The vast uprisings across Iranian cities in the fall of 2022 caught many of Iranian studies scholars and academic feminists in the diaspora off guard. My first confrontation was with trauma. Like many others, I worried about the lives and safety of my loved ones, political dissidents and prisoners from different ethnic backgrounds, feminists and queer activists on the ground, and, of course, the millennials and Gen Z, who unexpectedly emerged as the new revolutionaries. However, with the first wave of emotional encounters settled, the uprising unlocked another level of cognitive puzzlement critical to my academic life. I struggled to find comprehensive theoretical frameworks and supporting scholarship within Iranian studies or Iranian academic feminism to help my media and scholarly audiences grasp what was unfolding. In this reflective piece, I discuss how the scholarship of Iranian studies and feminism/s formulated the question of gender in liberal and radical essentialist multiculturalism and argue that Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF) urges us to adopt an antiracist and radical democratic approach, deconstructing the imagined Iran in the scholarship, and reconstructing it as a welcoming and inclusive discursive space for racialized and queer Iranians.

2022 年秋天，伊朗各城市发生的大规模起义让许多伊朗研究学者和海外的学术女权主义者措手不及。我的第一次遭遇是创伤。和其他许多人一样，我担心我的亲人、政治异见人士和来自不同种族背景的囚犯、当地的女权主义者和酷儿活动人士的生命和安全，当然还有千禧一代和 Z 世代，他们意外地成为新的一代。革命者。然而，随着第一波情感遭遇的平息，起义开启了另一个层面的认知困惑，这对我的学术生活至关重要。我努力在伊朗研究或伊朗学术女权主义中寻找全面的理论框架和支持奖学金，以帮助我的媒体和学术受众了解正在发生的事情。在这篇反思性的文章中，我讨论了伊朗研究和女权主义的学术成果如何在自由主义和激进本质主义多元文化主义中阐述性别问题，并认为《女人、生命、自由》（Zan、Zendegi、Azadi；WLF）敦促我们采取一种反种族主义和激进的民主方法，解构学术中想象的伊朗，并将其重建为种族化和酷儿伊朗人欢迎和包容的话语空间。