Conference Agenda

An all-female Carmen for an all-female audience; Verdi’s Lady Macbeth as a puppet; the Queen of The Night sung by five singers; these are some of the work-arounds Iranians have devised as they navigate gender politics and taboos on women’s public performance. Such creative solutions have been exploiting loopholes left by the ambiguous position of Islam towards music and shifting government guidelines regarding women and Western culture.

From its introduction to Iran in the late 19^th century, opera has been caught between Royal fascination with the West and religious conservatism. Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi’s Westernisation campaigns, particularly from the 1960s, culminated in the inauguration of the country’s first modern opera house in 1967, ushering in a golden age of Western opera. Following the Revolution, Khomeini’s 1979 ruling on music as an opium for youth should have resulted in the disappearance of operas; instead it gave rise to a new ‘opera’ (an umbrella term that resists Western translation), which, compared to pre-Revolutionary practice, is arguably more indigenous than Western, more democratic than elitist, and more accessible than exclusive. From pushing the boundaries of gender politics to regime-sanctioned operatic setting of the Shiite martyrdom, opera in Iran continues to provide an arena where ideological tensions are displayed and probed. It also offers a prism through which to examine the evolution of gender politics in the face of women’s continuous resistance.

Despite the growing interest in the global history of music, Iran’s Western art music in general and opera in particular are largely neglected. This paper addresses this lacuna, drawing on historical sources, archives, interviews and oral history. Borrowing from literary (Doyle, 2020) and historicising studies (Abrahamian, 1993), I place the relatively new phenomenon of Iranian ‘opera’ within its politico-historical context: from 1960s ‘inter-imperiality’ through to the contested populism of post-‘Khomeinism’ in present-day Iran. Considering such influences as Middle eastern modernity and Islamic/Iranian traditions, this paper argues that rather than ruptures and disjunctions, the story of opera in Iran is one of concealed continuity and paradox, and a testament to the resilience and resourcefulness of Iranian women.

Abstract:

In 2022, the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran engaged in an extraordinary series of protests, directly challenging the government, advocating for its ousting, and calling for the return of rights for women. Protest, in this context, is multifaceted and particular, its distinctiveness rooted in the history of anti-government demonstrations in post-revolution Iran: Further, the strength of the Women, Life, Freedom protests of 2022 lay in the transformative power of touch and sound.

This paper explores the ways sound and touch are reshaping the narrative of women's roles in Iranian society. Beginning with a short historical review of post-revolution movements in Iran, the paper moves from an analysis of the sensory aspects of this protest, emphasizing sight, sound, and touch, to an examination of the rationale behind Islamic regulations governing women's bodies and voices: here, music emerges as a form of resistance. Yet resistance via music is impossible without mediation. I analyze the role of social media in amplifying women’s voices of protest, transmitting the embodiment of female demonstrators around the world. Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye,” for example, became the song of the movement for international listeners, as Sara Fazeli has shown.

I argue, however, that the amplification of this song obscures, or mutes, the impact of many others. Drawing on my own experience as a witness who engaged in the feminist movement in Iran in 2022, I will examine protest songs of this era that are almost entirely unknown, alongside videos, and other visual imagery; criticizing the claims of Azadeh Moaveni’s Time article “2022 Heroes of the Year, the Women of Iran,” and revealing hidden angles of this movement, I will show how this multifaceted artistic production, transmitted via social media, offered ways for Iranian women both to reclaim their voices and bodies, and to send their protest around the world.

Since the beginning of the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman at the hands of Iran's police, ongoing protests have been happening in Iran and the diaspora, significantly in the United States. The soundscapes of Iranian protests in the United States are directly influenced by American social movements, specifically Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name (Mosley 2020; Siamdoust 2023). My fieldwork in the US reveals a striking adaptation of these movements' slogans into the lexicon of Iranian communities, as chants of "Say his/her name" reverberate through the gatherings. My discussion considers these global dialogues and interactions through sounds and similar patterns of resistance among oppressed groups that transcend national boundaries during social movements (Melucci 1996; Hollander and Einwohner 2004; Manuel 2019). This research sheds light on how the soundscape of feminist and political movements intersect among Iranians in the US. How does intersectionality unite people globally during social movements? To what extent do Iranian diasporic communities in the United States align their protest's soundscape with their host societies' expectations? Why do Iranians draw from Western slogans and songs to convey their national struggles and grief?