Dadkhah mothers of Iran,from Khavaran to Aban: digital dadkhahi and transnational coalitional mothering

Abstract

This article offers a theoretical account of the figure of the ‘Dadkhah mother’, the ‘justice-seeking mother’, by highlighting her historical, political and feminist significance in contemporary Iran and beyond. By drawing on a conceptual analysis of visual images, oral and written history and social media posts, I outline the key qualities of the figure of the Dadkhah mother and her longstanding activism and solidarity-building practices. I elaborate on what I call ‘transnational coalitional mothering’ and ‘digital dadkhahi’. The article builds on feminist theorisations of mothering, resistance, affective (mediated) solidarity and conditions of (un)grievability to argue that the multiple mediatised, resistant and coalitional strategies of the Dadkhah mothers of Iran offer radical alternative modes of thinking about mothering and (elderly) women's resistance. Such modes acknowledge these women's undeniable contribution to activism and to doing gender and politics across borders, beyond patriarchal motherhood, familial kinship ties, Western-centric co-optive voices and hierarchical framings, and in direct opposition to authoritarian spatiotemporal nation-building myths and impositions.

Introduction

The act of seeking justice for political activists and dissidents who are killed by state authorities has been a significant element of various societies for decades and has often been driven by women activists, mothers and elderly women in particular (Bouvard, 1994; Carreon and Moghaddam, 2015). In the collective global imaginary, now ‘famous’ are movements by diverse groups of activists and non-activist individuals, such as the Mothers de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the Saturday Mothers in Turkey and the Women in Black in several countries. These groups have long occupied public spaces to hold violent colonial, dictatorial and nationalist states accountable for their transgressions against multiple generations of people (Bouvard, 1994; Taylor, 2001; Ahiska, 2014; Karaman, 2016). The act of mourning and the role of mothers in creating collectives out of their grief are considered categories to ‘think-with’, to imagine new potentialities for political subjectivity beyond militarist sovereign state formation (Athanasiou, 2016, 2017) and nationalist contexts (Karaman, 2016). The political role of the mother (Karaman, 2016) and the ‘radical potential’ (Naber, 2021) of mothers and mothering during the revolutions have been a continuous focus of feminist scholarly debates in numerous contexts.

Nevertheless, the existing feminist and Iranian studies literature has largely neglected the movement of ‘mourning and justice-seeking mothers of Iran’, in particular the ‘Khavaran Mothers’, women who, since the 1980s, have been protesting the mass execution of their loved ones and their presumed interment in Khavaran, an area outside Tehran. Likewise, only a few scholars in the past decade have directed attention to a more recent wave of mourning mothers in Iran, known as the Mothers of Laleh Park, to highlight their ‘peaceful protest’ and the potentialities of ‘maternalism from below’ (Tahmasebi-Birjani, 2010; Carreon and Moghaddam, 2015). Some studies have critiqued or highlighted the diasporic campaigns that have manifested in support of these mothers (Seddighi, 2014; Gheytanchi et al., 2015). Overall, the scant existing literature on justice-seeking mothers of Iran has only partly attended to the movement's generational, historical and legal implications, and only briefly mentioned the Khavaran Mothers alongside and in parallel to contemporary political events (Akhavan, 2017; Khosravi Ooryad, 2019; Mohajer, 2020). In addition, the significance of the multi-generational activism of Iranian justice-seeking mothers, who have mobilised multiple innovative tools of protest for decades, is an important yet under-theorised topic to address.

In view of this, the concern of this article is to assert the significance of the movement of justice-seeking mothers in Iran, and to centre it in scholarly debates. I assert that the Farsi term ‘dadkhahi’, of which the literal meaning is ‘seeking justice’, offers indispensable intelligibility, singularity and embeddedness to better convey the complexity and plurality of the figure of the Iranian justice-seeking mother, whom I call the ‘Dadkhah mother’. In the article, I think with and through the figure of the Dadkhah mother by exploring her historic, political and feminist significance in contemporary Iran, and by drawing on textual and conceptual analyses of select images, videos, witness accounts, oral histories and social media posts about and by actual justice-seeking mothers (to whom I refer hereafter as ‘mothers’, adding ‘Dadkhah’ when referring to the figure). I conceptualise justice-seeking by keeping the Farsi term, dadkhahi, to stress that, especially when accompanied by mothering, this has become an epistemologically and politically crucial act in contemporary Iran.

Moreover, I argue that dadkhahi by mothers in the Iranian context extends beyond ‘seeking justice’, for their killed/disappeared children in this case, to encompass a range of other connotations, imaginaries and (dis-)organised activities. The women's dadkhahi has become a fierce oppositionary force with multiple manifestations, the most important of which are outright political activism against the current authoritarian regime in Iran, affective modes of togetherness and solidarity-building via digital activism and seeking transnational alliance, countering spatiotemporal narratives imposed on them by authoritarian harassment and creating their own framework for mobilisation by utilising a variety of innovative tactics, as discussed in the following sections. As noted, because of the epistemic dismissal of Iranian justice-seeking movements – especially that of the Khavaran Mothers – which, I argue, exists in scholarly debates, I assert that the language and notion of dadkhahi does more conceptual justice to the Dadkhah mother's multiplicitous and longstanding activism.

I argue that the multiple mediatised, resistant and coalitional strategies of the Dadkhah mother over the past decades, including what I conceive of as ‘digital dadkhahi’ and ‘transnational coalitional mothering’, offer radical alternative modes of thinking about mothering, and about doing gender and politics both in the Iranian context and across borders, in direct opposition to authoritarian violence, traditional patriarchal family values and kinship ties, as well as dominant Western epistemic narratives and stereotypes about (Muslim) Iranian women. More specifically, the Dadkhah mother helps us to see the nuanced forms that (elderly) women's activism under suppressive violent states may take, complicating and moving beyond rigid and hierarchical binary notions of ‘non-political’ elderly women versus politically aware young activists. Such notions disregard the capabilities of elderly women in doing feminist activism, gender and politics in these contexts.

The following section provides a brief account of events, in 1988, 2009 and 2019, in which state authorities killed political activists and protesters, prompting their mothers, and other concerned women, to form collectives. ¹ This is followed by a detailed mapping of the key qualities of the Dadkhah mother and her essentially interrelated site-specific and digital activism, as well as her efforts towards transnational coalition-building and combination of these modes of activism in innovative, disruptive and potentially transformative ways.

Historical background

The 1988 Massacre and the Khavaran Mothers movement

The history of post-revolutionary Iran involves a dark but bitterly prominent decade: the 1980s, which involved a massacre in the summer of 1988. In the spring of 1981 – only a couple of years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and shortly following a mass protest in Tehran – Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution, requested the development of a ‘road map to annihilate the adamant [political] opponents of his Islamic fundamentalist rule’ (Mohajer, 2020: 204). As part of this mission, a barren parcel of land known as Khavaran was identified outside the city of Tehran. Khavaran was supposedly a former cemetery for non-Muslims, which justified its selection as a burial place for dissidents of post-revolutionary Iran, ‘who did not belong to the community of Muslims, and were considered as “infidels”, [and so] would have to be interred in “pagan lands” or “damned lands”’ (Mohajer, 2020: 205).

Sudden mass executions started in July 1988 with Khomeini's fatwa, following, as claimed, the Mujahedin's attempted attack from the western borders of Iran (Abrahamian, 1999). That summer, approximately 4500 to 5000 ‘women and men, young and old, Muslims and Marxists [who were dissidents and] who were serving their sentences’ (Mohajer, 2020: xiv) were executed in prisons in Iran and interred in an unmarked mass grave in Khavaran. The victims’ whereabouts were unknown to their families until a group of mothers determined the location by digging into the soil in the area. Thereafter, the mourning families visited Khavaran every Friday despite pressure from authorities. According to one grieving woman, who was only six years old when she lost her mother and other family members to the massacre, ‘when [they] went to Khavaran for the first time, it wasn't like a cemetery at all, just piles of soil and crowds of mourning mothers’ (Kamali Dehghan, 2012). The deep grief in the mothers’ hearts led them to form meaningful ties with one another and fuelled a shared determination to seek justice; they eventually became known as the Khavaran Mothers (Mohajer, 2020).

The Green Movement: country-wide protests in 2009

In the aftermath of Iran's controversial election in 2009 (Karimi, 2018), the country witnessed the most substantial uprising since the 1979 revolution. As part of this protest, which is now referred to as ‘the Green Movement’, dissatisfied people flooded social media and the streets to challenge the obviously fixed election and demand that their votes be honoured. After the infamous murder of Neda Agha Soltan and Sohrab Aarabi by government forces during the 2009 summer protests, a group of mourning mothers and their supporters, who were amongst the organisers of the protests, ventured into public spaces and assembled in Laleh Park in Tehran every Saturday to protest the brutal violence by government agents. As the initial name of the group suggests, the mourning mothers of Iran were also ‘mourning’ the recent murders of protesters.

Shiring Ebadi, an Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner, urged the global community to support the mourning mothers of Iran (Esfandiari, 2009). Immediately after Ebadi's call, Iranians in exile joined in solidarity with the Mothers of Laleh Park. In Cologne, Frankfurt, Dortmund, Hamburg, London, Vienna, Los Angeles and many other cities, women convened in parks each Saturday to express support for the mothers’ activism and the burgeoning movement within Iran (Gheytanchi et al., 2015). Mourning mothers in Iran also gathered in Rasht and Kermanshah cities to grieve and memorialise their killed children. Significantly, members of the Khavaran Mothers joined the Mothers of Laleh Park in an active show of support. Mansoureh Behkish – the daughter of Nayereh Jalali (Mother Behkish) – who lost her siblings and relatives to the mass killings of the 1980s, is a prominent Khavaran justice movement member who joined the ‘second wave’ of the mothers’ movement in 2009. For decades, members of the Khavaran Mothers and Mothers of Laleh Park movements have also sought justice, amongst the fulfilment of other demands, by urging the international human rights courts to prosecute the perpetrators in transparent and just criminal trials. Furthermore, they have called for (inter-)national recognition of killings and victims’ exact whereabouts, have campaigned to eliminate the death penalty and have advocated for freedom not only for political prisoners but for all people in Iran (Mpliran, 2011a).

The 2019 Uprising: the November Massacre and the Aban Mothers movement

Only one year after the countrywide uprising of 2017–2018, which was incited by numerous economic and political crises in Iran, another uprising flared across the nation in November 2019 to protest the increase in fuel prices by the government. The government consequently lost major political legitimacy amongst people who were living in dire conditions in the country (Shahi and Abdoh-Tabrizi, 2020). Thousands of protesters took to the streets throughout Iran, and concerned authorities reacted by shutting down the country's internet for an entire week (Netblocks, 2019) and killing hundreds of protesters within only a few days (Reuters, 2019). The atrocity of such suppression was immediately exposed to the world (Europe Solidaire, 2019).

Soon after the mass killings, mourning families once again emerged from every corner of the country. They posted videos online and provided interviews with international media to share their experiences of losing their children and family members to the massacre (Esfandiari, 2019). These family members increasingly included women, who would later identify as ‘Aban Mothers’. From the outset, this intergenerational group of mourning and justice-seeking mothers displayed no fear of authorities. Moreover, they used all available tools to demand justice, accountability and the very condition of mourning in pursuit of a liveable life for all marginalised people.

Resistant subjects, solidarity-building

To ‘think-with’ mothering and dadkhahi in the Iranian context, it is imperative to first briefly situate my inquiry alongside feminist theorisations of resistance and collective solidarity-building that inform it. I focus on resistant subjects beyond Western conceptions of ‘agency’ by drawing on Maria Lugones’ concept of ‘active subjectivity’ (2005: 86), which aptly formulates ‘resisting’ in the gerund form, as an ongoing process rather than one that is ever finished. Lugones has argued that once agency is ‘de-emphasised’, the subject will appear ‘multiplicitous: at once terrorized and resistant; at once paralyzed in stasis and brooding her own liberation’ (2005: 90). Moreover, in thinking-with Gloria Anzaldúa, Lugones frames the rebellion of active subjects ‘as processes’ rather than isolated acts, which encourages a re-imagination of even solitary or disorganised acts of rebellion as part of the very process of materialising collective resistance (2005: 97).

This collectivity further requires a process of solidarity-building beyond imposed epistemologies. I incorporate Chandra Talpade Mohanty's emphasis on solidarity-building across borders, differences and time, which is necessarily a ‘praxis-oriented, active political struggle embodied in [the] notion of solidarity’ defined by ‘mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities’ (2003: 7). Crucially, this type of political movement de-essentialises (feminist) politics as founded on ‘identity or a naturalised femaleness’ (Hemmings, 2012: 158); instead, it seeks to create ‘affective solidarity’, that is solidarity based on dissonant yet shared, politicised feelings and emotions such as rage, frustration and grief (Hemmings, 2012). Such solidarity could be further nourished by movement-building that constructs ‘family’ beyond biological kin and acts towards ‘political kinship’ (Haraway, 1991: 156; Khosravi Ooryad, 2020: 146), and transformative imaginaries that persistently demand the possibility of conditions of grievability for all lives (Butler, 2020).

Site-specific activism: Dadkhah mothers refusing authoritarian spaciotemporal impositions

In patriarchal, authoritarian or sovereign states, a mother's place is ideologically sacred and a prominent discursive tool to serve religious or nation-building processes (Yuval-Davis, 1997; Kaplan et al., 1999; Kashani-Sabet, 2011; Khoja-Moolji, 2021). The construction of state ideology in modern Iran has relied heavily on ideological ‘maternalist ideals’; in the Pahlavi era, such ideals were exalted in ‘traditional family relations, morality, and appropriate attire as nationalist norms’, whereas post-revolutionary Iran ‘recast[s] these maternalist ideals as Islamic objectives’ (Kashani-Sabet, 2011: 214). In the nationalist gendered imaginary, the mother is expected to submit to the exploitation of traditional family roles or remain obedient for heteropatriarchal exhibitions, especially during times of war or crisis (Khoja-Moolji, 2021). As argued by feminist scholars, between woman and nation, there is also a structure of ‘political economy that is related to the production, distribution, consumption, and circulation of discourses and practices dividing time and space between bodies’ and the metaphoric imaginaries of the homeland that are imposed on women (Kaplan et al., 1999: 14). As noted above, the figure of the mother is thus amongst those most loaded with such mythic, sacred discourses as well as one of the most heavily exploited figures under the ruling capitalist economic system (Benjamin, 1998: 34) of modern nation-states.

In this regard, when a mother intentionally departs from patriarchal, exploitative and nationalist norms to become a ‘dissident mother’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2021) who participates in public gatherings against state-imposed violence, she is considered a criminal and suffers constant harassment (Mohajer, 2020: 204). As soon as a mother demands the right to venture outside for purposes besides the tasks that normative society expects of her, her presence becomes a threat to the status quo. Religious sovereign states produce and promote a dominant narrative around motherhood, and especially that of mourning mothers, which emphasises their compliance with nation-building narratives that embrace the martyrdom and sacrifice of their children. Khoja-Moolji has offered a compelling account of the obedient figure of the mourning mother in the Pakistani context, where the mourning mother encourages other women to ‘reinterpret their loss as a sacrifice necessary to keep the nation safe, to perceive this sacrifice as an honor, and to continue to participate in the nation-building process’ (2021: 176). In contrast, the ‘melancholic mother’ refuses to let go of her grief and, in this way, confronts the state (Khoja-Moolji, 2021: 187–188).

During the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s, Iranian authorities attempted to forge and idolise the figure of the ‘martyr's mother’, which resembles that of the mourning mother in the Pakistani cultural context that Khoja-Moolji (2021) proposes. The ‘martyr's mother’ exalts mothers who encouraged their children to join the warfront, hence creating a state-supported discourse of highly respected mourning mothers and providing conditions of mourning for martyrs of the so-called sacred war (Fox, 2016). In fact, ‘[b]eing the mother of a martyr confer[red] high status in the new fundamentalist state’ (Moallem, 1999: 336), which spectacularised this figure through multiple discursive tools forged by the state-led cultural propaganda of post-revolutionary Iran. The state also supported fertility and motherhood, both institutionally and financially, in the years following the Iran–Iraq War (Kashani-Sabet, 2011: 216). Meanwhile, women who embody the figure of the ‘Dadkhah mother’, which also emerged in the 1980s, have been demonised, harassed, continually surveilled by state authorities and omitted from national and historical narratives. Like the ‘melancholic mother’ of Pakistan, the Dadkhah mother in post-revolutionary Iran rejects dominant narratives of ‘patriarchal motherhood’ (O’Reilly, 2004, 2014) and confronts state exaltations of mourning and (un)grievability in times of war and beyond (Butler, 2015).

However, I argue that the Dadkhah mother differs from the ‘melancholic mother’ and similar figures in that she is not simply melancholic over the loss of her child, and refuses to define her activism by ‘mourning’ alone, as a (non-)residual emotion in ‘ambivalent’ relation to the ‘negligent’ state (Khoja-Moolji, 2021: 190). Instead, the Dadkhah mother demands justice, and her dadkhahi, amongst other issues, has emerged as a fundamentally political, semi-organised act of utterly detaching from and negating the state. She is outspoken, combative, dissident and in full opposition to the authoritarian regime, which has perpetrated yet ignored the killing of her children. More crucially, she has spent decades cultivating a sustainable grassroots movement of mothers who have boldly demanded justice in various interconnected ways.

For instance, as one of the dominant means of protest since their movement's inception, the mothers have performed the site-specific act of gathering in cemeteries and parks (see Figure 1). The Khavaran Mothers decided to meet in the Khavaran area every Friday for some years (Mohajer, 2020: 207), the Mothers of Laleh Park convened weekly in Laleh Park to peacefully protest the 2009 killings and the Aban Mothers, who once protested in Azadi Square and subway wagons in Tehran (see Figure 2), continue to gather at their children's graves and in their own homes. As these groups demonstrate, mothering and mourning as collective actions in multiple public and private spaces have prompted a continuous, ‘agonistic’ and oppositional shift against violence inflicted by the authorities and their imposed nation-building myths (Athanasiou, 2017).

Figure 1.

Group of Khavaran Mothers at the Khavaran mass grave area. Source: https://www.akhbar-rooz.com/28503/1399/02/17/.

Figure 2.

Group of Aban mothers protesting in the Tehran subway. Source: https://irankargar.com/مادران-جانباختگان-ضرب-و-شتم-و-بازداشت-م/.

When the mothers and their supporters seek consolation by visiting the graves of their loved ones at a cemetery – a public place with free entry for all visitors – their presence incites anxiety in the authoritarian regime. Mother Riahi, a Khavaran Mother whose children were executed during the 1980s and the massacre of 1988, recalled: ‘whenever we went [to Khavaran] for a visit, they harassed and tormented us on one pretext or another’ (Mohajer, 2020: 227). The Mothers of Laleh Park and the Aban Mothers have countless similar stories of experiencing police violence, arrest and harassment by Iran's intelligence service every time they gathered in public spaces to protest and mourn. As the mothers have united and assembled more widely, the authorities have become increasingly fearful of them and have attempted to suppress them through arrests (IranWire, 2019; Amnesty Iran, 2020).

By persistently occupying public places, the mothers refuse to be silenced or to forget the violence. Furthermore, they are continuously ‘seizing and reconfiguring the matter of material environments’ (Butler, 2015: 71), and their gatherings at these places, albeit temporary, potentially transform a ‘normal’ cemetery or park into a space of politics and resistance. Following Butler, I argue that, in practising their ‘right to appear’ (2015: 24) and protest in these and other places, the mothers are mutually supported by the material urban environment itself. This environment acts as an important component of the mothers’ protests, as ‘material [urban] supports for action are not only part of action, but they are also what is being fought about’ (Butler, 2015: 73). Therefore, I assert that, opposing the hegemonic and traditionally imposed position of ‘mothers’ as obedient gendered subjects serving the nation and the family, the mothers insistently appearing as combative and oppositional subjects in public spaces is a fundamentally feminist and political act (Naber, 2021) in which they challenge patriarchal motherhood (and womanhood) and are already aware of their power over the perpetrators of violence, who fear their public presence.

Crucially, the Dadkhah mothers’ multiple movement-naming has continuously survived authoritarian spaciotemporal impositions. Two of these movements bear the name of a place, Khavaran and Laleh Park, while the third is temporal, ‘Aban’ being the name for the months of October/November in the Persian calendar. Other transnational campaigns that manifested in the last decade include those of independent collectives of migrant Iranian women (e.g. the Dortmund Mothers), who are mostly in exile for political reasons. Notably, authorities in Iran have increasingly attempted to annihilate and prohibit entrance to the Khavaran cemetery. Meanwhile, the post-revolutionary state has continuously forged its own religious-political national calendar dates and actively censored its own numerous brutal acts while vilifying those who have been politically executed in the country.

In this context, I argue that the mothers’ conscious insistence on collectively (re-)naming their movements according to ‘taboo’ site- and time-specific references to when and where atrocities have happened further demonstrates the spaciotemporal strategies of their dadkhahi and, in this case, their public intervention as resistant subjects. It also reflects that the mothers do not express their demands at unplanned places or times; rather, I argue, they intentionally intervene in a dominant space-time – drilling holes into the hegemonic calendar and public spaces that are officially revered by Iranian authorities – to re-write its material-historical inscription and support their political mission for lives deemed ‘ungrievable’ by authorities (Butler, 2015: 138). Moreover, they present alternative worlds and world-makings (Lugones, 2003; Haraway, 2016) through such deliberate (re-)naming despite constant threats, censorship and (online/offline) control, which, following Lugones (2003), is a liberatory practice, as it offers a resistant reconfiguration of places and dominant accounts of history. Moreover, as authorities have escalated the suppression of collective public gatherings, mothers have also forged new forms of intervention by collectively utilising the affordances of social media.

Digital justice, activist mothers and social media mobilisation of (un)grievable lives

The interconnectivity of public space protests and the digital activism of Dadkhah mothers in the Iranian context has been vital to their endurance across time and generations. While the materiality of public places and the right to appear within them (Butler, 2015) are constantly controlled, with entry strictly forbidden in some cases and the place even actively destroyed in other cases, and the suppressive state employs all available tools to ensure the isolation of different political uprisings and their consecutive movements, the various movements of mothers have arguably found each other through alternative forms of collectivity, one of which I call ‘digital dadkhahi’. This form of activism has been crucial in helping mothers collectivise in public online/offline spaces. Furthermore, it has allowed their dadkhahi to manifest in political and intimate kinship with other social movements, thus becoming their source of political inspiration in the past years.

For instance, the initial gathering of Khavaran Mothers and members in Paltak online rooms in 2009 (Gooya News, 2009) and the website launch of the Mothers of Laleh Park during the Green Movement (Akhavan, 2013; Faris and Rahimi, 2015) not only made their oral stories more widely known and visible to the broader public but also caused their movements to adopt new formations in moving towards the construction of what feminist and digital media scholars have called ‘a digital politics of location’ (Tuzcu, 2016: 153). Here, the ‘accelerated entangling of different localities’ (Tuzcu, 2016: 153) facilitates encounters between the ‘enfleshed’ and the ‘virtual’, where ‘the new categories of embodiment’ (Tuzcu, 2016: 157) and novel forms of ‘collective sense-making’ (Onook et al., 2015: 211) can merge and emerge.

Moreover, in the pre-digital era, the Khavaran Mothers displayed immense diligence in approaching prominent religious or human rights figures at their homes or offices, to ask these people to help deliver letters to their international audience and request accountability and support in the months following the 1988 massacre. ² Yet, Iranian authorities suppressed the mothers for years, and this repressive social and political isolation led many to go into exile. In this context, the mothers utilised digital activism to connect their ‘individual experience’ (Hemmings, 2012) and trauma to a capacity for ‘collective action’ by mobilising the affective trope of ‘the mother’ in collective online spaces. The digital activism of mothers (and the other women activists involved) has thereby stretched the territorialities and localities of protest towards a more enduring and interconnected form.

Digital activism has long become an indispensable part of contemporary social movements (Van Dijk, 2013; Castells, 2015; Papacharissi, 2015a) and is already a well-practised means of feminist networking through, for instance, hashtag activism (Jackson et al., 2020) and the formation of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015b). In examining the hashtag activism of marginalised online communities in the United States, Jackson et al. have argued that the digital formation of counterpublics has had a part in shaping US politics by creating alternative communication, organising and forms of citizen visibility (2020: xxvi–xxxvi). In addition, through an intersectional feminist approach to networked feminisms, Macdonald et al. (2022) have examined feminist anti-racist activist assemblies in the digital age. These emerging critical voices show how the reclamation of visibility and political participation by dissident and marginalised communities is no longer manifesting only through traditional ways of street protest or mass media but is advancing with more digitised strategies and tactics, whereby new ‘virtual sojourners continue these traditions on social networking sites’ (Brown, 2022: 52). Alongside such framings, my conception of digital dadkhahi is another manifestation of networking strategies from the margins and beyond the Western context with the addition of #dadkhahi. It has arguably become a necessarily central point of protest in Iran through the practices of embodied hashtagging and livestreaming of justice demands, which are mainly utilised by mothers in conjunction with various social justice movements.

Digital dadkhahi is further mobilised when the right to enter a physical space is the very demand of an online campaign, as it further intertwines the material with the digital in this context. Iranian authorities have attempted to destroy places of physical protest and mourning and to forbid entry to or gathering within the Khavaran cemetery, which is not possible for those in exile anyway. Following such violent annihilation attempts, members of the Khavaran movement have created the #Khavaran and #Khavaran_Hafezeye-Tarikhi (#Khavaran_Historical_Memory) hashtags on Twitter and Facebook, along with the recently formed Clubhouse room Dadkhahan-e Khavaran (Khavaran Justice Seekers), as embodied ways of protesting in the digital realm to stop the destruction of the place in the offline world.

Moreover, such online campaigns demanding justice for the dead, the living and material places are continued and rendered visible through digital dadkhahi, which has enabled a differential understanding of locations (Tuzcu, 2016) as ‘countermemories’ that can form ‘affective networks’ of connections between bodies that ‘occupy different localities into mediators and participants’ (Tuzcu, 2016: 153). For instance, while the Khavaran Mothers spent years attempting to gather in the cemetery before mostly relocating to live in exile, and the Aban Mothers have been increasingly prohibited from assembling in public places, the formation of the #Khavaran_Hafezeye_Tarikhi and #Aban_Mothers hashtags is arguably another spatiotemporal intervention of these mothers that combines a ‘multiplicitous’ (Lugones, 2005: 86) web of joint activism in various localities. Digital dadkhahi in this sense, encourages a move towards a more ‘immanent [form] of affective emplacement’ and ‘interdigitated locations’ (Tuzcu, 2016: 153) that aspires to mobilise – and seek justice for – marginalised bodies and places facing destruction through an affective circuit of possible interventions in both embodied and mediated ways.

Digital dadkhahi, as an innovative spatiotemporal intervention of the Dadkhah mother through the construction of ‘interdigitated locations’, has also been manifested by mothers who connect and publicise their private home gatherings or temporary coming together at their children's graves. They livestream these dadkhahi events on social media platforms, such as Instagram and Clubhouse, as well as taking photos, recording live Instagram gatherings and posting content on their social media platforms to document the event on their story highlights. This form of embodied digital activism is performed by the mothers in spaces where the status quo would have them act ‘obediently’, and it involves using technologies which they are largely presumed to be incapable of mobilising, especially for purposes other than posting about their traditional motherhood roles. Thus, it offers potential for moving beyond solid notions of what constitutes a private, public or digital space, and supports the mothers’ active subjectivity in repurposing these spaces for their ‘activist’ aims. This form of activism is further mobilised through a mode of ‘affective solidarity’ based mainly on mobilising emotions of anger and grief via the Dadkhah mothers’ mediated pursuit of a ‘desire to transform the social [and political] terrain’ (Hemmings, 2012: 151) by capturing and keeping those fleeting yet recurring moments of togetherness and sense of collectivity in their archival digital spaces.

Such mediated gatherings, where mothers meet other mothers and women from previous movements, also facilitate the formation of a collective ‘political imaginary of the radical equality of grievability’ (Butler, 2020: 74), which calls for the condition of grievability of the lives of both the living and the brutally killed. Mothers and other justice-seeking women are the forerunners of this radical imaginary, and their mediated public appearance has numerous instances: Shahnaz Akmali's commentary on the Khavaran Mothers on her Twitter page, where she demands full justice in Iran; the hashtag campaign by #Khavaran justice movement members Mansoureh Behkish, Khatereh Moini, Esmat Talebi, Banoo Saberi, Bahareh Monshi and others to condemn executions; the livestreamed Instagram video from the Aban Mothers calling for justice for not only their slain sons but all people of Iran; and the promotion of online dadkhahi gatherings in Clubhouse rooms by Laleh and Lawdan Bazargan, two sisters and members of the #Khavaran justice movement, to honour the memory of Khavaran and continue their mother's mission of obtaining justice.

One specific and widely circulated video on social media shows a mother alongside several fellow activists chanting the famous revolutionary song ‘Khoon-e Arghavan-ha’ (‘The Blood of Redbuds’) on the street in front of the house of another mother, whose son had been arrested by authorities and had been missing for more than two decades (see Figure 3). Elsewhere, I have argued that the adoption of (feminist and revolutionary) songs and anthems as tools of protest has been crucial in the creation of political kinship ties amongst various generations of women activists (Khosravi Ooryad, 2020). Here, I further that argument by asserting that digital dadkhahi is a profound basis for better grasping how the multiple mediated spaces and tools of protest have aided – and been actively reconfigured by – the Dadkhah mother's activism throughout the years, for instance through the circulation of the aforementioned video on social media or the tactical performances of the Aban Mothers in gathering at their homes and simultaneously streaming live videos on their Instagram stories. These examples highlight the fundamental mutual ‘interdependency’ (Butler, 2015, 2020) and significance of all these spaces in advancing social movements, which, in this context, mothers practise innovatively to connect with each other and the broader public through various sites, to build communities and to resist authoritarian spatiotemporal inhibitions. Hence, such gatherings, live stories on social media, posts and chants accelerate the affective and intimate kinship relations of the alternative community.

Figure 3.

Shahnaz Akmali visiting and hugging fellow Dadkhah mother Akram Neghabi alongside their chosen extended families while chanting outside Mrs Neghabi's house. Source: https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=be4ZpbWWG60.

The Dadkhah mother: political actors and transnational coalitional mothering

Another central characteristic of the Dadkhah mother – which, I argue, has aided her in continuously demanding justice – is her openness to forging transnational solidarity networks across borders (Mohanty, 2003). The decades-long diasporic activism of mothers and other justice-seeking women has also involved site-specific and mediated protest gatherings in European and North American cities where mothers and their supporters reside as exiled activists. The most recent example is the gathering of Khavaran justice movement members, most of whom were women, outside of a Swedish court in Stockholm, where Hamid Nouri, an ex-prosecutor's assistant in infamous prisons in Iran, was under arrest and has been sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the 1988 prison massacre (Al Jazeera, 2022). Although some researchers have focused solely on the Mothers of Laleh Park (Seddighi, 2014; Gheytanchi et al., 2015), these past and recent instances prove that such ‘diasporic’ justice activism did not start with the Mothers of Laleh Park movement. Rather, it can be traced back to the 1988 massacre, when ‘Iranians in diaspora also started to hold commemorations simultaneously in different cities in EU countries and North America’ (Mohajer, 2020: 301). These activities across borders manifest a potentially radical form of mothering as a semi-organized political action, which I frame as ‘transnational coalitional mothering’ in the following sections.

Dadkhah mothers as political ordinary-activists

Before considering the transnational coalition-building attempts by mothers, it is imperative to address how mothers’ activism in the Iranian context is largely viewed as not activism per se in both scholarly and non-scholarly debates. As evidenced by the tendency to refer to the supporters and initiators of the Mothers of Laleh Park movement while disregarding the Khavaran Mothers and earlier movements, it has been assumed at times that a particular group of human rights journalists or activists have always initiated campaigns or online pages on behalf of the mothers (Seddighi, 2014: 525; Gheytanchi et al., 2015). While such a perspective is valuable for critically examining the Mothers of Laleh Park and the diasporic activities of the mothers and their supporters, it implicitly and ahistorically perceives the role of mothers as not politically embedded or socially aware. Rather, it is often used to depict mothers as non-activist, ‘unaware and non-political’ elderly women whose political presence is ‘not harmful and does not contain any political consciousness’ (Mpliran, 2010: para. 11; translation mine).

Dadkhah mother-activists in Iran have invalidated such ageist and normative thinking by actively campaigning, petitioning and mobilising both independently and collectively. In line with Butler, the continued political and justice activism of the mothers conveys that, ‘[to] be a participant in politics’, one should ‘act and petition within the terms of equality, as an action on equal standing with others’ (2015: 52). Mothers and their extended chosen families have reclaimed their participation in politics. Furthermore, they have proven that they do not need representatives to render their presence visible or their voices heard, as demonstrated by their range of activities and addressed in detail in the previous two sections.

Asef Bayat has partly problematised the overall hierarchical organisational approach to the women's movement in Iran by offering the concept of ‘a women's nonmovement’ to examine Iranian women's ordinary, everyday defiance of inequalities (2007: 160). While I agree with the need for a non-hierarchical lens to explore ongoing (women's) activism in Iran, I must challenge Bayat's approach to ordinary women's everyday defiance. While attempting to clarify non-structured forms of disobedience, such an approach actually reinforces the dichotomy of ‘activists’ versus ‘ordinary women’. The Dadkhah mother's instance – which completely eludes Bayat’s (2007) conceptualisation of the various forms of Iranian women's resistance – shatters this normative, binary understanding. While she is not necessarily part of any (human rights, feminist or political) organisation, the Dadkhah mother defies unjust patriarchal structures not solely through her ‘involve[ment] in ordinary daily practices of life’ (Bayat, 2007: 161) but also, more crucially, by actively participating in a range of interdependent, leaderless forms of digital justice-seeking and transnational and public protests. Mothers can be ordinary only if ordinariness is not perceived as a hindrance to their capacity to act and protest as they have for decades.

In this regard, I argue, the mothers are ordinary-activist women who know how to demand justice. Their justice-seeking approach represents the political act of pursuing equality and freedom from multiple axes of oppression and domination. By increasingly participating in contemporary politics and rendering their mothering visible as an undeniable form of doing politics and justice activism, the mothers have disrupted the dominant transcriptive framework of ‘activists’ versus ‘ordinary women’.

The mothers have also forcefully criticised any co-optation of their voices in the name of ‘representation’ or ‘political show’. One example can be found in an interview with Mahboobeh Ramezani which was livestreamed on Instagram by Masih Alinejad, a prominent US-based human rights activist and journalist who has over 6 million Instagram followers. In the video, Ramezani boldly states that justice-seeking mothers do not need anyone to represent them or be their voice, as they themselves ‘are the voice’. She further links her dadkhahi to that of both the women of the Plaza de Mayo movement in Argentina and the Khavaran Mothers of Iran. By negating and de-linking justice activism from any external or Western-centric force, the Dadkhah mother – while fully opposing the enemy ‘at home’ (i.e. oppressive Iranian authorities) – strategically utilises all available ways, platforms, media and channels to ‘voice’ her justice demands and formulates new imaginaries of thinking/doing gender and politics in Iran and beyond.

Transnational coalitional mothering

Inspired by such an undeniably conscious resistant trajectory, my term ‘coalitional mothering’ encompasses the women's rejection of the co-option of their voices and the affirmative pursuit of alternative forms of subjectivity and resistance in the justice-seeking and activism of the mothers. It is notable here that any political activity in the contested terrains, such as that of Iran, is constantly at risk of being hijacked by neoliberal/colonial human rights projects or agents of political violence (Whyte, 2019). The mothers’ activism is by no means an exception, as it has been represented problematically within various activists’ narratives or by human rights organisations in diaspora which claim to be prominent voices for the dadkhahi of mothers. Notwithstanding such problematic discourses, it is crucial to avoid falling into the ageist and hierarchical trap that projects the mother's role as not sufficiently political or independently activist. I have already vehemently critiqued the ‘gendered romanticising discourse’ of such human rights approaches to mothers’ justice demands, which constantly represents mothers in a sentimental narrative on the Iranian opposition side that frames them as almost incapable of doing activism on their own and then co-opts their voices to serve different political ends (Khosravi Ooryad, 2019). In this regard, it is vital to first acknowledge that the figure of the Dadkhah mother has ‘a voice of her own’ in politics, and her activism should be addressed or critiqued through that lens. Such consideration should lead to a better understanding of the Dadkhah mother's capabilities for forging movements, solidarities and bonds with attention to how, when and by which strategies of active (de-)linking the Dadkhah mother has (or has not) sought coalitions (trans)nationally.

Therefore, I assert that the digital dadkhahi and transnational coalitional mothering practices of Dadkhah mothers evidence an ‘active subjectivity’ (Lugones, 2005) which, as noted, differs from the Western notion of ‘agency’. This form of mothering constantly cultivates radical kinship ties beyond traditional family relations, national borders and dominant senses and sense-making (Lugones, 2005), thus re-claiming the ‘mutual interdependency’ of bodies for their chosen family (Butler, 2015: 97). At the same time, they assert political independence from any external representational force. The term ‘coalitional mothering’ has also been briefly considered as an ideal practice of queer polygamous families in which ‘non-normative kinship relations’ emerge (Park, 2013: 222). Notably, the figure of the Dadkhah mother is not necessarily one that is ‘queering motherhood’ in that they are not focused on forging non-heterosexual relationships or forms of living (Park, 2013: 21); nevertheless, I argue that through her political aspirations, refusal of patriarchal motherhood standards defining a good, ‘pious’ mother in the Islamic context of Iran and active construction of an alternative family that demands justice across generations and borders, she manifests new possibilities for perceiving and practising coalitional mothering. In this sense, coalitional mothering is a political and feminist quality of the figure of the Dadkhah mother, and it oscillates between her everyday, ongoing mediated resistance and her attempts to connect to global grassroots spaces of resistance (Çağatay et al., 2022: 70). Thus, such coalitional practice has emerged along the similar path of justice-seeking and feminist politics opposing state-nationalist (Howe, 2006; Athanasiou, 2017), Islamist (Khoja-Moolji, 2021) and authoritarian violence as well as unequal conditions of living.

Alongside local and everyday-activist forms of resistance, transnational alliance-making has been a key concern of the Dadkhah mother and her coalitional mothering practices throughout the years. Mothers have attempted to form ‘strategic coalitions across class, race, and national boundaries’ (Mohanty, 1984: 334) by means of solidarity-building, praxis-oriented, affective activism. While dismissed from major accounts of Iranian contemporary history and represented co-optively by Iranian opposition organisations, a main aspiration of the mothers’ coalition-building and resistance of erasure and co-option has been to hold symbolic tribunals in diaspora and request support from international justice movements and audiences while also critiquing those same tribunals when human rights organisers try to co-opt the independence of the mothers’ dadkhahi.

More importantly, in a conscious effort to link their activism and cause to broader global struggles, the mothers (and their supporters) have demonstrated continuous solidarity with other justice movements in Iran and throughout the world, including Latin American justice movements and Iranian workers’ rights movements, and have posted about them on their social media pages and websites to further express their solidarity. Thereby, Dadkhah mothers of Iran and their (trans)national supporters have continually and consciously manifested solidarity with global justice movements of mother-activists and beyond. Specifically, Dadkhah mothers have written to the mothers of Plaza de Mayo to commemorate their activism and declare solidarity with them and have connected their activism to that of Argentinian mothers in live (Instagram) interviews. In addition, they have sent multilingual letters to mothers in Tunisia and Egypt to express their solidarity and offer transnational allyship in their struggles:

Dear mothers in Tunisia and Egypt!

We call you for a global mothering alliance to shout our shared pains and to spread other mothering kindness to build a different world; since it is a mother's benevolence that can protect friendship and kindness in the world. Let us be the mothers of all the children in the world and promise peace, calm, and freedom to them (Mpliran, 2011b).

Such transnational alliance-making and coalitional mothering are enduring practices that foster solidarity across borders and differences (Mohanty, 1984). They demonstrate that Dadkhah mothers have actively pursued justice and peace in the world and demanded radical equality and conditions of grievability for all, which places them as a notable instance alongside other global fights against injustice.

Concluding remarks

This article has introduced and sought to conceptualise the figure of the Dadkhah mother in the Iranian context to illustrate how a longstanding movement of mothers, and their (feminist) activism, through doing gender, politics and family differently, challenges reductive understandings of elderly women and activism in Iran, and contributes to the formation of transnational solidarities and social justice. In advancing the notions of ‘transnational coalitional mothering’ and ‘digital dadkhahi’, the article has continued a dialogue with existing feminist theorisations of resistance, alternative solidarity-building and mediated (in)justice by highlighting the radical characteristics of Dadkhah mothers and their transnational practices beyond normative frames and in opposition to authoritarian forces and hierarchical regimes.

In addition, the article has focused on the fundamental significance of mothers’ justice movements to problematise the erasure and apparent epistemic amnesia in scholarly literature surrounding the figure of the Dadkhah mother, and the Khavaran Mothers in particular, hence contributing to recognition and possible further research around these figures and their movements. While the absence of the Dadkhah mother from the political and gender history of contemporary Iran is primarily due to suppression by Iranian authorities (Mohajer, 2020: 303), arguably it also reveals the exclusionary politics of academic knowledge production on Iran's contemporary history, which glosses over crucial events and figures or intentionally ignores movements of a politically and historically significant decade.

The article has also challenged ageist and hierarchical understandings of elderly and ‘ordinary’ women's activism that has led to relative dismissal of mothers’ activism in feminist and other scholarly debates concerning Iran. Thus, by centring the figure of the Dadkhah mother and making a case for her conceptual contribution to re-thinking women and activism, the article has urged a more nuanced reading of current feminist activism in Iran and transnationally and the invaluable participation of elderly women in (dis)organised collective resistance and mediated movement-building. On this note, I conclude this discussion by referencing Gohar Eshghi, an elderly ‘ordinary’ woman and outspoken Dadkhah mother whose son was killed by authorities in 2012. Eshghi, who lives in a small town near Tehran and always wears full black clothing and hijab, has spent years appearing in interviews and signing petitions alongside other mothers. She has continually attended online interviews, initiated foundations directly opposing the ‘regime’ in Iran, collectively sought justice for her murdered son and all people of Iran and extended solidarity with other movements, such as the workers’ strikes in Iran.

How can we understand Dadkhah mothers, such as Gohar Eshghi, whose resistant subjectivity manifests not in pious or non-political ways but through combative activist (dis)organised resistance? These mothers are neither non-political women nor necessarily outspokenly feminists. They challenge such dominant dichotomies. By fully grasping the significance of Dadkhah mothers in Iran and acknowledging and further engaging with the ways in which they do gender, and politics transnationally, we can perhaps re-imagine forms of affective, radical kinship and solidarity at both local and global levels.