Description
In September 2022, Jina Amini’s murder propelled one of the most significant social movements in 21st-century Iran. In this context, a name well-known by Iranians reappeared in protest songs and texts as a rallying figure of radical and revolutionary change: Forugh Farrokhzad. This paper intends to discuss why and how Iranian social movements reappropriated her instead of other radical authors of her time. Farrokhzad kept her status as a symbol of transgression and dissatisfaction with the repressive gender politics in Iranian society, while others lost much of their revolutionary appeal. By analyzing her texts alongside the discourses on gender evoked in the Iranian uprisings, I argue that her poetry maintained its subversive value by configuring a diasporic imagination in which women take centerstage. On the other hand, the foundation of the Islamic Republic’s theocratic regime became enmeshed with the crushed promises and hopes the revolution sustained and destroyed, a process that became associated with intellectuals such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati. Situating these processes in the current moment of sociopolitical upheaval, I argue that there was a fracturing of 1979’s utopianism in this amalgamation of crises, which provides a particular instance of the political relation between utopias and nostalgia, where my analysis shall also reside.
