Abstract
In the year following the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy, one image in particular proliferated in national and international press as indicative of the social revolution that had unfolded in Iran: that of the veiled woman with a gun. Much of the scholarly work on the aesthetics of Iran’s revolutionary culture has focused on the way embedded Shi’i cultural tropes expressed themselves visually in public space – primarily through the ta’ziyeh passion plays (which staged the martyrdom of Hussein) and the Ashura processions during the month of Muharram – and argues that it is through a lineage of Shi’i symbolism that we can locate imageries of women, chiefly through the figures of Fatima and Zeinab. Yet, the visual representations of women in the years leading up to 1979 pose a stark contrast to this explanation – militant women were compared not to Fatima or Zeinab but rather to figures like Leila Khaled of the Palestinian liberation struggle and Djamila Bouhired of the Algerian independence movement. Women were seldom shown as “a model of a daughter before her father, a wife before her husband, a mother before her children” – characteristics which chief revolutionary ideologue Ali Shariati had claimed Fatima embodied – but rather as fist-raising, gun-toting fighters. This thesis examines how we can account for this gap in the historiography of women’s revolutionary imagery, by tracing an additional lineage of aesthetics to transnational and Third Worldist visual cultures. Instead of viewing the Iranian Revolution as an “exception to the rule”, the work of this thesis asks how we can locate the Iranian Revolution within the global traditions of this era; and asks how Iranian revolutionary consciousness was itself influenced and inspired by the contemporaneous struggles, from Algeria to Nicaragua to Vietnam. Through mapping a number of prevalent symbols and gestures that formed a sort of vocabulary of resistance during the era – specifically, that of “the fist”, “the v-for-victory” sign, “the gun”, and “the militant woman,” this thesis looks at how Iranian revolutionary culture – and the place of women within it – came to adopt these era-specific codes of militancy. The work to map a transnational genealogy of political symbols can open up space to analyze the many aesthetics of the Iranian Revolution beyond the “Shi’i lineage” that has been assumed for it; and can provide new insights into the ways such transnational aesthetic traditions were in fact sustained, continued, and centered in the gendered iconographies of the Islamic Republic.