Two years after the historic Woman Life Freedom uprising, I still seek language to capture its singularity. While the better news reports got many things right, they centered the uniqueness of WLF, as this one does, on the very things that in fact connect WLF to feminist mobilizations that preceded it. Courage, one observer here states. Indeed, women in this rebellion were deeply, inspiringly courageous. But so too were the women in the 2009 Green movement, many of whom walked up to armed basijis, appealing to their humanity and their connections to fellow Iranians, imploring them to stop beating the protestors.

This is the first time that women have led protests, the narrator states, the first time they are supported by men. Yes and no. In the short-lived One-Million-Signatures Campaign that began as the state shifted rightward and the reform movement of the mid-1990s to mid-2000s dwindled, women’s rights activists staged sit-ins and performed street theater, held house meetings, and went door to door to end discriminatory family laws against women around marriage, custody, divorce, and citizenship. Many young men supported and joined them.

WLF distinguished itself from feminist campaigns and movements past by exceeding the struggle for the rights of one group (women), negotiated within the discourses set by the patriarchal entity that sets the parameters of belonging and exclusion (the state). WLF leapt beyond rights and reforms to fundamentally reconfigure the horizon of political possibilities.   

The slogan of the Kurdish women’s liberation movement—Jin, Jiyan, Azadi—spread like wildfire, igniting a movement in which the hegemonic universal—the elite male, with an arsenal of power to conceal its very particularity—was no longer. A new particular universal—that body and sphere of life at the intersection of race, ethnicity, language, class, and gender—emerged in plain sight, hidden from no one and speaking for all. Woman represented all because woman was the once living, then brutalized, and finally dead body upon which all large and small violences—patriarchal, state, racial-ethnic, religious, everyday—converged and were recognized, understood, and intensely felt by the majority. Building a movement and a new world in the name of this Woman, as the new particular universal, that is the singularity of the movement that gave the world a glimpse into a miraculous, as one observer here notes, unfolding of a new politics of Life and Freedom. Without her life as central, her freedom as that realized not deferred, very few lives and freedoms are possible. Creating the conditions to make her life flourish ensures the freedom of all.