Kurdish women’s activism in Iran : struggle for re-conquest of the public sphere

Ayatollah Khomeini’s concept of ‘Islamic government’, and the 1979 Iranian revolution, sought to exclude women from the public sphere and introduced a new hegemony of the Islamic public sphere. For a variety of cultural and political reasons, many Kurds in Iran refused to accept the religious government’s policies. Using the concepts of public and counter-public, the article discusses Kurdish women’s activism and investigates what motivated them to challenge their marginalization. We argue that in confronting centralist-religious power and traditional Kurdish society, Kurdish women have created new counter-publics that could promote democracy and improve gender equality in both Kurdistan and Iran.