Accidental Martyrdom and the Ambiguous Death Image of the Role of Iranian Women

Many photographs of women published in the Iranian press during the Iran-Iraq War tended to emphasize their roles as supportive and mourning mothers and sisters. By contrast, the often gruesome images that depict the death of women in the war proved much more difficult to categorize, which reflects ambivalence towards attaching the label of shahid, or martyr, to images of women who were killed. These photographs, whether gruesomely depicting their dead bodies or portraits taken prior to death, oscillate between evoking shahadat (martyrdom), more commonly applied to men, and depicting their deaths as accidental. The ambiguous approach to gendered depictions of martyrdom reflects attempts by the Iranian press to negotiate negotiating the role of women during the war period in photographs published in the press of the newly-established Islamic Republic. However, in the context of the Green Movement of 2009, more unambiguous depictions of women as martyrs begin to emerge, particularly as a result of the widely publicized death of Neda Agha-Soltan.

In this presentation, I trace the shift in depictions of women as martyrs between the Iran-Iraq War and the Green Movement. I argue that while earlier representations reflect tenuousness and ambivalence on the part of Iranian periodicals such as Ettela’at, Jomhuri-ye eslami, and Imposed War as they sought to grapple with the turmoil of war and a still emergent political system, the clear depictions of female martyrdom during the Green Movement reflect a less ambiguous approach on the part of the official press as well as the emergence of a non-state controlled space for debate and publication in the form of the internet and social media. This polarization emerges through simultaneous outright denial of the press agencies like Fars News to acknowledge Agha-Soltan as a shahid and the multitude of examples of her “death” images that are more akin to those of male shohada in other outlets. Agha-Soltan’s death images allow for the transfer of the ownership of the gory image and label of shahid from the state-sponsored press’s hands to that of the people via the debates, messages, and publication of her picture on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Thus while the official press has solidified its approach to (not) applying the label of martyr to women, it does so at a moment in which it has lost its monopoly over the declaration and depiction of martyrdom.