Woman, Life, Freedom
What if your body is a battlefield by default? Feminist struggle has, at its core, always been a fight for the right to exist – to be seen, heard, and believed. Nowhere was this more powerfully expressed in recent history than in the three words Zan, Zendegi, Azadi – Woman, Life, Freedom. The slogan became known around the world after Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, died in the custody of Iran’s morality police in September 2022 for allegedly wearing her headscarf “incorrectly”. Her death sparked an unprecedented protest movement, in which thousands of Iranian women defied the regime by removing their hijabs, cutting their hair, singing, writing, and reclaiming their place in public space.
Woman, Life, Freedom began in Iran, but it resonates far beyond. The oppression of women is universal, and the mechanisms that sustain it are recognisable across borders. At the same time, the movement carries something profoundly hopeful: that even when nearly all your freedoms have been stripped away, it is still possible to stand up for your rights and desires. That women can organise in the face of repression – and that doing so generates an immense and collective force. That makes Woman, Life, Freedom kin to other feminist movements around the world – like those in Latin America, where women have long taken to the streets to protest gender-based violence, femicide, and structural inequality. The combination of vulnerability and fierce political awareness rings out loud and clear in the wealth of feminist literature from that region. Again and again, all over the world, feminist writers pick up the pen to give voice to what might otherwise be silenced.
At the heart of this programme line lies the question: what can literature and art mean for the feminist fight against oppression? How do writers engage with violence, structural injustice, and gendered power? And what role can female solidarity – between friends, sisters, mothers, lovers – play in dismantling systems that seek to diminish women? (Spoiler: there is, thankfully, also comfort to be found.)
This series brings together writers who interrogate the world through a feminist lens – often against the odds. Featuring, among others, Mexican author Jazmina Barrera, whose luminous memoir Linea Negra explores motherhood through a deeply political lens, and a conversation between Greenlandic writer Naja Marie Aidt and Swedish author Johanne Lykke Holm about violence, womanhood, and the comfort found in female friendship.