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

116 Foucault's Writings on the Iranian Revolution
showed, at one and the same time, that male revolutionaries would not permit
attacks on women revolutionaries, and women were striking out on their
own as a way of deepening the content of revolution" (1979, 2-3). Additionally,
Dunayevskaya lauded the openness to international links on the part of
the Iranian feminists. She placed the current upheaval in the context of the
Constitutional Revolution, citing Morgan Shuster's 1912 eyewitness account
of what she called the "historic role" of women at that juncture as well: "The
Persian women since 1907 had become almost at a bound the most progressive,
not to say radical, in the world. That this statement upsets the ideas of
centuries makes no difference. It is the fact . ... In their struggles for liberty
and its modem expressions, they broke through some of the most sacred customs
which for centuries past had bound their sex in the land of Iran" (cited
in Dunayevskaya 1979, 8-9). Finally, she poured scorn on those leftists, both
inside and outside Iran, who placed anti-imperialism in the forefront in such
a way as to excuse the internal oppression of an ascendant mullocracy that
was hemming in the rights of women, workers, and national minorities.
In France and elsewhere, however, not all leftist intellectuals supported
these feminist criticisms of the revolution. Marc Kravetz wrote in Liberation
that, according to his sources among Iranian women, "the situation ofIranian
women is more complex than the views expressed at meetings in Paris." He
also downplayed reports of executions of homosexuals, writing that they were
not "for homosexuality as such," but for "homosexual pimping and sexual
violence against minors," as if the claims of Khomeini's secret tribunals were
to be taken at face value (Kravetz 1979). Not surprisingly, Kravetz's article
soon received a sharp rebuke from a gay male activist, Lola Steel, who had
participated in the March 16 demonstration in Paris: "As a homosexual, I
participated in the demonstration in support of Iranian women because I
had heard talk of 'shooting' of homosexuals." Steel then mocked Kravetz's
assertions that these were merely executions of pedophiles. He pointed out
that homosexuality existed in all societies, including Islamic ones, albeit in
different forms (Steel 1979).
Criticism of international efforts to support the Iranian feminists came
from other quarters as well. In mid-March, Edward Said had attended a meeting
convened by Sartre and de Beauvoir on the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the
meeting, de Beauvoir seems to have expressed her strong opposition to the
re-veiling of Iranian women. In a rather condescending account published
two decades later, Said described her attitude toward the Iranian feminists:
Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban, lecturing anyone who would
listen about her forthcoming trip to Tehran with Kate Millett, where they