It is difficult to critique a documentary like Forbidden Voices without falling into alliance
with the repressive regimes that the film denounces. The
danger in that critique of the
film's simple
binaries (juxtaposing a
free West and North and an oppressed and authoritarian East and
South), however,
is the danger of discourse in
a world where
the tools and agents of
resistance the illegitimate
children of the military-industrial complex.i
There are no easy or innocent
statements in this context, and no easy answers. Forbidden
Voices unfortunately
largely ignores these
complexities in favor of the
elevation of its three subjects—Yoani
Sanchez of Cuba, Zeng Jinyan of China, and Farnaz Seifi of Iran—as
uncomplicated protagonists of political
struggle. This can be seen
with particular clarity in the case of Seifi,
whose case highlights the film's strengths, its failings, and
ways in which changing the medium might undo some of these problems.
Seifi's
section focuses at the outset upon state misogyny, with interviews
from Seifi describing the devaluing of women in her
home country of Iran. Her interviews are thus among the most valuable
in the film, providing
excellent insights into the
political and historical context in which Seifi works. It
is a context of feminist struggle that dovetailed in 2009 with the
wider Green Movement, which emerged in opposition to President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before being brutally repressed. Much has been
written already about the role of women in this revolution and the
way in which the Green Movement offered hopes of feminist reform.ii
In highlighting Seifi's first
hand account of the way in which the Internet facilitated a strong
feminist movement, the film makes good on the promise of its tagline
(“How to start a revolution with a laptop”) and adds a valuable
perspective to the Green Movement, suggesting that it is a coalition
of different interests that
are, by necessity, “stepp[ing] in unison with one another.”iii
There are echoes here of the critiques of Haraway and Sandoval, which
assert a need for a politics of affinity rather than a collapsing of
individuals into identity experiences.iv
This history, however, is
used in a frustratingly uncomplicated and unexamined way by the film.
The statement by Zahra
Rahnavard, wife of Green
Movement leader Hossein
Mousavi, that, simply, she “is no Michelle Obama,”v
with all the political
complexity such a statement implies, is
particularly ironic when considered
alongside film's use of Obama
in the early framing narrative. Michelle
Obama's statements of
support for female bloggers,
despite her specific references to Yoani Sanchez, are framed in such
a way that they appear to encompass
the experiences of all the bloggers (and
perhaps all bloggers in general, although this speech occurred before
Chelsea Manning emerged as an embarrassing and inconvenient
counterexample). It is
juxtaposed with an image of lines of information radiating out—the
World Wide Web realized in glowing light—across the globe,
originating with the film's three subjects and
their geographic locations. The three bloggers and
their experiences are thus equated
in the same way that a global, international feminism has sought in
the past to discover an essential female experience.vi
Another striking quote comes from Seifi herself, in a segment where
she discusses tactical organization. She states that “When you are
an activist who is outside of Iran, the really helpful thing you can
do is to support those inside Iran and try to be their voice.” She
goes on to discuss the way in which she and Reporters Without Borders
have facilitated connections between activists in exile and activists
still within the country. This section is quite useful in the way it
explores the affinities and material strategies for cyberfeminist
resistance.
However, there are two key issues with this presentation. First,
while the message of this section seems to be one of facilitation,
the voice is still Seifi's, and one other expatriate whose interview
Seifi and Lucie Morillon of Reporters Without Borders watch on a
computer screen. The film thus shies away from actualizing the
presumable result of facilitation: the presentation of a wider range
of voices. This highlights the second issue with the film as a whole
and Seifi's activism: the film draws simple binaries in which it is
not just desirable but actually possible for one voice to speak for
millions of men and women within a country. And yet, a very cursory
glance around the Internet shows a far more diverse coalition of
voices than the film's construction of an easily cross-mappable
experience suggests. Consider, for example, the contrast between the
aforementioned Dr Rahnavard's apparent support of traditionalist
religious modesty with expatriate blogger Leila Mouri's vehement
condemnation of the compulsory Hijab.vii
Or consider the reported alliances between Iranian expatriates and
neoconservative think tanks, which other expatriate journalists decry
as a betrayal of the spirit of reform that drove the Green Movement.viii
In a world where state-sanctioned extremism in Iran occurs alongside
Western assassinations of politicians and civilians within Iran, the
simple binaries of the film between authoritarian actors and
liberating actors become highly contested. An interpretation of these
actors as members in various coalitions, as per Sandoval and Haraway,
and the material realities as propositions in a multiverse of
articulate possibilities, as per Bruno Latour, is not a postmodern
slide into relativism but an honest assessment of complex affinities
and alliances of convenience.
It is possible—even likely—that
the film's ability to grapple
with these nuances was
hampered by the limitations inherent in conducting
interviews in a powerful
state dedicated to forbidding Farnaz
Seifi's voice, as
the title suggests. However,
any conjectured problems are certainly compounded by a series of
strange and counterproductive directorial decisions. While it is
possible, for example, that no other participants in the Green
Movement were available for commentary on the impact of Seifi's
writing and the writing and activism of other women, that context
could have been provided by interviews with a wide range of
expatriates that, like Seifi, have left Iran and found refuge for
their ideas with Western and occasionally even Middle Eastern media
sources. Furthermore, a
greater presence of the director herself and her overt choices and
perspectives would have been welcome.
While the absence of a singular authoritative voice-over that, in
outdated modes of documentary production,
asserted absolute objectivity
is welcome and fitting, it
has been replaced by three voices reduced to a singular experience.
The words of the film's
subjects are literally
inscribed in the sky, transforming
into an even more elevated collective figure than the outmoded voice
over could have been. With a total absence of the director's hand,
and a dearth of other voices, the film falls into a trap of
oversimplification and an excessive veneer of objectivity.
The film as part of a wider
institution, however, is more successful, and the way in which the
Internet has been used to expand upon the documentary points towards
a new, far improved mode of production and information distribution.
The Forbidden Voices website includes a Flash-based map of thedifferent bloggers and, in a welcome expansion of the available
voices, the blogger Ory Okolloh of Kenya and the Reporters Without
Borders agent Lucie Morillon. This suggests that the film could be
expanded incrementally to include a far wider range of voices and
experiences that could even potentially be juxtaposed or
counterbalanced with one another. There is great potential here if it
was harnessed properly. Even more impressive are the interviews with
the bloggers and the additional information on their political
context. In Farnaz
Seifi's interview reaction to
the documentary, she describes the fear of a military strike against
Iran, and dismisses sanctions against the country as ineffectual.
This shows an element of political complexity not present in the film
itself, where the West and East are placed into a simple binary. Her
statements are accompanied by
a fascinating Reporters Without Borders brief on the rise of
draconian censorship policies in Iran. Fascinatingly, they point out
that private contractors in the West are largely responsible for the
technology that Iran uses to censor and monitor its citizens. Most
stunning of all is an account of the production of monitoring
technology in Israel, Iran's purported enemy, which is then shipped
to a Dutch firm, which sells this technology to the Iranian
government.
These strange affinities and
disaffinities represent the world as it is: complex, tangled, devoid
of innocent positions. The Forbidden Voices
extended hyperdocumentary, seen specifically through the lens of
Farnaz Seifi and her political context, is thus far more successful
than its traditional core product. It is, more than the documentary
itself, an interested
entity that is capable of producing articulate propositions. This
reaffirms the fundamental value of the Internet as the medium of
choice for a complicated and politically fraught 21st
century, and it suggests that an individual like Seifi—who is,
after all, a profoundly brave figure worthy of our respect—need not
be championed in a simplistic context to be championed at all.
Notes
iDonna
Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and
Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed.
Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 193.
ii“What
we are witnessing in Iran is a natural consequence of years of
feminist presence and the active participation of powerful women in
the public sphere which has taught little girls that being a woman
does not mean just being a mother or a wife and that women must be
present and fighting in order to achieve their rights and demands.”
“Women have been undoubtedly a
great part of the so called "Green Movement." Zahra
Rahnavard, the wife of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi, became
a key part of the campaign. Her presence meant a promise of a more
open arena for women in the political scene and maybe some
relaxation of the rigid social laws. Young women appreciated the
attention that Mousavi gave his wife, treating her as his equal and
a friend. They envisioned that such relationships would become more
widespread in Iran if he became the next president.”
iiiGolbarg
Bashi, “Feminist Waves in the Iranian Green Tsunami?,”
The PBS article links to a series of quotes
from individual writers, which in turn lead to a series of blogs
that, alarmingly, have gone offline since the article was published
four years ago. The original quote, which reads: “we--as members
of the women's movement in Iran and as civil rights activists from
diverse areas such as NGOs, political parties, campaigns, press and
trade unions--have realized that there are many ways in which to
achieve women's demands. When it is necessary, we have stepped in
unison with one another” presumably came from one of the lost
articles.
ivC
Sandoval, “NEW SCIENCES Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of
The,” in Cybersexualities: a Reader on Feminist Theory,
Cyborgs, and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999), 247–263. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto
for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the
1980s,”
v“Dr
Rahnavard has been careful to present herself as a firm believer in
the Islamic revolutions with books such as The Beauty of the Veil.
She stressed recently: 'I am a follower of the daughter of the
Prophet Mohammed, who has the same name as I do. I am no Michelle
Obama. I am Zahra Rahnavard.'" Can I take a moment to step
outside my academic neutrality voice to say that this woman is truly
badass?
viDonna
Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and
Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,”
viiLeila Mouri. “Compulsory Hijab in Iran: There is No Room for Appeasement,” The Huffington Post, July 24, 2012., Kim Sengupta, “Has President Ahmadinejad...”
viii“Meanwhile,
thousands of Iranian dissidents fled Iran and opted for the
indignity of exile in the region, or in Europe or North America.
Some of these dissidents joined intellectual US neocon operations
and/or the pro-Israeli think-tanks to call for regime change in
Iran. But the overwhelming majority of them opted for a full
recognition of the dignified limits of what they could say or do
from abroad and never joined the bandwagon of "regime
changers", or the treasonous path of plotting against their own
homeland.
The outdated monarchists and the
discredited Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) tried to jump on the bandwagon
of the Green Movement but failed. The main body of expatriate
Iranians remained committed to the democratic aspirations of their
homeland but equally adamant and vocal in opposition to the
crippling economic sanctions that Washington neocons, their Zionist
contingency, in collaboration with their Iranian allies, were
seeking to impose on Iranians - or even talk of military strike - as
a kind of 'humanitarian intervention'.” Hamid Dabashi, “What Happened to the Green Movement in Iran?,” Al Jazeera America, June 12, 2013.
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