Queer-Feminism Against War and the Politics of Death
“Woman, Life, Freedom” reimagines power beyond war, patriarchy, and the hierarchies that decide which lives matter.
If war is understood not as an event but as a logic—a logic grounded in domination, erasure, and the devaluation of life—then the central question becomes: what can interrupt it? At a time when global powers once again frame war as a solution, from the Middle East to beyond, this question is no longer local. It is urgent and global. “Woman, Life, Freedom” emerges within this urgency as one of the most compelling attempts to break that cycle.
War is often narrated as an exception—an eruption that disrupts order, only for “peace” to return. But from feminist and queer perspectives, war is not an anomaly. It is a continuation: an intensification of the same structures that already organize violence across bodies, genders, and everyday life. As Virginia Woolf argued in Three Guineas, war does not emerge from nowhere; it is rooted in systems that normalize hierarchy, exclusion, and the concentration of power.[1]
From this vantage point, condemning a potential or ongoing war by Israel and the United States against Iran is not merely a geopolitical stance. It is an ethical imperative. Contemporary history, from Iraq to Afghanistan, has repeatedly shown that military intervention, even when framed through the language of “human rights” or “liberation,” often reproduces the very violence it claims to resolve. As Lila Abu-Lughod has argued, the rhetoric of “saving women” has long served to legitimize interventions that ultimately reinforce new forms of control rather than dismantle oppression.[2] This logic does not only objectify women; it also renders queer bodies as either targets of salvation or elimination.
Yet any critique that looks only outward remains incomplete. Inside Iran, the Islamic Republic operates through deeply entrenched forms of structural violence: the regulation of women’s bodies, the criminalization of dissent, and the systemic persecution of queer people. In Frames of War, Judith Butler asks which lives are considered “grievable” and which are not.[3] This distinction is not abstract. It is political. Some lives are rendered so precarious, so devalued, that their loss barely registers as loss at all.
For me, this is not only theoretical. War is something I have felt in the space of disconnection—when internet shutdowns turn communication with family into an anxious speculation: Are they still alive? In those moments, war is no longer geopolitical; it becomes intimate. It circulates through the body: in insomnia, in racing thoughts, in the exhaustion of imagining catastrophe. And for those already living under conditions of control—women, queer individuals, the marginalized—this experience is intensified, layered, and inescapable.
Paris — March 8, 2026: Portrait of Asal Abasian, journalist and queer feminist activist | Photographer: François-Xavier Manceau
Paris — March 8, 2026: Portrait of Asal Abasian, journalist and queer feminist activist | Photographer: François-Xavier Manceau
Paris — March 8, 2026: Portrait of Asal Abasian, journalist and queer feminist activist | Photographer: François-Xavier Manceau
Paris — March 8, 2026: Portrait of Asal Abasian, journalist and queer feminist activist | Photographer: François-Xavier Manceau
It is within this context that “Woman, Life, Freedom” must be understood. Originating in the Kurdish feminist movement of Rojava as “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî,” and globally amplified after the killing of the young Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini in 2022, the slogan is not merely a chant; it is a reordering of values. “Woman” here is not a fixed identity but a political position: a name for all those whose bodies have been sites of regulation and control. “Life” resists a politics organized around death. “Freedom” is not an abstract promise, but something that must be lived, materially and bodily.
If, as Cynthia Enloe suggests, militarization extends into everyday life—shaping economies, cultures, and intimate relations—then “Woman, Life, Freedom” can be understood as a project of demilitarization.[4] It seeks to reclaim life from the logics of domination and to center care, interdependence, and dignity.
Literature has long revealed what official narratives conceal. In The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich documents the experiences of Soviet women in World War II not as heroic myth, but as embodied memory: fear, hunger, grief, survival.[5] These testimonies dismantle the aesthetics of war and return us to its material reality: the production of suffering.
Contemporary contexts echo this pattern. In Gaza, women face compounded vulnerabilities under siege conditions, with restricted access to healthcare, safety, and basic resources.[6] In Sudan, ongoing conflict has led to widespread sexual violence and the collapse of social infrastructures.[7] In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s return to power has once again rendered women’s bodies a primary site of control—excluding them from education, work, and public life, in what can only be understood as a form of systematic violence. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has abducted thousands of women and girls, subjecting them to forced labor and sexual slavery.[8] And in Rojava, experiments in women-led governance have attempted, however imperfectly, to reimagine political structures beyond patriarchal norms.[9]
These are not exceptions. They are patterns.
For this reason, any project that claims liberation while reproducing the logic of war risks reinstating the very structures it seeks to oppose. One cannot bomb a population into freedom, just as one cannot justify internal violence in the name of resistance. These are not opposing forces; they are variations of the same political grammar.
“Woman, Life, Freedom” offers a break from that grammar. It is not merely reactive; it is propositional. It calls for a reordering of the world—one in which life is not instrumentalized, but centered. A world in which nobody is deemed disposable on the basis of gender, sexuality, or political position.
To return to this horizon is not to retreat into idealism. It is to make a necessary ethical choice: to side with life over death, with care over domination, and with solidarity over erasure. At a time when war is once again presented as a solution, this return is not optional. It is urgent.
If cycles of violence are to be broken—if life is to be reclaimed from beneath the weight of both war and authoritarianism—there is no alternative but this: a sustained commitment to the horizon that “Woman, Life, Freedom” has opened.
References:
* Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press, 1938.
* Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
* Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
* Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
* Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Random House, 2017.
* UN Women, “Gender Alert: Gaza,” 2024.
* United Nations, “Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Sudan,” 2023–2024 reports.
* Amnesty International, Our Job is to Shoot, Slaughter and Kill, 2015.
* Meredith Tax, A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2016.
Queer-Feminism Against War and the Politics of Death #QueerFeminism #WomanLifeFreedom
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