Manijeh Moradian

On imperial feminism, transnational solidarity, and inter-generational inheritance.

By Elika Khosravani

Illustration by Iris Pope

I was sitting cross-legged on the Persian rug in my grandparents' guest bedroom in Toronto—a city affectionately nicknamed “Tehranto” for its large Iranian community—when I met with Manijeh Moradian over Zoom. The soft wool brushed against my bare ankles as I absentmindedly recalled childhood memories; tracing the rug’s woven hunters down the woodland’s winding river, daydreaming about the deers dwelling among the meadows. Around me were black-and-white family photographs of my father's childhood in Iran, and on the bedside table, a wooden takhteh board resting beneath my mamanpari's Quran. It felt like the right place to have this conversation. 

The Blue and White first encountered Moradian through staff members who attended her panel, “Transnational Feminist Perspectives,” at this year's Scholar and Feminist Conference, held the morning after the American and Israeli bombing of Iran began in February. We spoke on July 24, during an uneasy lull in months of intermittent strikes on Iran. Moradian firmly rejects that flattening narrative of war and Western intervention in Iran, insisting instead on a different framework for understanding how the ruins of empire and the simmering embers of revolution shape global politics today. 

In addition to serving as an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Moradian is a historian, writer, and organizer. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of the Feminists for Jina Global Network. Once in our conversation, I joked that she seemed to have written an essay on nearly every topic I brought up; it wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Moradian’s scholarship has appeared in Journal of Asian American Studies, Iranian Studies, American Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, to list a few. In addition, her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States received the 2024 Hamid Naficy Book Award from the Association for Iranian Studies and the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. 

Moradian’s work traces the generational shifts and politics of the Iranian diaspora while challenging conventional interpretations that have long defined the U.S. narratives about Iran. Our conversation ranged from the Iran-Iraq War and Cold War politics to student organizing, diasporic identity formations, grassroots feminism, and the ways of building genuine solidarity in an era of continuously-escalating conflict.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

. . . 

The Blue and White: You were born and raised in the U.S. but then you later spent time living in Iran. How did moving between these two cultures shape your personal identity, and subsequently as a scholar?

Manijeh Moradian: Thank you for that question. I want to challenge the framing, because I don’t see the U.S. as one culture and Iran as one culture. I think these are both multicultural societies, and culture has to do with so many different things: your class background, your religious background, where you live. Are you urban? Are you rural? It has to do with your political positioning, what cultural references you’re drawn to. So, I grew up experiencing the U.S. as a space of cultural contestation, a space of social justice organizing, where there were cultures of resistance and cultures of domination, cultures that were anti-racist and anti-war, cultures that were promoting stereotypes. I experienced the U.S. as a culturally dynamic and contested space in which I never identified with the dominant white patriotic nationalist culture in the United States, and that has a lot to do with how I was raised. My father is an immigrant from Iran, and he was deeply influenced by Mohammad Mosaddegh and the Democratic National Oil Nationalization movement. 

B&W: He’s our family hero.

MM: Well, [my dad] was a teenager. He was in high school when Iranians mobilized against British control over oil resources, and they saw themselves as part of a broader decolonization movement that was unfolding across Africa and Asia after World War II. And the Tudeh Party, the Communist Party of Iran, played a very big role in organizing and mobilizing people during that democratic opening from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, and then it was all shut down by the CIA and the joint U.S.-British coup that overthrew Mossadegh and reimposed monarchical rule, which became ever more centralized, becoming a true police state and eventually an official one-party state. My father came to this country knowing full well that the U.S. was not the land of freedom and opportunity. He was very aware of the impact they’d had in Iran and also across the third world, and he was also very aware of racial injustice and class inequality right here in the United States. He was a student at Howard University, a historically black college. He became a professor there, so his home in America was among the African American population, which also included other diasporas: Caribbean diasporas, African diasporas, as well as other students from across West Asia, North Africa—or you know, we call it the Middle East. But I don’t love that.

He was in a place where anti-racist and third world decolonial politics were gaining influence, and eventually, Howard's students became very involved in the civil rights and Black Power movement. So his take on what is the United States and where are we and what’s happening here and how do you position yourself in an imperialist and racist country was not in line with what you’re taught in your elementary school textbook about the U.S. as the best country in the world, bringing freedom across the world. Not only because the U.S. played that nefarious role in country after country after country, undermining democratic movements, installing dictatorships and police states, and waging war explicitly in places like Vietnam, but also because of the migration. There were so many diasporic peoples or exiles or refugees from those interventions that were in the United States, that you could organize alongside. I considered it a privilege, growing up without illusions in American nationalism or empire, and with a consciousness that the cultures that mattered were the cultures of resistance, and those were global. They had deep roots in the United States, but they were not limited to its borders. They extended transnationally.

When I went to Iran in my 20s, I also found a contested society with multiple cultures and subcultures with different class, religious, and ethnic backgrounds, different orientations politically toward the state, toward ways of contesting official religious ideology from within a faith framework, secular frameworks, feminist frameworks. There was a grassroots feminist coalition called the One Million Signatures Campaign, which epitomized the diversity of Iranian subjectivity and political opinion because it was a coalition of women—although not exclusively women! Women were in the leadership, but men could join too, and it was organized around trying to gather 1 million signatures to submit to parliament to overturn 10 laws that discriminate against women and made them officially second-class citizens. That movement included religious women, secular women, leftist women, socialist women. It was the tail end of what we call the reformist years, when President Hatami had overseen an opening in the cultural sphere, which has subsequently been shut down.

I think it’s important to step outside of the framework of the U.S. versus Iran, as if they’re these two monolithic cultures that are inherently counterposed because there's an East-West divide. 

B&W: I appreciate that you mentioned the diversity of opinion within the Iranian diaspora. When the war broke out in January, people I knew—even my own family—were on opposite ends of the spectrum. Some were so glad that the U.S. was bombing Iran, and I remember sitting there, feeling the complete opposite. We have seen time and time again how Western intervention fails the Middle East. I can’t recall an Iran that was ever truly free. To you, what are the biggest challenges that the Iranian diaspora faces when it comes to political solidarity, and what are some misconceptions that people, maybe even outside or inside our community, have about that diaspora? 

MM: I could understand why young Iranians in the diaspora could uncritically buy into the idea that Iran was much better under the Shah. Look at the images of women wearing Western skimpy clothing. I don’t know when skimpy clothing equaled liberation. We should interrogate that. Women should be able to wear whatever they want without state regulation or patriarchal control over their bodies. But it’s not true that one outfit makes you free and another one makes you oppressed. The point is: Are you deciding? Are you consenting? Are you choosing? The mandatory unveiling, which the Shah’s father imposed by law and enforced by police, was very oppressive to women who wanted to cover their bodies out of their own faith and because it allowed them a form of social mobility. Anyway, my point is that for younger generations, they really may not know. They may believe what they see on social media, a sort of pro-Western, pro-Shah propaganda. They may believe what they see on the Iranian diasporic satellite channels that are a 24-hour pro-monarchist, pro-war propaganda machine. They could be forgiven for not knowing how to counter that overwhelming propaganda. 

However, I would say that for the adults, I don’t think it’s true that they don’t know what the U.S. did in Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s not that they don’t know or that they've forgotten or they're turning a blind eye. I think it’s about their emotions. It’s about their affective attachments and orientations. For many Iranians, not all, but for many Iranians in diaspora, especially the ones who have a big social media following or a big platform, they are single-mindedly focused on getting rid of the Islamic Republic government. They don’t want that regime, and that’s all that matters to them. They don't really care if the U.S. slaughtered a million Iraqis or has overseen genocide, funding and arming and aiding and abetting the slaughter of innocent Palestinians and destruction of an entire society in Gaza. They’re only upset about what they lost in Iran. They want to get rid of that government so they can go home, so they can see their loved ones. So they can make money off this huge untapped market. And they want it all to be “normal,” which means integrated into a pro-U.S. global political world order. My most generous reading is that people want to go home. They’re homesick. But if all you can do is focus on your own pain and your own suffering, and nobody else matters, you’ve lost your moral compass. Then ethics, morality, principles, history—all of it goes out the window. 

If you’re angry about the atrocities the Islamic Republic is committing and has committed, the way it's impacted your family, you have all these very loud voices telling you what to do with those feelings: to support the war, right? “The U.S. is going to overthrow the government.” And, “Oh yeah, well, what they did in other countries that may have been awful, but Iran is different. Here in Iran, they're going to really help us.” That becomes a delusional frenzy. Among the diaspora, those sitting comfortably in their homes, hoping that bombing ordinary people, schools, bridges, infrastructure, apartment complexes, [thinking] that this is going to somehow bring freedom. It is one of the most depressing, shameful, abhorrent moments. It is a new low to which our diaspora has sunk. I understand that it’s the result of suffering and grief and loss. I get that, I do. But that doesn’t make it okay to line up behind the forces of war and genocide. That’s never okay. We are not for that kind of politics of retribution and revenge. There’s just not one example ever where a U.S. war and bombs bring freedom. 

Furthermore, it’s not the U.S. agenda. There was a little bit of rhetoric around that for a second, but what Trump is really talking about is control over global trade, taking out Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons and to produce missiles capable of reaching Israel and U.S. allies in the region. They want to control the Iranian government militarily, and they want to control them economically, and that’s really their agenda. Trump was very happy to cut a deal. He doesn't have any principled opposition to police states, dictatorships, authoritarians. That’s what he wants to create here: a fascist dictatorship. He doesn’t even want to leave power when his term is over. Look at the deployment of ICE and National Guard troops in our cities. Look at the rounding up of immigrants in concentration camps. This is one authoritarian fascist cutting a deal with another repressive authoritarian that also uses mass incarceration and detention. Although they don’t have the equal power in the world; Trump and the U.S. have much greater reach and influence, they can bomb and destroy on a scale that Iran cannot. However, there's no inherent clash of values here. 

The important difference is [that] Iran is a sovereign country, and the U.S. has no right to bomb or invade. The only reason the U.S. can do that is because it's an imperial power. It violates their sovereignty. It violates international law. It routinely commits war crimes and is never held accountable. It's not even a signatory to most of the treaties that prohibit these crimes. 

In combination with deep trauma that’s been systematically recruited into a pro-war, pro-monarchist agenda, it eventually sacrifices every kind of moral, ethical principle, every commitment that Iranians might have to dignity, equality, human rights, women’s rights. Any of that is out the window, and it also cuts Iranians off from everybody else in the world, including people right here who are suffering from U.S. militarism and state violence. It is very tragic. It’s a total failure. The U.S. bombs don't liberate anybody.

B&W: In 2025, Netanyahu addressed the Iranian public, saying that, "this is your opportunity to stand up and let your voice be heard. Woman, life, freedom,” actively citing arguably the most famous protest movement slogan for women’s rights in Iran. Through media outlets, we have also witnessed artificial intelligence propaganda of Iranian women removing their veils with the assistance of American and Israeli soldiers. Every time the West goes to war with a majority Muslim country, politicians communicate that this war will serve as an unveiling and that Muslim women will be liberated by Western forces. Although it is undeniable that women in the Middle East are experiencing extreme gender inequality in a harrowing way, the idea that Western violence can bring freedom to me seems very outrageous.. Given your work on Iranian feminism and anti-imperialism, how would you interpret the use of feminist language to justify military action and invasion?

MM: Well, that is imperial feminism. It’s a very old story. It’s a colonial trope of using violence and domination to unveil and liberate women. This is as old as the British going into Egypt, as the conflict between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. But Netanyahu is slaughtering Palestinian women all the time, arresting and torturing them. Why should we even waste our breath on this? This is not something we should entertain or take seriously. It should be absolutely condemned and dismissed. This man is a war criminal. He’s carrying out genocide. He doesn’t care about women or freedom or life. He’s the machinery of death and extermination. So how dare he take women, life, freedom? How dare he even say those words? He is carrying out mass slaughter. Why would he care about Iranian women? It’s a complete lie. It’s akin to pinkwashing. The idea that Israel presents itself as the only pro-gay utopia in a really homophobic Arab world is not true. Israel is a deeply homophobic, patriarchal, sexist society. Just because there are gay nightclubs in Tel Aviv, what does that have to do with rights? Does that mean it’s okay to slaughter Palestinians? It doesn’t. You don’t have to defend an ethno-nationalist apartheid state carrying out occupation and genocide because gay people can walk down the street in a couple of places. It is totally incoherent and it’s designed to distract from the settler colonial project and from the violence against Palestinians. 

It’s the same thing in Iran. They want to bomb and destroy and kill people, but let's distract you by saying, "Oh, we're going to free women.” I don’t think it has the same traction because of Afghanistan, because that was the promise there, and we saw what happened. I think it’s a media blip, with AI and the mainstream media and the algorithms that repeat it over and over again. But we should condemn and denounce it, and then we should actually talk about where the real source of women’s liberation can come from in Iran. If there are any gains for women, it’s because women themselves have organized and fought for them at great cost. It has nothing to do with Israel. 

B&W: What would you think genuine solidarity with Iranian women looks like? How is it different from speaking on their behalf? How do we manage to walk that fine line between speaking up for someone, speaking over them, or speaking with them? 

MM: This is a complicated question. First, you always have to notice where you are located in the world. What I say here is not the same as what I’d say in Iran. Also, you have to have some relationships with people in Iran; some idea about their breadth of experience, their range of opinions, their debates. What are different people saying? And not to represent Iranian opinion as a monolithic thing, to account and leave space for that dynamism, diversity, debate, and polarization. 

Then, you must have some integrity yourself. I’m against war, even if someone in Iran wants to be bombed because they’re hoping, in this desperate way, that it's going to free them. I’m not an echo chamber. I don’t uncritically endorse anything and everything that anyone in Iran says because they’re authentically in Iran. No, I have values. I have principles. I have politics, and I have an understanding of history. I have an interpretation of what we have been through, not just since 9/11. You can trace back 100 years of  colonialism in the region. We also need anchoring: a starting point of principles and integrity. I think the anti-war voices in Iran are being marginalized. I think that the Iranian state is very gung-ho about this war. They see what they can get out of it, while the ordinary people are divided. 

I think the majority of Iranian people don’t support the government. That doesn’t mean they’re pro-war, though. We have to leave space for people to be like, “we're being oppressed by this government,  and we’re being bombed by the U.S. and Israel, and all of it’s horrible,” right? The economic crisis is produced by foreign sanctions and internal corruption, and inequality. And the elite in Iran enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary people. For the majority of Iranians, their lived experience is that there’s more than one source of oppression, repression, hardship, and punishment. They're experiencing the brunt of the war, and they're experiencing the brunt of regime repression because the raids, arrests, torture, executions have not stopped. 

I think the way to be in solidarity, if you’re here in the United States, is first and foremost to say we’re against this war. Stop bombing. This is our government. I didn’t vote for them, but we have to hold them accountable. They’re using our tax dollars and U.S.-made weapons, and they're going over there and they’re killing people and they’re invading a sovereign country and they’re destroying civilian infrastructure, and they’re committing war crimes. The onus is on us here to organize against that, to pressure politicians to make it so politically costly to continue to fund this war that they have to stop. They don’t have enough votes to stop it yet, but every time the vote happens, they get a few more votes. It’s getting closer. I know that this time frame is not fast enough to stop the bombs from falling. So it’s a very frustrating, demoralizing experience, but I do think that is our main role here: to do everything we can to organize against the continuation of this war. At the same time, if we want to challenge that pro-monarchist, pro-war, pro-Zionist propaganda that’s targeting Iranians in diaspora and in Iran, we can’t stay silent about the oppression at the hands of the Islamic Republic. We have to be against both at the same time. 

B&W: When you were talking about mobilizing, I couldn't stop thinking about universities as an origin site for protest organization. Historically, in the U.S., we have seen university students stand up against global issues such as the Vietnam War, the South African apartheid, or the Iraq War. However, with this Iran-U.S. war, people don’t seem as impacted. Perhaps people are too afraid to protest, but I also think many people don’t know what the “right opinion” is because they’re hearing so much back and forth from the Iranian diaspora. Given that you’ve deeply investigated 1960s and 1970s political formations on university campuses, how do you feel students today understand solidarity in contrast to previous generations? Do you feel that it has shifted? 

MM: My book [This Flame Within] is about Iranian foreign students who came to the U.S. on student visas in the ’60s and ’70s, and they were very much a part of the U.S. Cold War project of expanding U.S. influence across the Third World, including West Asia or the Middle East. These students were supposed to acquire a Western education, then return to Iran and develop a modern capitalist economy in sync with a pro-Western oriented market. While they were here, they were supposed to acquire a pro-U.S. worldview, because the Cold War was always cultural and ideological, not only economic and material and military. The ideological cultural component was very important. They would see how great America was, and then they would be so excited to go back home and be a neo-colonial ruling class that would essentially run Iran in alignment with a pro-Western set of interests. I’ve called them imperial model minorities, building on the model minority myth in the U.S. of the Asian American immigrant who assimilates and is super successful and upwardly mobile. The imperial model minority was supposed to show that belonging to the U.S. sphere of influence in the Cold War was a good thing. It was benevolent. It was going to end poverty. It was going to help progress in these countries. And these students epitomized that. 

But a minority among the tens of thousands of Iranian foreign students who came here actually couldn’t go along with that project. They used their time on U.S. campuses to educate Americans about the CIA coup in 1953, about the nefarious role the U.S. was playing in Iran, supporting a police state, arming and training a secret police force, SAVAK, to terrorize dissidents. Americans didn’t know they were getting mainstream propaganda that was very pro-Shah, so the students were exposing that. They were doing teach-ins, demonstrations, and pickets. They saw Black students fighting against segregation and exclusion from campus curriculums and they identified with all this. They were both fighting against the same source of injustice, an imperialist American government which doesn't care about Black and brown people. So there was a connection that Black and brown Americans were making between racism at home and U.S. imperialism abroad. The post World War II era of decolonization and anti-racist struggle created the possibility for those solidarities across differences, because Iranian students obviously were not experiencing what Black Americans were experiencing—they had totally different histories, and it’s not the same. But there was the ability—at the level of affect, emotion, feeling, camaraderie—to identify with a militant stance in the face of injustice. It was drawing young people into the movement, including a lot of white Americans. Not without friction and problems, but people came to unite despite their differences. They found things in common, and sometimes what they had in common is a desire for freedom. It’s a desire to live differently, to be free of unjust domination and militarism and exclusion. So Iranian students at that time were part of those struggles, and they were critiquing a very hidden form of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.

Do I think things are different now? Yeah, I mean, the Cold War is over. We’re not in an era of decolonization. In some ways, we're in an era of recolonization, where the U.S. invades and occupies Afghanistan and Iraq, or you have the ongoing occupation of Palestine. You have a lot of post-colonial governments that have become profoundly authoritarian and oppressive, and have betrayed the promises of popular movements. When people overthrow a colonial power, they do it because they want to have a better life and more freedom, and more rights. And in country after country, we see that very often the jails are filled again with dissidents, and you have inequality and corruption. 

The struggle continues, and the record of losses and carnage is long and deep. I do think we’re in a harder situation now. If you’re here in the United States and you want to be in solidarity with people in Iran, but you don't want to feed into Islamophobic, imperial feminist, and other forms of demonization of Iran that justify war, how do you talk about repression in Iran? How do you talk about women’s rights in Iran without feeding that imperial feminist script that justifies war? It’s not so easy to build solidarity. It's not so easy to say, oh, we're all on one side. On one side are the imperialists or the colonizers, and on the other side are the Black and brown people of the world. It’s much more complicated when you have these post-colonial states that are run by native people but are oppressing their own populations. Then what do you do? 

Now, some people on the right use that as an excuse to justify imperialism. They say, "Oh, look, you know, we let these people run their own country, and now look at how oppressive they are.” They erase all the genocides and crimes of colonialism itself, and don’t take into account the very unequal economic global order in which these countries have to survive. But at the same time, for those of us who want to be on the side of justice, equality, and dignity, we can't absolve all agency from the people who are actually in power in these countries. In Iran, they didn’t have to repress the reformist movement; they didn’t have to put the leaders under house arrest after the 2009 election. They didn’t have to rig the election, quite frankly. There’s so many moments in which they could have granted reforms. They could have listened to the people. They could have, and they didn’t. They chose repression, militarism, violence, over and over and over again, and they have to be held accountable for that too—not by the U.S., the biggest purveyors of violence in the world, but by their own people, right? But their own people are suffering under bombs, sanctions, economic crisis, and state repression. How are people supposed to organize and fight back and remake their society? They keep trying and getting shot instead. 

We are decades into this fight. There’s no easy fix. There’s no bomb that’s going to liberate you. The reality is that this is a protracted crisis, decades in the making, if not longer. And there’s not an easy way out because we don’t have a global left, an internationalist left. How do we stand against all forms of domination and militarism and violence? How do we regain our footing, our moral integrity, our moral compass?