Psychoanalytic Reflections on Female Resistance in the Middle East
Sara Shadabi
Psychoanalyst & Independent Researcher
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Abstract
This article theorizes women as the point of rupture within the patriarchal symbolic order in the Middle East. Combining political psychoanalysis with discourse analysis, it shows how law, religion, and language objectify the female body as abject simultaneously incorporated and excluded. The paper reads recent mobilizations, notably “Woman, Life, Freedom,” as intra-discursive interventions that rearticulate nodal points and (re)fill empty signifiers such as “freedom,” “security,” and “modesty” through body-centered practices rather than external secession. Case vignettes from Iran, Rojava, Lebanon, and Palestine illustrate how women convert positions of objecthood into subject positions across protest, governance, and everyday care. Methodologically, the analysis engages Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Laclau and Mouffe, and Butler to map mechanisms of abjection, discipline, and hegemonic re-signification. The article argues that women’s leadership—enacted through care, horizontality, and co-governance—constitutes an alternative political project for rebuilding legitimacy and social order. It concludes that suppression of women operates less as episodic coercion than as a structuring anxiety of the patriarchal order; hence challenges to it trigger crises of authority while opening durable pathways for rewriting law, security, and citizenship from within discourse.
Keywords: symbolic order; abjection; body politics; empty signifier; hegemonic articulation; women’s leadership; Middle East; Woman, Life, Freedom.
Introduction
This article conceptualizes woman as a “point of rupture” within the patriarchal symbolic order in the Middle East. By combining political psychoanalysis and discourse analysis, it shows how law, religion, and language represent the female body as an abject object—an object that is simultaneously incorporated and expelled.
The text reads contemporary mobilizations—especially “Woman, Life, Freedom”—not as an external secession from power, but as intra-discursive interventions: struggles that rearticulate nodal points and refill floating/empty signifiers such as “freedom,” “security,” and “modesty” through body-centered politics, thereby transforming dominant meanings.
Case narratives from Iran, Rojava, Lebanon, and Palestine illustrate how women move from positions of objecthood to positions of subjectivity across protest, governance, and everyday care. Methodologically, the analysis draws on Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Laclau & Mouffe, and Butler to map mechanisms of abjection, discipline, and hegemonic re-signification. The article argues that women’s leadership—enacted through care, horizontality, and co-governance—constitutes an alternative political project for rebuilding legitimacy and social order. It concludes that the suppression of women functions less as episodic coercion than as a structuring anxiety of the patriarchal order; therefore, challenging it produces crises of authority while opening durable pathways for rewriting law, security, and citizenship from within discourse.
Keywords (Persian section): symbolic order; abject object; body politics; empty signifier; hegemonic articulation; women’s leadership; Middle East; Woman, Life, Freedom.
Theoretical Framework
This article designs a hybrid, interdisciplinary theoretical framework through a broad review of psychoanalysis, critical feminism, and discourse analysis. Two main axes ground the analysis:
- Lacanian–Kristevan psychoanalysis to explain mechanisms of women’s objectification, the return of the repressed, and the female body as abject within the symbolic order.
- Laclau & Mouffe’s discourse theory to conceptualize women’s resistance as projects of redefining meaning inside language and discourse, not necessarily by an external break.
Freud understands the formation of social order as founded on the repression of sexual drives (Freud, 1930). Lacan sees entry into this order as impossible except through the symbolic (Lacan, 1966). In Freud, the social order appears as the superego; in Lacan, repression is theorized through the Name-of-the-Father. In both, the social order is visibly male-structured, and woman remains at the margins of language and power, to the point where the female body is constituted as the Other. In Lacanian terms, woman can be described as “lack of meaning” within this order: a subject who does not speak, but is spoken about. Put differently, woman is not seated at the negotiating table; she has no dialogue and no exchange is formed with her. She is the object on the table—decided upon, negotiated over, without the authority to redirect the negotiation. This pushes her from active agency into shadow.
Lacan’s concept of the phallus functions as the master signifier of the symbolic order—the signifier that explains positions of power and organizes language in a hegemonic representation of domination through the Name-of-the-Father and the patriarchal order. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the phallus connects the subject to power, law, and legitimacy; woman, deprived of this signifier, is positioned as the object of desire, not the subject of desire. Wherever woman attempts to move from objecthood to subjecthood, she remains trapped within the old fabric of law and language—the symbolic order of the Name-of-the-Father.
Kristeva reframes this tension through the notion of the “subject-in-process/on trial” and clarifies that before the Lacanian symbolic there exists a pre-symbolic stage in which the child’s bond with the mother has not yet been severed by paternal law and language. Patriarchal culture, to preserve its symbolic order, must repress and expel this primal maternal relation, because it threatens the logic of domination. Here woman appears as abject: something that must be cast out for masculine identity and the patriarchal subject to stabilize—yet at the same time there is an endless desire for her presence.
In this space, a psychic re-creation of the symbolic order becomes necessary—one that recognizes the share of all “non-male” layers of society. The emergence of women’s agency in the street, university, education, and politics triggers anxiety in systems aligned with the symbolic order, because it threatens their identity foundations. The abject is simultaneously absorbed and rejected—simultaneously invoked and expelled. It is what must be distanced from to form the symbolic order, yet this distancing is never complete. The abject remains in a liminal state—neither fully outside nor fully inside; a border that is also a threat. The issue is not “either/or” but “both/and.”
Therefore, the politics of suppressing women in patriarchal societies cannot be reduced to physical or legal coercion alone; it is also internalized, psychic, and linguistic. From the start, woman is positioned in the discourse of power such that any demand for active presence is treated as a rupture in the existing order. This is especially true of the female body—particularly the maternal body—as a paradigmatic abject object: it is the source of life yet also recalls the pre-symbolic state in which boundaries between self and other, subject and object, are not stabilized.
Kristeva also extends abjection to institutions: political, cultural, and social institutions are compelled to expel the abject but can never eliminate it fully. In fact, they attempt to preserve what is attractive and motivating in it, while deleting or hiding what is repulsive. Put simply: institutions try to define woman as object—covered, hidden, mysterious, in need of control and limitation—while keeping her body at the center of production, reproduction, and consumption. This is clearly visible in the Middle East. Woman stands at the intersection of religious laws, social custom, and the symbolic order. Her body is declared both “sacred” (mother, sister, family honor) and “impure/threatening” (seduction, fitna, deviation). This duality directly reflects Kristeva’s abject structure: woman must be removed for order to remain, but her removal is always incomplete—and this incompletion generates a core crisis within power.
Judith Butler argues that gender is a reiterative performance within social norms and power structures. What we recognize as “woman” or “man” is the product of institutionalized repetitions of behaviors, embodiment, and discourse—performativity. Thus “being a woman” or “being a man” does not express a natural biological truth (Butler, 1990).
Accordingly, “womanhood” is a fluid position continuously formed within power relations. Importantly, woman is not a fixed, homogeneous identity opposed to man; rather, male hegemony can marginalize any gender position other than “man”—which opens the question of other genders. Butler stresses that social recognition of identities inconsistent with the heteronormative symbolic order disrupts dominant discourse and irritates the mechanisms of power reproduction. Hence gender resistance is possible not only through public protest, but also by disrupting the rules of gender performance—for example, women in the Middle East who challenge the symbolic order through the body and body politics, exceeding and refusing stereotypical gender scripts (Butler, 1993).
Body politics can be understood via Foucault’s account of discipline: modern power makes bodies “usable,” “controllable,” and “productive” through surveillance, micro-regulation of behavior, and the internalization of norms. The female body becomes a concentrated target for disciplinary techniques—from medical and hygienic regulation to moral, educational, and media discourses that govern body shape, clothing, sexuality, and even pregnancy (Foucault, 1975).
Within the symbolic order, concepts such as military power, control, and threat are organized at national and international levels under the signifier “security.” Laura Sjoberg calls this gendered security: women’s experiences of violence, insecurity, and war are often ignored in dominant security frameworks. Security is not neutral reality but a discursive construct formed around men’s needs and anxieties, especially those of state and military men (Sjoberg, 2010). Cynthia Enloe likewise emphasizes that global politics is built on women’s labor, bodies, and social roles—from diplomats’ wives to women workers and nurses on military bases (Enloe, 2000). This invisibilization and erasure is itself a political discourse of abjection: not a theoretical “gap,” but a designed process to reproduce male power.
Even key concepts like war and peace carry gendered assumptions: when defined by men, peace often means merely “not fighting,” even when permanent readiness for war is called “peace.” For many women, peace means liberation from violence, rape, poverty, and appropriation. Women’s demands challenge what has been treated as “fluid” and peripheral: in this analytical frame, security, sovereignty, and politics are interrogated not as neutral universals but as historical, male, ideological structures.
Despite the interweaving of religion, ritual, and cultural tradition that reinforce the symbolic order across the Middle East, women face multiple simultaneous mechanisms of oppression. Paradoxically, this very abject positioning is generating new forms of agency across the region—forms that transform women from objects into subjects, and make them participants in the symbolic order. In Iraq and Egypt, for instance, Muslim women have occupied discursive space through choosing forms of dress and maintaining public presence—using the body to “occupy” discourse. Persisting in everyday public life despite authoritarianism or religious fundamentalism signals women’s understanding of the importance of resistance (Al-Ali, 2000).
Disciplinary power works by making individuals recognize it “voluntarily”; unlike classical power, it operates less through direct command and more through normalization and knowledge production. Medical and psychiatric “knowledges” about women’s bodies do not merely observe and treat; they regulate and normalize. Family planning regimes, sexual behavior regulation, and the model of the “good mother” are disciplinary forms that place women’s bodies within constant measurement and judgment. In Middle Eastern societies, discipline is reinforced not only by modern institutions but also by traditional, religious, and political discourses. Women’s clothing becomes not only a religious matter but a tool for social discipline, controlling public space, and representing political authority. Education, family, courts, and media all participate in reproducing this disciplinary order—turning the female body into a site of political and ideological meaning, not simply a biological body. Such power is complex: it represses while producing; it constrains while granting “identity.” Hence the female body is not only controlled but used to stabilize the social and political order—where state, nation, and religion attempt to fold it into their legitimating frameworks.
At a deeper and broader level, “East” and “West” have historically constructed each other as “Others.” For the West, the Middle East is imagined as passive, irrational, emotional, erotic, and in need of guidance. Edward Said’s Orientalism shows how this image is systematically reproduced in Western literature, art, politics, and academia to legitimize colonial domination (Said, 1978).
Conversely, Middle Eastern societies have constructed a defensive image of the “West” that does not necessarily reflect objective reality but forms part of an identity project against colonialism and modernity—often called Occidentalism, where the West is represented as corrupt, rootless, materialist, and anti-moral. Buruma and Margalit (2004) argue that in resistance discourses across the Middle East and parts of Asia—particularly Islamist or nationalist movements—the West becomes both colonizer and symbol of spiritual decay and cultural threat. Thus othering is a two-way operation of power and identity: East and West act as mirror images of their imagined others. In all these ideological clashes, woman remains the abject object.
The image of the “Eastern woman,” as Said implies, can be read as an allegory of the colonial symbolic order’s desire and fear: a fear the Western man carries—sexual and cultural, deeply dual. She is presented as both seductive and victimized; both a threat to Western morality and aligned with modernization. Here we face an even wider symbolic order: a global symbolic order with a male-coded scientific authority that defines, names, and frames women’s “sexual objecthood,” veiling and obedience under the concept of “knowledge.” In this process, Eastern women are assigned a specific position: they remain “on the table.” Despite screams, expressions, and agency, they are presumed silent—either as subjects who must be “saved” or as subjects without independent speech.
In today’s media discourse, the Muslim woman wearing hijab is still treated as a sign of cultural backwardness, without accounting for diversity, personal agency, or choice. This cultural othering reproduces the symbolic order, producing even a “sexual-cultural other.”
Yet discourse is not a closed, inflexible system. Laclau and Mouffe, influenced by post-structuralism, propose resistance from within discourse. Discourse is open and conflictual, always exposed to struggles over meaning. Hegemony is not fixed but a fragile political project constituted through discursive construction—and precisely for that reason, it can be contested and transformed (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985).
From this view, resistant subjects—here, “woman”—do not need to revolt from outside power or language. They can redefine themselves from within the same language and even within subordinated discourses. Resistance is not total exit from the symbolic order but recombination of signifiers and shifting their meaning. Concepts like “Muslim woman,” “mother,” or “modesty,” often conservative and constraining in many Middle Eastern contexts, can be redefined and turned into tools for challenging the existing order. This is particularly visible in regional women’s movements where activists, rather than rejecting religious or national discourse entirely, produce new meanings from within. For example, women who enter public space with Islamic dress while demanding equality are performing the very “discursive struggle” Laclau and Mouffe describe as enabling counter-hegemony. Politics is not the stabilization of meaning but an endless conflict over floating signifiers whose meanings are never closed.
This approach shifts women’s activism away from the myth of liberation “from outside” the structure and toward complex tactics of re-reading, internal modification, and re-articulation within language, culture, and religion. In the patriarchal symbolic order—such as theorized by Lacan, Kristeva, and Foucault—women’s agency and leadership in the Middle East is not merely political activity; it is a discursive and psychic intervention in the structure of power. Women entering politics, education, and social action—whether in Iran’s streets, Rojava’s self-administration, or Palestinian civil resistance—move their body, voice, and position from abject objecthood to resistant subjectivity. This is more than breaking cultural taboos; it is a redefinition of the symbolic order itself: the language that once erased women becomes a battlefield where women rearticulate power, leadership, and legitimacy (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Kristeva, 1982).
In this space, women’s leadership appears not against men but as a structurally disruptive alternative—an alternative that emerges from local religious and cultural discourses and transforms what it means to be a subject (Butler, 1990; Enloe, 2000; Sjoberg, 2010).
Methodology
This article uses a qualitative, interdisciplinary approach that combines Discourse Analysis and Political Psychoanalysis. On one hand, discourse analysis examines how meaning, legitimacy, and resistance are produced within political and gender discourses. On the other hand, political psychoanalysis—drawing on Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva—analyzes the psychic mechanisms behind repression and the return of women’s subjectivity within the symbolic order. In addition, the article uses Roland Barthes’ semiotic approach to analyze layers of signification in discourse. In Mythologies (1957), Barthes shows how culture and ideology naturalize signs to make particular meanings appear self-evident. Here, concepts like “hijab,” “honor,” and “security” are treated as signs: at the first level they appear religious or moral, but at the second level they carry patriarchal myths. Analyzing these two levels shows how the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement performs demythologization and turns the female body from a symbol of obedience into a sign of resistance (Barthes, 1957).
This combined methodology enables a deeper understanding of invisible structures of power, embodiment, and women’s objectification in Middle Eastern contexts. Using the dual theoretical framework as a guide, the article designs a core analytic pathway for the case study of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement and for regional examples.
Violence against women in the Islamic Republic is not merely physical or legal; it is systematic, discursive, and symbolic. The Islamic Republic, as a symbolic order, has used every tool of repression against women’s subjectivity. Instruments such as morality police enforcement, compulsory dress control, discriminatory laws, heavy fines, vehicle confiscation, workplace expulsion, educational and professional deprivation, and the arrest and beating of activists confirm that the female body is treated not only as an “ethical threat” but as a political threat.
This violence intensified clearly after the killing of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 (Shahrivar 1401): street repression, mass arrests, family pressure, and media erasure revealed that women’s desire for self-expression is interpreted as rebellion against patriarchal power. From a Foucauldian perspective, the female body becomes a site for disciplinary power: not only repression, but normalization, bodily management, and production of moral/medical knowledge (Foucault, 1975). Violence against women functions as a tool to preserve political legitimacy because the female body is central to patriarchal structure. From political psychoanalysis, “Woman, Life, Freedom” can be read as the return of the repressed: the erased, objectified, voiceless woman returns with voice, body, and agency and threatens the structure from within (Freud, 1930; Kristeva, 1982). Kristeva’s abject explains this return: what must be expelled to preserve order, but can never be fully expelled. Woman is no longer merely an object; she carries disruption into stabilized order. Reports by organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also show that state reaction is not simply to street protest, but resistance to a psychic–political threat emerging from hidden layers of order (Amnesty International, 2022; Human Rights Watch, 2022).
The symbolic order of the Islamic Republic draws legitimacy not only from religion and law, but from internalizing paternal authority (the Name-of-the-Father) within the collective unconscious (Lacan, 1966). In religious narration this authority is framed as divine and beyond critique. When women refuse this authority through body, media, or clothing choice, they challenge legitimacy. Exiting objecthood—becoming a subject full of desire, expression, and agency—shakes patriarchal structure. Psychoanalytically, the return of the repressed in crisis moments brings the order into anxiety and breakdown (Freud, 1913). The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” opens a crack in stabilized order that disrupts patriarchal power. The movement becomes an intersection of psychoanalysis, discourse struggle, and body politics.
Across many Middle Eastern contexts—Yemen, Rojava, Lebanon, Palestine—despite patriarchal and authoritarian dominance, women have gained influential positions in politics, education, and governance in critical moments and resistance contexts.
Regional Cases (Yemen, Rojava, Lebanon, Palestine)
Yemen (Tawakkol Karman): Tawakkol Karman, journalist, human rights activist, and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is a symbolic figure of women’s resistance in Yemen. She played a key role in protests against Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime and is known as the “Mother of the Yemeni Revolution.” In a deeply patriarchal and conservative society, she used media to open public space for women’s political presence. Her participation challenged global assumptions about Arab women. She demanded not only democracy and freedom of expression, but women’s participation in peace processes and state-building.
Rojava (Northern Syria): Women in the Kurdish women’s movement have played a decisive role in political and military structures. Governance in Rojava is designed around “participatory democracy” and “gender equality.” The co-chair system (co-leadership), requiring every institution to have both a female and male leader, guarantees women’s real decision-making presence. The Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) became a symbol of armed resistance against ISIS, but beyond that, women have leadership roles in constitution drafting, education, social justice, and agriculture. This model, influenced by Abdullah Öcalan’s theories, frames women as the driving force of a “new civilization.”
Lebanon: Women’s movements face obstacles within complex sectarian and political structures, yet women’s role in civil movements—especially the October 2019 protests—was prominent. Women appeared not only at the front lines but also led many slogans, media representations, and social initiatives. In education and civil society, organizations such as KAFA and ABAAD—led by Lebanese women—have been at the forefront against domestic violence and gender discrimination. Some women have entered local councils and parliament by crossing sectarian structures, though participation remains limited.
Palestine: For decades, Palestinian women have been at the forefront of resistance, education, and everyday social care under occupation. From the First Intifada to today, women have been central not only in political organizations (e.g., Fatah and Hamas) but also in education, health, social work, and human rights organizations—key pillars of non-violent resistance. In refugee camps and besieged areas, women have built networks of informal education, psychosocial support, and even local policy-making. Often without formal titles, they manage community life and transmit a culture of resistance.
Across these contexts, common patterns emerge: a combination of resistance and care; substituting patriarchal symbolic order with horizontal networking and intersectional action. Women act simultaneously as fighters, teachers, and leaders. They redefine structural concepts of power and symbolic order in their own idioms—from reworking religion and nationalism to democratic socialism. In Rojava and Lebanon, women develop participatory and council-based structures rather than centralized leadership—forms of women’s leadership. Their action is multilayered across class, religion, ethnicity, and gender.
Table 1. “Woman, Life, Freedom” as a Discursive Text (Laclau & Mouffe)
| Signifier | Role in articulation | Re-signified meaning in the movement | Rival meaning in the dominant order | Position in the chain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Woman | Central signifier (Nodal Point) | Agentic subject; point of rupture; patriarchal anxiety | Controlled object; “honor” | Connects diverse demands |
| Life | Stabilized floating signifier | Dignified life; everyday dignity | Obedience; survival within law/sharia | Equivalent with “freedom” and “woman” |
| Freedom | Empty signifier | Liberation from coercion over body and speech | Conditional freedom within sharia/law | Container representing diverse demands |
| Security | Floating signifier | Security for women’s bodies and public presence | Control of women’s bodies to preserve order | Opposes dominant definition |
| Hijab | Floating signifier | Personal choice; symbol of resistance | Compulsory virtue; official identity | Site of meaning struggle |
| Honor | Floating signifier | Woman’s self-authored dignity | Male ownership over women’s bodies | Antagonistic point |
Analytical Findings: Interpreting Table 1
The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” creates a scene of discursive conflict and draws an antagonistic boundary between two poles: on one side, a “religious–security patriarchal order” that tries—through law, state, and religious–security institutions—to monopolize meaning and control bodies; on the other, equality-seeking and emancipatory demands that represent not only women but also diverse marginalized bodies. In the chain of equivalence, beyond women, groups such as children, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, and even environmental movements are included, since all face disciplinary and discriminatory mechanisms. Thus the slogan constructs a collective “we” of demanding subjects against a “they” representing patriarchal authority—matching what Laclau and Mouffe call the logic of antagonism within hegemony (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985).
Two readings of the slogan’s semantic structure are possible. In this article, “woman” functions as the nodal point around which meanings are fixed; “life” and “freedom” acquire meaning through women’s subjectivation and body politics. Alternatively, some theorists might treat “freedom” as the empty signifier that can hegemonize diverse demands. Yet because this article’s thesis is “woman as point of rupture,” selecting “woman” as nodal point aligns with the theoretical orientation.
Alongside the nodal point, several floating signifiers remain in constant contestation: “life,” “freedom,” “security,” “honor,” and “hijab.” The movement redefines “life” as dignity, non-violence, bodily autonomy, and everyday worth; the dominant order defines it as obedience and survival within sharia/law. “Freedom” becomes bodily, expressive, and public; the dominant order reduces it to conditional freedom. “Security” becomes women’s public safety; the dominant order equates it with controlling women’s bodies. “Hijab” becomes personal choice and resistance; the dominant order insists on compulsory virtue and official identity. “Honor” shifts from male ownership to women’s self-authored dignity. This struggle over signifiers is the main terrain of discursive conflict, as each side attempts to temporarily fix meaning.
A key achievement of “Woman, Life, Freedom” is constructing chains of equivalence against chains of difference. Equivalence ties together heterogeneous demands—bodily rights, street safety, legal equality, political presence—through shared injustice, producing a new “people” as a subject of emancipation. The dominant order tries to stabilize difference through signifiers like compulsory chastity and male-coded security, sharpening the “us/them” frontier. This articulation shows how the movement can fracture hegemonic order through temporary fixation of meaning—always unstable, always contested, but politically enabling.
Even if “woman” is treated here as nodal point, the role of “freedom” as empty signifier remains crucial. Freedom functions as an empty container in which workers, students, ethnic and religious minorities, allied men, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized groups can inscribe their demands without dissolving discursive unity. This emptiness gives freedom high hegemonic capacity and allows the movement to become broader than a “women’s movement” and toward a general emancipatory project.
Through hegemonic recombination, the slogan transforms dominant signifiers: “security” becomes women’s bodily and social safety; “hijab” shifts from imposed virtue to a visible instrument of discipline; “honor” becomes women’s autonomous dignity rather than male ownership. These meaning-shifts are rupture moments enabling an alternative hegemonic project and undermining the legitimacy foundations of the existing order (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Laclau, 2005).
The slogan also disrupts subject positions: woman moves from being the object talked about to the subject who speaks, acts, and represents. Men shift from “guardians of honor” to potential allies within the chain of equivalence. The state and religious–security institutions, once framed as guardians of truth and order, are repositioned as the antagonistic “other.” In sum, “Woman, Life, Freedom” is not only a protest slogan but a hegemonic mechanism for redefining power: woman as nodal point; freedom as empty signifier; life as a new ethical–political horizon; and an antagonistic frontier that pits “the people” against patriarchal order (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Laclau, 2005).
Reproducing the Symbolic Order: “Man, Homeland, Prosperity” vs “Woman, Life, Freedom”
“Woman, Life, Freedom” emerges not in a vacuum but in direct opposition to patriarchal-authoritarian discourses. A prominent rival formulation is “Man, Homeland, Prosperity.” Here “man” functions as the nodal point around which “homeland” and “prosperity” are organized. Woman has no independent subject position; she appears as a silent object—either “honor” to be protected or “mother” whose role is to produce soldiers. In contrast, “Woman, Life, Freedom” builds an alternative order in which woman is a subject and meanings of life and freedom are redefined through women’s lived experience. This makes visible the rupture between reproducing patriarchal symbolic order and attempting to destabilize it.
Table 2. Two Discourses in Opposition
| Alternative discourse: Woman, Life, Freedom | Reproductive discourse: Man, Homeland, Prosperity |
|---|---|
| Nodal point: Woman → agentic subject, point of rupture | Nodal point: Man → hero/defender |
| Life = dignity, worthy life, liberation from violence | Homeland = defined through male gaze |
| Freedom = empty signifier representing diverse demands | Prosperity = product of male sacrifice; women’s labor erased |
| Woman = from object to subject | Woman = silent object (honor/mother/companion) |
| Resistance and redefinition from within the symbolic order | Reproduction and stabilization of patriarchal symbolic order |
This comparative table shows an antagonistic opposition at the level of articulation: the first constructs a counter-hegemonic project by centering women’s subjectivation; the second reproduces patriarchal order by centering male heroism and erasing women’s agency—matching Laclau and Mouffe’s logic of frontier-making in hegemonic conflict (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985).
Challenges and Structural Barriers in the Middle East
The history of the Middle East shows that the female body has been not only an arena of political and moral dispute but also a primary site of action and resistance. Since the late nineteenth century, women in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Iran stood at the forefront of reform and modern movements—from Egyptian women’s participation in the 1919 uprising against British colonialism and the formation of early women’s unions in Cairo, to Iranian women’s active role in the Constitutional Revolution (1906–1907; 1285 SH) and the publication of journals such as Danesh and Zaban-e Zanan that placed women’s bodies and education at the center of social modernization. Later, anti-colonial and independence struggles—especially in Algeria, Tunisia, and Palestine—again turned the female body into a field of resistance: from Algerian women using clothing to conceal weapons and political messages in the struggle against French colonialism (Fanon, 1959), to Palestinian women whose embodied public presence and informal education in the First and Second Intifadas became symbols of survival and national resistance. In Iran’s 1970s and the 1979 revolution, women’s bodies again became ideological battlegrounds between state modernization and religious restoration. Afterward, every social uprising—from the Green Movement to “Woman, Life, Freedom”—has reactivated the politics of the body. This discontinuous yet recurring history shows that in the Middle East women have not only been present in political transformations; through their bodies they have rewritten the meaning of politics, morality, and resistance—an embodied presence that escapes control and, under repression, becomes a scene for the emergence of subjectivity.
Across the region, experiences in Yemen, Rojava, Lebanon, and Palestine show women can redefine key concepts of power by combining resistance and care and by building participatory and council-based structures that re-signify freedom, security, and homeland through women’s experience.
Three structural barrier levels are highlighted:
- Law: laws that systematically suppress women rather than protect citizens. In family law, men often hold rights to divorce, custody, and polygamy, while women may require a guardian’s/husband’s permission to divorce or travel (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen). In some contexts, women’s testimony or inheritance is valued as half that of men (based on certain jurisprudential readings). Compulsory dress regulation and restrictions on sports, employment, and mobility turn women’s bodies into direct targets of policy and discipline.
- The body as risk: being non-male becomes sufficient to be exposed to sexual violence, threats, and erasure. Women activists in Iran, Palestine, Bahrain, and Egypt frequently face threats of arrest, torture, and sexual assault. Women’s security is endangered not only by the state but also at home and in neighborhoods: many are threatened with family pressure, social expulsion, or so-called “honor killings.” This insecurity makes women’s activism costly and pushes some toward silence, migration, or covert work.
- Public mentality: society remains unfamiliar with or hostile to the image of a “woman leader.” Common beliefs portray women as emotional and incapable of management; certain religious interpretations depict women’s political leadership as illegitimate. Women’s political participation is often framed as “moral corruption” or “immodesty.” State media and cultural products reproduce ridicule and distrust toward women leaders. Political psychoanalysis reads this cultural resistance as part of a patriarchal collective unconscious reproduced through language, myth, religion, and education—where any attempt to leave subordination is treated as a threat to the symbolic order.
Findings / Discussio
Within political psychoanalysis, critical discourse analysis, and feminist theory, transforming patriarchal order becomes a historical, psychic, ethical, and political necessity. Three main components articulate this necessity:
1) The suppression of women as management of psychic anxiety—not merely an instrument of power
From Lacan, Freud, and Kristeva, the symbolic order is not only linguistic or social but also psychic; woman is both desire and threat. She is the abject object to be expelled so the order can stabilize—yet expulsion is never complete. Woman is present in discourse but voiceless. This is not historical accident but a psychic condition of power: a masculine anxiety that fears woman as Other while being drawn to her. Thus women’s resistance is not only political; it is the return of the historically and psychically repressed into the discursive surface.
2) Structural incapacity and unresolved crisis
Patriarchal systems in the Middle East are built on centralized power, exclusion of the other, and dependence on traditional authority. Facing contemporary crises—legitimacy, war, social breakdown—these structures have failed to offer flexible, participatory, humane responses. Fear of women symbolizes fear of change: once women become demanding agents, patriarchal order resorts to psychic–political repression, because change means losing the historical language of legitimacy.
3) Women’s leadership as a participatory, care-centered, language-based alternative
Unlike traditional leadership based on command, domination, and exclusion, women’s leadership—discursively and experientially—emphasizes dialogue, care, and rebuilding social relations. Following Gilligan, this is tied not to biological sex but to an ethic of care and contextual sensitivity. Across Iran, Rojava, Lebanon, and Yemen, women’s leadership appears as:
- built on co-leadership, horizontal democracy, and gender equality;
- emphasizing social rebuilding and care in the face of violence;
- using local language and cultural concepts to enable redefinition of power signifiers.
Language and the female body as ongoing redefinition
Following Cixous’s écriture féminine, writing that emerges from women’s bodies and experiences breaks and reconstructs patriarchal language. This aligns with Butler’s performativity thesis: gender is not fixed but executable and re-signifiable. Woman is not only a political leader but a linguistic and cultural subject rewriting the symbolic order.
From resistance to reconstruction: future horizons
Women’s resistance in the Middle East is not only negation of order; it is reconstruction of meaning, language, law, and legitimacy from within those structures. As Laclau and Mouffe argue, meaning is never fully fixed; power signifiers are always contested. Women who appear in public with hijab but equality demands, or women who craft different language inside male institutions, are not external oppositions; they are internal transformers—re-articulating from within the symbolic order.
Conclusion
In power discourses across Middle Eastern states, women’s bodies, desires, and voices operate—often unconsciously—as a psychic–political threat to the existing order. From this perspective, the emergence of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran—and its global expansion—is not merely a freedom-seeking social protest arising from injustice. It is a global demand for women’s entry into power as subjects—centered on body, desire, voice, and women’s discourse. Middle Eastern women no longer consent to remain fixed as abject objects, even when such fixation appears stabilized. Through layers of structural violence and deep cultural identity crisis, women express themselves, challenge patriarchal tradition layer by layer, and destabilize the symbolic order—not only in Iran or the Middle East, but wherever “Woman, Life, Freedom” has been sung and spoken.
Within political psychoanalysis, the suppression of women must be located not only in law or surface traditions, but in men’s structural anxieties, fear of losing control, and the linguistic order of power. Woman, as abject, is both expulsed and unexpellable; both a threat to coherence and a condition for discursive survival. She is the internal rupture point of every patriarchal structure: her absence makes power stabilization possible, but her presence shakes its foundations. Yet precisely from within the same language, discourse, and repressive structure, the possibility of redefining power and subjectivity emerges—not necessarily from outside.
Women who appear in streets, schools, media—and increasingly politics—are recombining the meaning of power, legitimacy, and security, meanings previously monopolized by male order. Figures such as Tawakkol Karman, women’s councils in Rojava, Palestinian teachers, and Lebanese activists testify that women’s leadership is not merely a feminist alternative, but a structural necessity for moving beyond existing socio-political deadlocks: a leadership that signifies not vertical concentration but horizontal participation; not command but care; not exclusion of the other but coexistence and dialogue.
Therefore, changing patriarchal systems is not only a political or feminist demand but a historical, psychic, theoretical, and civilizational necessity—necessary for moving beyond structures suffering legitimacy crisis and incapable of confronting contemporary complexity. A power that reproduces itself through women’s erasure, expulsion, and silence is condemned to collapse. What is being born in the Middle East is a voice that seeks not to exit structure, but to rewrite it: a feminine, fluid, resistant voice. A democratic, durable, and just future in the region becomes possible only when woman is no longer merely an object to be spoken about, but a subject who rewrites discourse—where resistance penetrates the very language of power, and leadership begins with women’s voice.
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Appendix: Key Concepts
Symbolic Order (Lacan)
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the symbolic order refers to the structure of language, law, culture, and power that people enter from childhood and within which identity is formed. Because language is historically shaped by patriarchy, the symbolic order also carries patriarchal structure. For example, a law requiring a woman to obtain her husband’s permission to leave the country is not just a legal rule; it belongs to a symbolic order that defines women as subordinate, surveilled, and politically less capable. Likewise, school textbooks that show women only as mothers or wives reproduce a male-centered symbolic order through language and education.
Hegemony
Hegemony means power exercised not mainly through direct force but through social acceptance and internalization—people recognize and value the authority even without external pressure. First developed by Gramsci and later expanded by Laclau and Mouffe. For example, when women themselves believe “politics is for men,” or say “I’m not political; my husband decides,” patriarchal hegemony is at work—soft power reproduced through media, education, and religion.
Subjectivation
Subjectivation is the process through which people become particular kinds of “selves” through language, law, social order, and media. It can produce obedience (e.g., the “obedient woman” in patriarchal order) or resistance (the “rebellious/agentic woman”). In the Islamic Republic, women were long reproduced as obedient subjects through compulsory hijab, employment restrictions, and media portrayals of women as housewives. But in “Woman, Life, Freedom,” this shifted: woman moved from controlled object to agentic subject who protests, speaks, chooses, and redefines herself—showing subjectivation can also emerge through resistance.
Abject (Kristeva)
The abject is what society tries to expel as a threat to order, purity, or stabilized identity—yet can never fully remove, because it also carries fascination and attraction. The abject sits on borders: neither fully inside nor outside; neither eliminable nor fully assimilable. In the Middle East, the female body is a primary abject: called sacred (mother, honor) and also impure/threatening (fitna, seduction). Woman must be hidden and controlled to preserve patriarchal order, yet the same order continually uses her body in production, consumption, reproduction, and ideology. The state manages this contradiction through compulsory hijab, censorship, and repression—trying to expel women from public space—while still reproducing women’s presence in controlled forms.
Empty Signifier (Laclau)
An empty signifier is a term with no fixed meaning, capable of carrying diverse demands. “Freedom,” for instance, can mean hijab choice for a hijabi woman, freedom from compulsory hijab for another, job security for a worker, and fearless speech for a student. In “Woman, Life, Freedom,” “freedom” functions as an empty signifier because multiple groups can articulate their demands through it.
Butler’s Gender Performativity
Butler argues gender is not a natural essence but enacted through repeated behaviors, dress, gestures, and speech. If these repetitions change, gender meaning changes too. For example, a young woman with short hair, nonconforming clothing, and assertive public presence disrupts the dominant “performance” of womanhood defined as obedient and domestic—creating cracks in patriarchal order and enabling new gender meanings.
