In many countries around the world (including the Global North), women suffer from numerous and interlocking forms of oppression. While a great deal of attention is rightfully paid to their experience and status as victims, more space also needs to be devoted to their agency and ability to act as resisters to the oppression(s) they experience and endure. A recent article by The Guardian's award-winning journalist Saeed Kamali Dehghan illustrates how we can view female resistance in a more nuanced way.
Dehghan writes about the persecution of Iranian painter and women's rights activist Atena Farghadani. Ms. Farghadani has been critical of the government's intended reversal of Iran's family planning policies in order to boost the country's population. The government intends to do so by tightening divorce laws, outlawing voluntary sterilization and restricting access to contraception. Much of these policies would predictably have detrimental impacts on women's rights in Iran and their autonomy. Farghadani has angered the government through her meetings with families of political prisoners, drawing a cartoon depicting parliamentarians with animal faces, and by launching an exhibition commemorating those attacked by state actors during the post-election protests in 2009.
So what are Farghadani's alleged crimes? Dehghan reports that she has been charged with having committed "crimes" including “insulting members of parliament through paintings” and “insulting the Iranian supreme leader”. She has also been charged, in connection with her exhibition and meetings, with “gathering and colluding with anti-revolutionary individuals and deviant sects.”
At the outset, it would appear that such crimes infringe upon Farghadani's rights to freedom of expression and freedom of association protected under international law (see for example articles 19 and 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which Iran ratified in 1975). One of the important things that the freedom of expression protects is the ability to express political opinions and opposition to state policies. In this case, there is no question that her conduct with respect to the cartoon, the exhibition and the meeting were non-violent.
During her time in jail pending trial of these charges, Farghadani has been subjected to violence and abuse by guards. After a two-week period of incarceration where she was kept in isolation without access to her legal counsel or family, she posted a you tube video of her experiences. In it she stated the following (as quoted in Dehghan's article):
One of the guards opened the cell door violently … and shouted ‘take off your clothes’. I told them that what they were doing was illegal. One of the guards who swore a lot held my hands up, because I was resisting the body search … My right hand hit the wall and my wrist became swollen and bruised … I told them that I was on ‘dry’ hunger strike and that I would file a complaint. One of them told me ‘shut your mouth or I will hit you so hard that your mouth will be full of blood’.
In addition to her resistance noted above, Farghadani had collected discarded paper cups and flowers to use for her artistic endeavors further angering her captors.
It is easy to see from this account of Farghadani's experiences (and in part through her own words), that she has been and continues to be a victim of political persecution. The target of her resistance and activism is the state and its actors and in particular their policies and conduct. Her actions demonstrate that while she is a victim of the government's oppression, she is also simultaneously an agent and an outspoken one. Farghadani refuses to remain silent with respect to her political opinions or passively acquiesce to unlawful and degrading searches.
The picture that emerges from Deghan's article is one that challenges many people's imagination of a "third world" woman. To paraphrase Professor Ratna Kapur, women in the third world have come to represent the real or authentic victim subject in people's imaginations. She observes that often the "image we are left with is that of a truncated third world woman, who is sexually constrained, tradition bound, incarcerated in the home, illiterate, poor and victimized.” While Farghadani's actions clearly defy such imagery, to solely accentuate her agency may also undermine the persecution she has experienced. Consequently, Kapur asserts that “we need a more sophisticated subject that is both a victim and has agency.” She adds that “we need to think about how to retain the disruptive possibilities of the subject, without marginalizing or reducing the harms and discrimination to which she has been subject.”
Ms. Farghadani's resistance illustrates the ability to see women, and women from the Global South in particular as more than mere victims, but as complex subjects who are both victims and agentive resisters.
Sources
International Law
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 16 December 1966, 999 UNTS 171 (entered into force 23 March 1976).
Saeed Kamali Dehghan, "Iranian painter and women's rights activist on trial for insulting MPs" The Guardian (20 May 2015).
Ratna Kapur, "Babe Politics and the Victim Subject: Negotiating Agency in Women’s Human Rights" in David Barnhizer, ed, Effective Strategies for Protecting Human Rights: Economic Sanctions, Use of National Courts and International Fora and Coercive Power (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) at 85-92.
No comments:
Post a Comment