Hi, welcome to Navarra FM. I'm Elena Penny.

In September 2022, a young Kurdish-Iranian woman named Gina Am Amini died at the hands of the so-called Morality Police in Tehran.

Her death sparked outrage across the country and across the world, with mass protests springing up under the banner of the Kurdish Women's Movement slogan,

Jin Jian Azadi, Women, Life, Freedom.

The movements faced harsh crackdown at the hands of the state, and foreign powers have used

the idea of women's struggle in Iran to justify hawkish intervention in the region.

Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been name-checking the slogan.

Feminism in Iran has often been recruited into a media war that casts Muslim majority or global South countries as morally backwards,

where women's only hope lies in being saved by foreign imperialist powers.

So, in the long wake of the Women Life Freedom Movement, it's worth asking what factors are actually shaping the state of feminist struggle in modern Iran?

We can look to the neoliberal restructuring of the state after the 1979 revolution, the after effects of the First Gulf War, the internal imperial violence in the Kurdistan and Balutistan

regions, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. To talk more about this, I sat down with Baha

Norizadeh, a writer, artist, researcher and filmmaker, and an associate lecturer at RCA School

of Architecture and tutor in Geodesign at the Design Academy, Eindhoven.

Her work looks at intellectual histories of economics, and she co-edited EFlux's issue on the material

history and afterlife of the 2022 Gina Uprising.

We talked about policing, Balochistan and Soviet economies, about union organizing and the global influence of

father of neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek.

Bahar, welcome to the show. Thank you. First of all, I kind of want to do some table setting.

For those who might not be super familiar, can you tell us a bit about the origins

of the women life freedom movement? Because there are different ways in which we can

historicise this, the slogan and the kind of women's movement more generally, of course,

...