On Feminism, Silence, and Selective Solidarity
There is a growing chasm between the values Canadian feminists profess and the silence many uphold when those values are most needed.
Over the past year, Iran has once again found itself at the intersection of political repression, international violence, and feminist resistance. And yet, Canada's feminist movement, known for its global posturing, has remained largely silent.
When Israel launched unprovoked attacks on Iran in June 2025, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians, including women doctors, athletes, and artists, the response from Canadian feminist institutions was nonexistent. No public statements. No demands for restraint. No calls for protecting civilians or upholding international law. Instead, there was quiet approval, or worse, disinterest, as if Iranian lives exist outside the bounds of feminist concern. As if civilian casualties in Tehran or Isfahan are not worthy of the same outrage we extend elsewhere.
This erasure is not an accident. As feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty warned in her foundational critique Under Western Eyes (1984), Western feminism has long constructed women in the Global South as passive victims rather than political agents. That same framework is alive today, only now, Iranian women are simultaneously erased and hyper-visible, used selectively to serve Western narratives of saviourism, secularism, or war. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising in 2022 briefly captured global headlines, but even that was filtered through a lens that stripped it of its revolutionary roots. Canadian feminists lit candles, cut hair, and posted hashtags, for a moment. And then they moved on.
Meanwhile, the women who risked everything to rise up against state violence inside Iran, including activists, students, and journalists, have faced imprisonment, exile, and death. Diaspora organizers who have tried to keep the momentum alive have been met with silence, suspicion, or outright erasure from Canadian feminist institutions. Our grief is too complicated. Our politics are too messy. Our voices are too inconvenient. We are either framed as victims in need of saving or too political to be platformed.
Paria Gashtili, writing in Hypatia (2024), addresses this exact dynamic. She critiques Euro-American feminism for offering two common approaches to Iranian women: Orientalism, which essentializes and dehumanizes, and apologetic multiculturalism, which flattens difference in the name of diversity while ignoring political specificity. Neither approach affirms the lived realities or the radical potential of Iranian feminist resistance, especially when that resistance confronts both domestic repression and imperial aggression.
Canadian feminist institutions often cite “not having a team on the ground” or “not wanting to speak over local voices” as reasons for silence. These may sound like ethical precautions, but they often function as convenient excuses for inaction.
As Fatemeh Sadeghi explains in Bypassing Islamism and Feminism: Women’s Resistance in Post-Revolutionary Iran (2010), Iranian women’s movements, whether labeled feminism or otherwise, are not bound by simplistic binaries of secular vs. religious, liberal vs. conservative. They are complex, grassroots movements that use diverse strategies, legal challenges, education, cultural resistance, to fight for bodily autonomy, economic justice, and freedom. These struggles don’t always fit neatly into Western NGO-friendly narratives, and perhaps that’s precisely why they’re ignored.
But the issue goes beyond erasure. Western feminism’s selective solidarity is political. When Canadian feminists may speak out about women’s rights in Afghanistan or Ukraine, often in line with state foreign policy or humanitarian trends, but stay silent on Palestine, Iran, or the impact of sanctions, they reproduce what Mohanty and others call “imperial feminism.” This is a feminism that serves empire, not liberation. A feminism that supports some women while sacrificing others.
This double standard is especially painful for those of us watching our homeland become a target of both internal state violence and external military aggression. It’s painful to see bombs fall on Iranian soil while those who claim to fight for peace and justice in Canada say nothing. It’s painful to see feminist organizations proudly declare solidarity with global women’s movements while deliberately ignoring the one led by women chanting Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom) in the streets of Mahabad and Sanandaj.
Let’s be clear: you do not have to support the Iranian regime to oppose war. You do not have to endorse the Islamic Republic to grieve the loss of innocent Iranian lives. And you do not need to understand every nuance of Middle East politics to recognize that state violence, whether from the Iranian government, the Israeli military, or Western sanctions, always harms women, children, and marginalized communities first. The idea that Iranian people are collateral damage in a broader geopolitical game is dehumanizing. It tells us that our lives, our families, and our bodies are expendable. That our survival is negotiable. That our resistance doesn’t count.
This is not only morally bankrupt, it is anti-feminist. Feminism, at its core, must oppose all systems of domination: patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and militarism. When feminist institutions remain silent in the face of Israeli bombs or Canadian sanctions that starve Iranian hospitals of medicine, they fail that mission. When they ignore the vibrant, messy, powerful feminist resistance emerging from Iranian streets and diasporic networks, they betray their supposed commitment to global justice.
So what can Canadian feminists do?
We do not need more symbolic gestures. We need sustained, principled solidarity. That includes:
Funding and platforming Iranian feminist researchers, organizers, and artists, without requiring them to sanitize their politics or identities to make them palatable for Western funders or audiences.
Publicly condemning all forms of state violence, including Israeli aggression and Western sanctions, which disproportionately impact Iranian women and marginalized communities, while refusing to frame such critiques as endorsements of authoritarian regimes.
Condemning Iran’s gender apartheid system, including compulsory hijab laws, restrictions on education, public life, and bodily autonomy, without infantilizing Iranian women or relying on tired Orientalist tropes of passive, veiled victims in need of Western rescue. Iranian women are not waiting to be saved; they are leading some of the most fearless feminist movements in the world.
Embedding anti-imperialism into feminist foreign policy, by opposing militarism, interventionism, and economic warfare, and by centering the leadership of women who are resisting both domestic authoritarianism and foreign domination.
Acknowledging complicity, including the ways that feminist institutions often uphold Canadian foreign policy interests or align with whiteness, silence, and safety over justice, and committing to change.
Iranian women have never stopped fighting. We are fighting against patriarchy and policing, censorship and colonialism, foreign military aggression, sanctions and silence. We are fighting for a feminism that doesn’t leave us behind.
Do you stand with us in struggle, or just in symbolism?
