Mothers Who Mourn the Nation. The Politics of Grief and Women’s Subjectivation in Iran

In the wake of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising and the intensification of state repression, bereaved mothers have once again come to occupy a central place in Iran’s contested public sphere. Gathering at gravesites, in the streets, and across digital platforms, they mourn loved ones killed in protests and state violence, linking contemporary losses to earlier periods of repression, from the early years of the Islamic Republic to more recent unrest, including the 2026 Grand Bazaar strikes triggered by economic crisis. Their mourning extends beyond personal grief, articulating a broader sense of collective loss and a wounded national community. In this process, mourning becomes a sustained form of public claim-making that challenges the state’s authority to define and represent the nation. While existing scholarship on maternal activism has often understood mourning primarily as a form of moral protest, it has paid less attention to how politicized mourning operates as an ongoing process of political subjectivation, one that generates agency, resilience, and solidarities across generational, ethnic, and religious divides.
Building on earlier work, this article offers a new analytical lens for understanding how the Iranian Mothers for Justice (Mādarān-e Dādkhāh) transform loss into a politics of grief through which women mourn and speak on behalf of the nation. Its central contribution is to conceptualize politicized mourning as an enduring process of political subjectivation, in which grief becomes a source of agency, resistance, and collective identification under authoritarian rule. Situating this activism within a broader genealogy of maternal protest since 1979, the article argues that collective mourning has become a key site through which women emerge as political subjects, despite a theocratic system that seeks to confine them to domestic and moral roles.
Drawing on ethnography, historical records, media sources, and personal narratives, the analysis shows how these mothers rework dominant ideals of motherhood to produce a counter-subjectivity that challenges both patriarchal and religious authority. In this process, politicized mourning not only reshapes their own identities but also amplifies the voices of the disappeared, imprisoned, and executed, fostering solidarities that cut across ethnic, religious, and generational divides, while unsettling official narratives of nationhood, martyrdom, and justice. The article thus asks: how does politicized maternal mourning within the Mothers for Justice movement enable women’s political subjectivation, agency, and resilience under the authoritarian conditions of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

motherhood, subjectivation, resistance, agency, politics

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