Standing on top of society’s sexist load: Gate-keeping activism and feminist respectability politics in the case of the Iranian MeToo Movement

Abstract

Over the past three years, Iran has witnessed the birth and growth of an unprecedented movement, whereby countless women have come forward to narrate their experiences of sexual violence. Despite its innovative characteristics and significant accomplishments over a short period of time, academic scholarship has paid little attention to the Iranian MeToo movement to this date. This study aims towards bridging this gap by critically exploring the backlash the movement has generated. Taking a recently published open letter titled ‘inner critique’ as a case study, it deploys critical textual analysis, combined with a thematic analysis of data driven from in-depth interviews, to unpack the discourses used in the letter by placing them in their historical and material contexts and exposing their relation to pre-existing victim-blaming tropes and rape-scripts. The analysis further sheds light on the classed and gendered respectability politics through which Iranian feminists negotiate status distinctions and reproduce inner hierarchies of power. It concludes by arguing that, rather than offering necessary constructive critique, the open letter builds on and extends the state-backed discourse which depicts feminists as opportunistic agents of foreign political influence, in order to discredit their activism and suppress their radical potential for bringing about transformative change.