Feminists for a Free Palestine: Voices from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iran, and Beyond

Introduction

 We feminists are bearing witness to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a continuation of more than seventy-five years of Israeli settler-colonial violence against Palestinians. More than two decades into the “War on Terror,” we want to cut against the erasure and make connections, as feminist scholar-activists, between the ongoing freedom movements in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iran, and beyond. From transnational feminist perspectives that interrogate US hegemonic political and theoretical frames, we want to reflect on the relationship between racism and imperialism, war and capitalism. We want to imagine a world in which Palestine is free.

One of the reasons we decided to write these essays is because we came together at the National Women’s Studies Association in October 2023 as we found ourselves isolated, dismissed, and silenced. The NWSA is one of the main academic platforms in the US that fosters critical feminist theory and activism. Many of us expected that the opening keynote made by the organization’s president Karsonya (Kaye) Wise Whitehead would, along with the usual land acknowledgement statement, also acknowledge the ongoing settler-colonial violence and genocide in Gaza. Instead, any mention of Palestine was avoided by the president and by the speakers, including the renowned theorist of intersectionality Kimberlé Crenshaw. Moreover, those of us who protested the absence of any mention of Gaza were aggressively asked to leave the room and were threatened with being kicked out by security. We stayed at the door in protest and waiting to hear the scheduled pre-recorded video of Angela Davis. It was finally screened when all the speakers had left the stage. In it, Davis gave a beautiful reading of June Jordan’s “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon.”

We decided to organize a webinar on the occasion of International Women’s Day (March 9^th, 2023) via Critical Studies of Iraq and co-sponsored by the Palestinian Feminist Collective and Rutgers University departments and programs in sociology and anthropology, political science, and women’s and gender studies—all at Rutgers-Newark_—and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers-New Brunswick.

In this roundtable based on the papers presented at the webinar, we all attempt to answer the following question: what does transnational feminist solidarity mean in a time of genocide?

See the first article in this series here. More articles are forthcoming. 

Zahra Ali

Zahra Ali is a sociologist and a feminist. She is associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Newark and the founder of Critical Studies of Iraq, an initiative dedicated to centering the work of scholars, feminists, and activists in Iraq. Ali is the author of Women and Gender in Iraq and the co-editor of Decolonial Pluriversalism. Her forthcoming book Intifada/Uprising explores the October 2019 uprising in Iraq.

Wafaa Hasan

Wafaa Hasan holds a PhD in English and cultural studies and is currently an assistant professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto-St. George campus. She is an international lecturer and author who has taught in the Centre for Women and Gender Studies at Brock University, the Historical and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Toronto-Scarborough Campus, and in the Gender Studies and Feminist Research Program at McMaster University. She has published on Palestinian childhood in Canadian literature; Islamophobia; anti-Palestinian racism; critical pedagogies; and global practices of resilience in displacement in Countering Displacements: The Creativity and Resilience of Indigenous and Refugee-ed Peoples (University of Alberta Press, 2012). Her latest book chapter “Fragmented Bodies ‘Dancing on the Spot’: The Transnational Lives of Canadian Muslims and the Limits of Anti-Islamophobia Advocacy” was published in Systemic Islamophobia in Canada: A Research Agenda (2022), which was named a Top 100 Book for 2023 in the Hill Times.

Manijeh Moradian

Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022), won the 2024 Hamid Naficy Book Award for the best book in Iranian diaspora studies from the Association of Iranian Studies and the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. The book also received an honorable mention for the 2023 Middle East Studies Association Nikki Keddie Book Award. She has published widely, including in American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Radical History Review, Scholar & Feminist Online, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of Feminists for Jina, a global network which formed in fall 2022 to support the women, life, freedom uprising in Iran.

Wazhmah Osman

Wazhmah Osman is a filmmaker and associate professor in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. Her research and teaching are rooted in feminist media ethnographies that focus on the political economy of global media industries and the regimes of representation and visual culture they produce. In her book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists (University of Illinois Press, 2020), she analyzes the impact of international funding and cross-border media flows on the politics of Afghanistan, the region, and beyond. She is also the co-director of the critically acclaimed documentary Postcards from Tora Bora and co-editor and co-author of the forthcoming books Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power (Duke University Press) and Afghanistan: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) with Robert Crews. Osman has appeared as a commentator on Democracy Now, NPR, and Al Jazeera, among other news outlets.

Ather Zia

Ather Zia, PhD, is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (2019), which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldúa Honorable Mention, 2021 Public Anthropologist Award, Advocate of the Year Award 2021, and an honorable mention for the 2021 Rosaldo Book Prize. She has been featured in the Femilist 2021, a list of one hundred women from the Global South working on critical issues. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak? (Women Unlimited, 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and A Desolation Called Peace (Harper Collins, 2019). She has published a poetry collection, The Frame, and another collection is forthcoming. Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the coeditor of the journal Cultural Anthropology (2022-25).