Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wp2c8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-15T18:09:35.709Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Silence, Silencing, and (In)Visibility: The Geopolitics of Tehran's Silent Protests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

A. Marie Ranjbar
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the use of silent protests to resist state denial and appropriation of activist narratives. Drawing from feminist literary studies, I conceptualize silence as a pluralistic, multifaceted, and multi‐sited force. Through an analysis of several modalities of silence employed during Iran's 2009 election protests, I explore tensions between acts of silencing and silence as an act of dissent. I argue that silent protest is both an effect of—and resistance against—geopolitical conditions that subject Iranian citizens to state silencing. In this article, I examine: (i) the geopolitical conditions that enabled the silencing of Iranian citizens; (ii) meanings and interpretations of silent protests within Iran and internationally; (iii) the relationship among embodiment, scale, and visibility of Iranian protesters. I conclude with thoughts on reading silences across borders, while questioning the efficacy of silent protests in places considered geostrategically insignificant to the international community.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 32 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Contested Terrains: Women of Color and Third World Women, Feminisms, and Geopolitics , Summer 2017 , pp. 609 - 626
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrahamian, Ervand. 2008. A history of modern Iran. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abu‐Lughod, Lila. 2013. Do Muslim women need saving? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ackerly, Brooke. 2008. Universal human rights in a world of difference. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bani‐Sadr, Abdolhassan. 2009. Iran at the crossroads. New York Times, July 31.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dabashi, Hamid, ed. 2006. Theology of discontent: The ideological foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2011. The Green Movement in Iran. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A voice and nothing more. Boston: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dotson, Kristie. 2011. Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing. Hypatia 26 (2): 236–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dowler, Lorraine, and Sharp, Joanne. 2001. A feminist geopolitics? Space and Polity 5 (3): 165–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernandes, Leela. 2013. Transnational feminism in the United States: Knowledge, ethics, and power. New York: New York University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fluri, Jennifer. 2009. Geopolitics of gender and violence “from below.” Political Geography 28 (4): 259–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghamari‐Tabrizi, Behrooz. 2008. Islam and dissent in postrevolutionary Iran: Abdolkarim Soroush, religious politics and democratic reform. London: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Gillick, Jeremy. 2009. Iran's velvet revolution. Moment Magazine, June 11.Google Scholar
Glenn, Cheryl. 2004. Unspoken: A rhetoric of silence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Hashemi, Nader, and Postel, Danny. 2010. The people reloaded: The Green Movement and the struggle for Iran's future. New York: Melville House.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 1989. Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Toronto: Between the Lines.Google Scholar
Hyndman, Jennifer. 2004. Mind the gap: Bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics. Political Geography 23 (3): 307–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, Cindi. 2001. On the grounds of globalization: A topography for feminist political engagement. Signs 26 (4): 1213–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keddie, Nikki. 2003. Modern Iran: Roots and results of revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Koopman, Sara. 2011. Alter‐geopolitics: Other securities are happening. Geoforum 42 (3): 274–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lorde, Audre. 1977. The transformation of silence into language and action. In Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. New York: Quality.Google Scholar
Malhotra, Sheena, and Rowe, Aimee Carrillo, eds. 2013. Silence, feminism, power: Reflections at the edges of sound. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mohanty, Chandra. 1988. Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist Review 30 (Autumn): 61–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Medina, José. 2013. The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mountz, Alison, and Hyndman, Jennifer. 2006. Feminist approaches to the global intimate. Women's Studies Quarterly 34 (1/2): 446–63.Google Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. 2004. The colonization of psychic space: A psychoanalytic social theory of oppression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Pain, Rachel, and Smith, Susan, eds. 2008. Fear: Critical geopolitics and everyday life. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.Google Scholar
Pain, R., and Staeheli, L. 2014. Introduction: Intimacy‐geopolitics and violence. Area 46 (4): 344–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pratt, Geraldine, and Rosner, Victoria, eds. 2012. The global and the intimate: Feminism in our time. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Puwar, Nirmal. 2004. Space invaders: Race, gender and bodies out of place. New York: Berg.Google Scholar
Sahimi, Muhammed. 2009. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri: 1922–2009. PBS Tehran Bureau, December 21. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2009/12/grand-ayatollah-hossein-ali-montazeri-1922-2009.html (accessed February 16, 2017).Google Scholar
Sharp, Joanne. 2011. Subaltern geopolitics: Introduction. Geoforum 42 (3): 271–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri. 1998. Can the subaltern speak? In Marxism and the interpretation of culture, ed. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri. 1999. A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Telegraph. 2009. Iran's Guardian Council rules out annulment of election. June 23.Google Scholar
USG Open Source Center. 2009. Supreme Leader Khamenei's Friday address on the presidential elections. Informed Comment, June 19. http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/supreme-leader-khameneis-friday-address.html (accessed February 16, 2017).Google Scholar
Wright, Melissa. 2009. Gender and geography: Knowledge and activism across the intimately global. Progress in Human Geography 33: 379–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar