foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Debating the Outcome of the Revolution, Especially on Women's Rights 113
national Women's Day demonstration. They reacted with bitter derision to
this news. Despite severe verbal pressure from hostile men on the campus,
some five thousand women marched out of the university onto the streets,
where Islamist counterdemonstrators physically harassed them. Two days
later, on Saturday, March 10, many thousands marched fo r women's rights,
after which fifteen thousand women held a sit-in at the Ministry of Justice.
The statement the women presented to the government called for "freedom"
for all, "regardless of gender, color, race, language, and opinion.· Their eight
demands included free choice concerning dress, freedom of expression, and
the removal of "all inequalities between men and women in national law"
( "Statement by Iranian Women Protestors," app., 245, 246). By this time, the
government had announced that the new dress code was a recommendation,
not a requirement, and that the Family Protection Law would be restore d, but
both of these concessions turned out to be only temporary. The most popular
slogan of the day was: "In the Dawn of Freedom, We Have No Freedom"
(Millett 1982, 139).
Claudine Moullard of the French women's movement, also present by
invitation of the Iranian feminists, spoke at a press conference on March 11,
stating that she was "from the women's liberation group in France called Poli­
tique and Psychoanalysis, " and the journal Des femmes en mouvement. She
added, "The struggle of women is international : since the first day. When
Iranian women break their chains, women of the whole world can advance"
(Millett 1982, 160-62) .
By March 12, the women's demonstrations had spread to numerous cities
around the country. After a long public debate at Tehran University, with the
Fedayeen bowing out from helping to protect the marchers, and other leftist
groups urging the women to call off the march, thousands stepped out
into the streets again, still shielded to an extent by numerous male leftists,
who continued to form a chain of protection against the Islamist vigilantes.
March 12 was the last big feminist demonstration. Soon after, the women's
movement called off its public demonstrations, in large pan because of pressures
from leftist groups such as the Fedayeen, the most influential group on
the campus of Tehran University. The Fedayeen argued that the paramount
issue now was the need to avoid a new civil war within the revolutionary
camp, in the face of possible foreign intervention or royalist plots (Gueyras
1979b).
The French media covered the women's demonstrations in great detail,
and Le Monde reponed that an "Islamic tribunal " had carried out the execution
of two "corrupt" men found guilty of "homosexual perversions"