A Short Anthology of Resistance Against The “Patriarchal Prehistory of Humanity”

we learnt a phrase of overcoming

from Kurdistan, Iran, Balochistan, Azerbaijan, as they began

to revolt; they kept on saying

Woman, Life, Freedom,

Chile, 2019

Often, it’s that one step too far that triggers an uprising. In Chile, a hike in metro prices launched one of the country's largest protest movements- the Estallido Social (Social Outburst)- as protestors around the country chanted Chile despertó (Chile woke up). In neoliberalism’s cradle, austerity, price hikes, corruption, police abuse, triggered widespread protest (Sasse, 2021). Women were violently policed during these protests. In response, 2,000 women, led by theatre group LASTESIS (“Theory”), performed “A Rapist in Your Path,” or Un Violador En Tu Camino, outside the courts of justice on November 25th, declaring:

The patriarchy is a judge
that judges women for being born
and women’s punishment
is the violence you don’t see.

The patriarchy is a judge
that judges women for being born
and their punishment
is the violence that you have seen

(Dávila, LeBrón, 2019)

Patriarchal violence hides in plain sight; you see it all the time, every woman you know has experienced it, and yet we go on like nothing is happening, like nothing is wrong. They wore blindfolds to symbolise the particular tactic of Chilean police of blinding protestors, with “460 cases of eye injuries, including total vision loss of protestors and bystanders” and at times would squat, to symbolise what police would often make women do when they were under arrest (Llanos, 2023). In an interview, LASTESIS explained that “during the protests there exists the possibility that the police will torture you, that they strip you naked or they rape you,” and the chant makes that a clear target- “It’s the cops, The judges, The state, The president. The oppressive state is a rapist. The oppressive state is a rapist. The rapist is you.”

In their analysis, the state and political economy is the primary conduit through which modern patriarchy flows through. Indeed, Rita Segato, whose writing informed LASTESIS in the creation of their chant, particularly her “work on rape as a moralising and political act of domination” (Serafini, 2020) wrote about how it is through the modern state that patriarchy achieves its legitimacy, and vice versa. The modern state takes us from a “low-intensity” to “high-intensity” patriarchy (Segato, 2018). Pre-entrenched patriarchal values are codified into legislation, processed through several layers of bureaucracy, and translated into a police and military backed/perpetuated culture of domination.

Un Violador En Tu Camino spreads across the world, and its words ring true in every continent; “and the fault wasn’t mine, nor where I was, nor how I was dressed” (Dávila, LeBrón, 2019).

it burst out of death like

a phoenix, out of a rich

history of opposition erupted

Woman, Life, and Freedom

United Kingdom, 2021

One and a half years later, in March, a woman named Sarah Everard is kidnapped, raped and brutally murdered by a policeman known as Wayne Cousins, who was colloquially known within the force as “the rapist” (Ng et al., 2021). His past with women including accusations of indecent exposure and other accusations, had had no effect on his career as a parliamentary policeman. When a vigil was held days later in London, it was excessively policed by the metropolitan police, with arrests, assaults, women being forced to the ground, and was widely condemned. One particularly striking picture from the protest was a woman being arrested wearing a t-shirt stating Jenny Holzer’s iconic aphorism: “abuse of power comes as no surprise” (Cummings, 2021).

In the wake of statistics coming out of the UK, that 97% of women aged 18 to 24 had been sexually harassed within their lifetime (The APPG for UN Women, 2019) and that 1.3% of rape cases end in prosecution (Home Affairs Committee, 2021-22), accusations of institutional sexism came to the fore. These accusations were levelled by organisations like “Police Spies Out Of Our Lives” who were campaigning against the prevalence in society of cases like Kate Wilsons, a female activist who entered into a long term relationship and had children with a man who turned out to be an undercover police officer. Another woman, Helen Steel, who was in a cohabiting relationship with a fellow activist for two years and learnt 19 years later that he was a undercover officer, said that it was “acceptable for the police to abuse women… (in order to) undermine political movements and campaign groups” (Police Spies Out Of Our Lives, 2019).

Police raped with impunity, courts who refused to prosecute, and government was rife with sexual assault (56 MPs were facing sexual misconduct claims (Boothman, Wheeler, Yorke, 2022)). The cops, the judges, the parliament- the oppressive state was (is) a rapist, and abuse of power was not just unsurprising, but ubiquitous.

strip bare or cloister,

declare your own choice,

your only choice, to live and run,

to choose Woman, Life, Freedom,

Iran, 2022

The murder of Jina, or Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman, broke through the shallow, fickle comfort of the patriarchal and femicidal system in Iran. Sending similar shockwaves throughout the world, it reignited the global fight for women’s lives, for women’s freedom, ignited three years before by un violador en tu camino, and- at least in the UK- a year previously with the murder of Sarah Everard. Jina was murdered by the Gasht-e Ershad, or morality police, whilst in custody for improper hijab. Eyewitnesses state she was taken into a van and beaten, dying of her injuries three days later. The coroner claimed she died of a heart attack and cited previous conditions, but the family firmly believed she had died as a direct result of injuries to her body (Khatan, 2023).

what is it to be freed from

the shackles which stopped you walking

in the night, male sight gone,

Woman, Life and Freedom,

It was with this that Woman, Life, Freedom spread into the international consciousness. Walking though Manchester Piccadilly, once a week there was a protest against the Islamic Republic. We were flooded with social media posts decrying the regime, and that slogan, originally the Kurdish Jin Jiyan Azadî, which originated in the Kurdish women’s movement particularly in Rojava, blossomed through the Islamic Republic and beyond (Internationalist Commune of Rojava, 2018). Their movement is largely inspired by Kurdish political leader Abdullah Öcalan, who wrote:

In the name of honour, man seized the position and rights of woman in the most insidious, traitorous and despotic manner. The fact (is) that, throughout history, woman was left bereft of her identity and character – the eternal captive – at the hands of man. (Öcalan, 2013)

What will follow in this piece is an examination, through these three case studies and using the theory of Öcalan and Segato, of the patriarchal nation-state and how it relies upon what Segato calls “femgenocide” (Segato, 2018) for power and legitimacy, with a particular focus on Jina Amini. It’s impossible to understand the murder of Jina Amini without first understanding Kurdistan.

what could I have become

had I not been a son? taught

to hate the Liberation behind

Woman, Life, Freedom

Kurdistan

Nation building is, in a significant proportion, about defining and creating the ins and the outs; categorising, delimiting, in order to control the populace and legitimise the rule. Balochistan, Azerbaijan, Kurdistan and other nations are oppressed as their mere existence disavows the idea of “Iran” as a unified social, economic and political entity. Regional governments, internal economies, cultures, practices, languages transcend the Iranian state. Much effort has gone into creating a unified idea of Iran in the past two centuries; Sadeghi-Boroujerdi (2023) writes on how “the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic have promoted and perpetuated… the centralising nation-state vis-à-vis ethno-national peoples of a ‘periphery’ of its own making” consistently homogenising the territory for over a century. “Patriarchy finds in the state its ultimate, concrete realisation”, declares Segato (2018), and this social realisation includes the complete subjugation of otherness within the patriarch’s territory. These others are feminised in the way they are treated; restricted, abused, and made to provide for the patriarch in exchange for a faux visage of protection and a meagre allowance.

For instance, in recent years, Iran’s successful legal attacks on the exporting of mostly Kurdish oil through the Turkish border has left Iranian Kurdistan without a key revenue source. In turn, it has left it more reliant on Iranian state budgets for the region- which Iran will only give in exchange for its oil. It has manipulated the situation so that Kurdistan cannot make its own money, and relies on the state for an allowance whilst surrendering its natural resources (Wilgenburg, 2023). This is something of a housewifisation of Kurdistan. Much like how after the 1979 revolution, one of the first legal acts of the government was to make it so that “women would have to ascertain permission from male kin to work, travel, study and change their place of residence” (Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, 2023), Kurdistan is robbed of its autonomy and potential to create revenue at the behest of the Iranian state.

Materially, the regime expropriates its resources in order to fund its security state, and rhetorically, it creates Kurdistan as an internal other in order to justify the security state’s expansion. The Woman, Life, Freedom protests, largely originating from Kurdistan, and largely led by women (in a sample of 1,265 protests, at least 1,158 were led by women (via Wintour, 2022)), were described consistently by Tehran as being curated by Zionists and The West (Gritten, 2022), thus designating them as the internal manifestation of the external other. This designation justified the firing of several rockets into Kurdistan in the weeks following Jina Amini’s death (Iddon, 2024). The state (re)creates Kurds as a feminised internal other it can control and exploit.

behind a vicious creeds guns

there flicker eyes of martyrdom

burning scripts in daughters crypts scream

Woman, Life, Freedom

Patriarchal Iran

Öcalan (2013) writes that “undoubtedly, rape and domination are phenomena related to social exploitation; they reflect society‘s rape by hierarchy, patriarchy and power. If we look a little deeper, we will see that these acts also express a betrayal of life”. But Segato takes it a step further; rape and domination are not mere reflections of a society, but pillars upon which the society, and the state stands. “Gender”, Segato (2018) argues, “is the basic historical form or configuration of all power and, therefore, of all violence, since power is the result of an inevitably violent expropriation” that gender based violence forms the blueprint for all domination- women are the first colony. It is this initial historical “low-intensity” patriarchy which has upscaled into “high-intensity” patriarchies of modern nation-states. Patriarchy is the bedrock of the state. Without the free labour of women, subservience, the strict enforcement of gender roles and categories, the state struggles to survive. Particularly in times of immense insecurity- i.e. austerity, sanctinons, social upheaval, secession threats- here we have seen, in Chile, Britain and Iran, violence against women increases. This is the betrayal of life Öcalan speaks of. The betrayal of freedom and betrayal of life are so deeply intertwined with the betrayal of women. Nation-states rely on these betrayals to survive.

a bullet never seemed to stop

Woman, Life or Freedom

a shah, a cleric, priest, nun

a seraphim or simulacrum

their orders barked like crumbs

their vicious tongues sound like they

spit from punctured lungs, their words

are numb, compared to

Woman, Life and Freedom

Executions in Iran rose from 290 in 2021 to 553 in 2022 (Human Rights Watch, 2023). Despite this, images pouring out of Iran showed a state in temporary retreat. Power was temporarily somewhat inverted; “school children defied teachers and ran officials out of their schools, crowds of young men and women chased down the police, and people took control of their streets and local neighbourhoods” (Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, 2023). Iranian artist Nesa Azadikhah commented that “there were women and girls who were not wearing the hijab, and there were men who were protecting the women… I hear that women all over the city are dressing in bright colourful clothes while leaving their hair to flow freely” (Hazboun, 2023); some freedom, some forced change.

However, in September 2023, four days after the anniversary of Jina Amini’s murder, a bill was passed by the Iranian parliament equating failing to meet the government's standards for the hijab with nudity, and threatening a ten year prison sentence (Parent, 2023). State news outlets claimed that the bill stood to “support the family by promoting a culture of chastity and hijab” (Mizan, 2023). How many times have we in the west heard of “family values” being used to justify domination and oppression? In Latin America too, Segato (2018) notes that “throughout the Americas, an emphasis on the ideal of the family, defined as the subject of rights to be defended at all costs, has galvanised efforts to demonise and punish what is called ‘the ideology of gender.’” Deviant ideas of liberation are seen as aberrances from the family, and by this they so often mean from the father. As Öcalan (2013) puts it, “firstly, family is turned into a stem cell of state society by giving power to the family in the person of the male,” and these males, as Segato (2018) puts it, “function as hinges between two worlds, divided in their loyalties: loyal to their people, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the rule of masculinity, modelled on the masculinity of the conquerors.” In simpler terms, the state sees the family as not just their ally, but atoms of the state within society, particularly relying on the power of the father to implement and legitimise its power, and in turn bolstering the power of the father. The morality police, for instance, their role is clear, to enforce the power of men throughout society by forcing women to live by their laws, whilst simultaneously bolstering the power of the state. The two powers come from the same place; patriarchy.

what burns the man's mind?

his desire is confined into

a vile prison of venom, against

Women, Life and Freedom

When we see these abuses of power, these patterns of high-intensity patriarchy happen anywhere, they should be opposed everywhere. It is easy, in the western left, to get drunk on oversimplified geopolitics. That the Iranian state is supposedly anti-imperialist often leads the left to fetishise Khomeini and his successor (that same movement which conducted the “elimination of the lion’s share of liberal and leftist political competitors by June 1981” (Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, 2023)) . It isn’t that we should use Iran’s gender apartheid to justify Israeli calls to denounce the blockade of the Red Sea, or to back the genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza strip. Rather, we should not fall into the trap of defending Iran as it follows the exact same patriarchal, imperialist patterns we condemn in our home countries. What Woman, Life, Freedom hit upon in the UK was the women’s movement which was bursting out in light of our own crises. We would do well not to forget this common enemy of the patriarchal state, to not make apologies for

The cops, or

The judges, or

The state, or

The president, for

The oppressive state is a rapist.

When we apologise for it elsewhere, it becomes much easier to apologise for it here.

no more bombs over Kobane,

Erdogans or Soleimani’s

holding bibles, korans and throats

holy as a golden goat,

defilers of their faith, betrayers

of their own divine theorem, of

Magdalene and Maryam, prophets of

Woman, Life and Freedom

The poem laced throughout this piece, Woman, Life, Freedom, was written for a fundraiser for the Woman, Life, Freedom movement at The Rag Gallery in Manchester. It was written after witnessing a protest in Piccadilly Gardens, where I heard the phrase for the first time. It targets the enemies of women, and decries the defiling of life by men. For the cruel tragedy of patriarchy is that, as Segato (2018) claims, “the masculine mandate, which is a form of rule by rape, has men as its first victims, since gendered violence is also intra-gender violence, among men.” Men are deputised into the patriarchy to the point where they are more committed to patriarchy than their own freedom; Öcalan (2013) declares that men “fear that abandoning the role of the dominant male figure (will) leave him in the position of the monarch who has lost his state. He should be made aware that this most hollow form of domination leaves him bereft of freedom as well.”

It is not that without our power, we are nothing; it is that if we cling to our power, that is all we will have. Segato (2018) writes that we are still in the “stationary time of the patriarchal prehistory of humanity,” but one cannot eternally live in a prehistory.

the heads that are on the block

the morality police who beat

Kurdish women into rage, o!

the geopolitics of a cage,

in a genocidal age, we

look at what we've done

rise and overcome,

Woman, Life, and Freedom

Woman, Life, Freedom

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Joseph Conway is a poet and musician from Manchester. He performs around themes of love, politics, and the abstract. After achieving a degree in Politics and Anthropology from the University of Manchester, they have worked as a teacher, actor, director, bartender, composer, and poet. He is also political editor of The Lemming, an activistic magazine.