Description
Due to its explosive inception and wide-ranging ramifications, the Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement has come to be known as a revolution by its participants in Iran. Still, they have not accomplished the disruption of the state apparatus they were aiming for, namely the Islamic Republic, contradicting more conventional understandings of revolution, which prioritize state control as a central component of any revolutionary struggle. This paper explores how WLF orients towards another, more expansive notion of revolution, in which creating a revolutionary subjectivity through solidarity, collective political praxis, and affective bonding assumes central stage. While the state is not out of the question, such a concept embodies a non-linear temporality characteristic of anticolonial praxis by revitalizing past and present archives so that their character as revolutionary subjects is reclaimed. Through an engagement with the perspectives of WLF activists, I retrace affective archives of revolution that remain salient yet latent in Iran.
