sareh z afshar

Upcoming Events (2023)

Woman*, Life, Freedom: Stories of a Revolution in the Making
March 8, 2023
Brooklyn Public Library, Dweck Center

On September 16, 2022, 22 year-old Mahsa Amini was killed in police custody in Iran for her alleged improper wearing of the hijab. Her death, along with the deaths of several other women at the hands of the regime, has led to an uprising of consistent protests that have lasted longer than any other form of resistance since the 1979 Revolution.

Join us in a conversation about the historical causes of the current resistance, as well as the young men and women who are propelling a revolution that extends beyond the borders of Iran. Featuring Sareh Z Afshar, Yasi Alipour, Marzieh Tofighi Darian, Afruz Amighi, and Diba Mirzaei. Moderated by Alexis Fedor.

PSi #28 Conference
August 2–5, 2023
Uhambo Luyazilawula: Embodied Wandering Practices
Johannesburg, South Africa

“Have You Ever...”: The Limits of the Sayable of Migrant Life

What have we lost in handing over provisions of our individual security to nation states? What might we gain by highlighting the unseen labor of “maintaining legal status,” and can doing so progress our considerations of inter-relationality in late capitalism? And finally, how does the violence of the exclusionary practices of border imperialism—weapons of empire par excellence—extend into and ground our understanding of the violence of inclusion? This paper attends to these questions by examining the durational practice of maintaining legal status. Choppy at best, this duration is cut up according to arbitrary and nation-state-specific rules. And yet where this duration is perhaps most cohesively and consistently encountered is in the questions posed in visa applications themselves: the “Have you ever...” questions that make use of an ever that may seem like it extends only into the past, but also functions to extend the questions into the future—the etymology of ever, derived from the Old English æfre, implies an “always.” This paper argues that this projection via the use of ever serves to prolong the moment of the visa application, and to create certain subjectivities in its wake: it attempts to ensure the migrant subject who never does certain things. Maintaining legal status then is knowing what is unsayable, or what the unsayable is, and with this knowledge comes the determination of what is “sayable” in the public sphere of migrant life.

MESA Annual Meeting
November 2–5, 2023
Palais des congrès
Montréal, Québec, Canada

If Knowledge Is for Cutting, What Is Cutting for? On Iranian Women Rising & Cuts that Wander

“… knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting.” (Foucault, 1984)  

“Within the interdependence of mutual (non-dominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being.” (Lorde, 1979)

From Saqqez to Brooklyn, Santiago to Berlin, the mournful yet militant gesture of scissor-yielding women* lopping off locks of their own hair has wandered globally in the aftermath of the criminal killing of the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, Jina (Mahsa) Amini. Revived on the gravesites of numerous Iranian protestors killed in the women*-led protests that engulfed Iran, this supposedly traditional mourning rite has since been repeated in spaces ranging from domestic town squares to street rallies organized abroad by Iran’s diaspora population, to viral social media celebrity compilations, to concerts and awards ceremonies worldwide, and even to the EU Parliament floor.

To some, the message carried by cutting seems straightforward: one of solidarity with Iranian women*. If this viral action does in fact bring about solidarity, what does this solidarity do? Does it help center non-normative bodies and desires on a global scale, which is arguably at the root of this revolutionary, leaderless uprising’s core slogan, “Woman*, Life, Liberty”? Can it help us ascertain obscure or occluded genealogies of feminist, queer, and liberationist thought and practice? (How) Do the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist struggles of the Global South labor, gender, and justice movements make room for the differences of Iranian women* and queer people beyond their gender/sexuality? Or is this solidarity the self-aggrandization of networks of neoliberal feminism coupled with celebrity activism, and merely posturing as such? And if this is the case, how can models of retro-speculation be leveraged to help preserve this leaderless movement, prevent its cooptation, and use it to continue imagining the inhabitable futures it promised?

By employing José Muñoz’s methodology of associative thinking that leads to the construction of new and random archives, this paper attends to these questions by putting this gesture in conversation with Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) to explore how cutting—when read as an act concerned with the disruption of memory and the obsolescence of history—can help us cut down on some of the discontents that continue to weigh transnational feminist and queer solidarities down.

References
Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books.
Lorde, Audre. 2002 [1980]. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House: Comments at “The Personal and the Political Panel (Second Sex Conference October 29, 1979).” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, 106–09. Berkeley, CA: Third Women Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.

Past Events (2019 - 2022)

ACLA 2022 Annual Meeting
June 15-18, 2022
National Taiwan Normal University
Taipei, Taiwan

Vast Voids:
War, Mourning, and Holding Space Together in Gohar Dashti's Sticky Photographs

Drawing from two photographic series by artist Gohar Dashti, Iran, Untitled (2013) and Today’s Life and War (2008), I argue that the convergence of sacred and profane spaces in Tehran has resulted in an imposition of a self-surveilling opto-architectural order upon the everyday practices of Iran’s capital-dwellers. This architectural form—which I dub the “necropticon” following Foucault’s panopticon—is one that functions to hierarchize the population and their dead, along with mourning and public feelings, because of its performance of unvisibility, functioning through its simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility (an affective excess). A disciplinary mechanism that functions through the overmarked nature of certain deaths, the necropticon is obtained from exteriorizing the markers conventional to interior spaces: in Tehran, martyrs get to oversee everyone who ventures out under the gaze of their long-fixed eyes, hand-painted on buildings and billboards. I examine how the necropticon’s architectural form translates into affect to take on a different transmissive force. Affects pave the way for “the sociality of mourning,” a designation I use to posit mourning as an act of being sociable, as a becoming sight and sound of sense, facilitating the formation of an alternative mode of collectivity. This model is long familiar to Iranians, as is abiding with the dead, and it is through their coupling that revolutionary counter-moods are born and bred.

NCA 108th Annual Convention
Honoring PLACE: People, Liberation, Advocacy, Community, and Environment
November 17-20, 2022
New Orleans, Louisiana

Maintaining Legal Status: An Unseen Durational Performance 

The term “status” finds its roots in the Latin stare—to stand, make or be firm—and eventually came to imply a sense of “standing in one's society or profession” and later “legal standing of a person.” The term “maintain,” meanwhile, stems from manu tenere—hold in the hand—meaning “to support, uphold, aid,” and indicating a sense of “hold in an existing state or condition, keep in existence or continuance.” What the juxtaposition of these two terms implies in the maze of our global security architecture, which restricts movement and opportunity for some, is the subject at the heart of them. That is, one person is tasked with “standing” and with enacting the “support” to hold themselves up—an exhausting ask, and misleading expression. The intense emotional and actual labor of paperwork, visas, border crossings is rendered invisible as the effort takes on the parameters of durational practice. This paper seeks to bring visibility to the dilemma to ask: What have we lost in handing over provisions of our individual security to nation states? What might we gain by highlighting the unseen labor of “maintaining legal status,” and can doing so progress our considerations of inter-relationality in late capitalism?

After the Cohort
February 14, 2020
Dept. of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, PS Studio
New York, NY 10003

In response to the antisocial thesis in queer theory, and as a proponent of queer of color critique, José Esteban Muñoz famously theorized queerness as forward-dawning and relational. Given our contemporary moment, however, there is a renewed interest in queerness as a negative, destructive, nonrelational force. Deeply indebted to the work of Muñoz, this symposium reunites and puts into public conversation a cohort of four of his students—Sareh Z Afshar, Joshua Guzmán, Summer Kim Lee, and Daniel J Sander. The cohort will join together to think at a practical level about cohorts and students—what students build or do not build, what they inherit or do not inherit—in order to think at a theoretical level about what a queer and distinctly relational politics and aesthetics could be, even if it is borne out of negativity. Speakers will draw on their areas of study—including Art History, Asian American Studies, Iranian Studies, and Latinx Studies—to consider negation in critical theory, performance, and aesthetics.  A reception will follow the symposium.

Forty Years and More: The First International Conference on Iranian Diaspora Studies
March 28-30, 2019
Seven Hills Conference Center
San Francisco State University
800 Font Blvd, Mary Ward Hall
San Francisco, CA 94132

Objects of Difference:
Diasporic Bodies, Translocal Affects, and the Primacy of Passage over Positionality

In 2009, the IMF reported that Iran’s brain drain—its loss of trained professional workforce to other nations offering better opportunities—sits atop the global list, with an annual loss of 150,000–180,000 of its academic elite to “developed” countries. Following the bloody post-electoral street protests of the same year, it could be surmised from stories coming out of Tehran and other urban centers that if not the actual number, then the number of those wishing to leave the country has been on the rise. My essay concerns itself with asking: What translocal affects has this specific form and high level (of talk) of travel helped deploy?

As Georges Van Den Abbeele has argued, to speak of travel is inevitably to engage in it, to embody the movement implied by the words; i.e. our speech utterances effectively change our position as matter in the world, transport us. We speak, we shift; we shift, we change; we change, we speak differently—and speak differently, an immigrant population always does. Speaking differently poses a problem, a threat that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have addressed in claiming the unity of language to be “fundamentally political.” Can a population whose accents often betray their foreignness and whose grammar is frequently faltering, fully submit to the social laws of their host nations to ease the apprehension with which they are likely received? I take up José E. Muñoz’s adaption of “identity-in-difference” to discuss the struggles of assimilation the Iranian diaspora has faced, both from their host and home nationals.

On the flipside of this equation are the migrants and their discontents. If “travel” comes from the French term “travailler”—to work—we must go beyond the physical to ask: What is the emotional work of travel? Exemplary of this labor, my paper closes on an analysis of how Iranians have been employing mixed linguistic fabrications in various social media outlets—“Penglish” and “Enarsi”—to change the negative prevalence of a sense of dépaysement (disorientation as a result of not being in their home country) common to Iranian diaspora, to a more positive one rooted in potentiality.

Screening Performance, Performing Screens: New Projections in Theatre and Media
May 13-14, 2019
The Graduate Center
City University of New York
365 5th Ave
New York, NY 10016

The Performance of Unvisibility in Postrevolutionary Iran:
Martyrdom on Display and Self-Surveillance in the Age of Necropticism 

Skin is what we show of ourselves and see of others, how we know and come to be known. Steven Connor suggests that the reason skin—in and of itself—figures so prominently in our current moment is due to “the multiplication of skin-surfaces… [and] signifying screens” and not merely a result of its evermore visible presence in social representations. Identifying the photograph as “[t]he first such modern skin-surface,”1 he joins together the acts of touching and looking. Roland Barthes too was fixated on the ways in which light operated as “a carnal medium, a skin [he shared] with anyone who has been photographed,” as well as radiations that “touch”ed the photographed body “to [his] gaze.”2 However, what both of these thinkers overlook in their meditations on the allure of the photograph is their own participatory role in this linkage, leaving all the work of touching and feeling up to the image, the photograph, the other.

Taking its cue from this missing link, this paper interrogates the affective work of a particular spectator. That is, it looks specifically at how the interplay of the images of the martyred dead of the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88)—ubiquitous in the urbanscape as well as in private domains—along with the living dead, blistered bodies of veterans and civilians exposed to mustard gas during said war, work to create the architectural form I dub the “necropticon,” in which the aforementioned spectator is a direct collaborator. In turn, this disciplinary mechanism, obtained from exteriorizing the markers conventional to interior spaces, functions to hierarchize the population and their dead, along with public feelings. Crucially—as I argue through an analysis of Gohar Dashti’s conceptual photo series Today’s Life & War (2008)—this opto-architectural technology of power does so not in spite of but precisely because of its performance of unvisibility, promised through the normalization of the sights of the memorialized dead and the living dead among Tehrani spectators. 

 1. Steven Connor. 2001. “Mortification,” In Thinking through the Skin, edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, 36–52. London: Routledge, p. 36.
2. Roland Barthes. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, p. 81.