Affective Resistance Against Sovereign Erasure: Historicizing the (Maternal and) Feminist Politics of Shared Grief in Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising

Abstract: This article argues that the Islamic Republic of Iran's codified and institutionalized gender apartheid created a unique form of militarized women's domestic role from which grief and mourning became protected, even expected, forms of expression for maternal subjects. Bringing Iran's unique historical and political context to bear on an analysis of bereaved mothers' affective resistance during the "Woman, Life, Freedom" (WLF) uprising, it demonstrates how mothers' expressions of "shared grief" constitute a life-affirming form of affective resistance that not only challenges sovereign erasure but also subverts traditional motherhood to perform a feminist politics of lamentation that enacts equality—revealing a maternal politics that threatens the performative undoing of Iran's essentialist gender apartheid and exposes the fragility of its theocratic rule.