article.

The function of the “In The USA Too” phrase is to gloss over the horrible realities of the women’s conditions in Iran by comparing the Iranian State violence towards women to the stupidity of an American religious leader whose functions are completely separated from those of the USA political administration. Brainquake demonstrates the brainless approach of its initiators to the grave issues particular to the Iranian women, indeed.

Azadeh

Fault-Lines and Hem-Lines

Very nice ...

Excellent

Excellent

Kudos

What an engagingly enlightening write-up, it oozes clever thoughts ably explained, kudos.