Jina means life-giving.
Jin, Jiyan, Azadi means Woman, Life, Freedom.
On 13th September, while visiting Tehran, Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman from Saqqez in Iranian Kurdistan, was arrested by Iran’s so-called “morality police” supposedly for not adhering to the state’s strict dress code. She was beaten in the back of a police van, suffering injuries that would put her into a coma. She was transferred to Kasra Hospital, where she died three days after she was arrested.
Her body was buried at the Aichi cemetery in Saqqez a day later. Among the cries of mourning were chants of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” – a slogan that translates into English as ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’. At the funeral march, cries of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” echoed alongside chants of “Death to the Dictator”. A crowd gathered in front of the governor’s office demanding justice for Jina, and images of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei were torn from billboards. Within hours, “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi”’s Farsi equivalent, ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’, would be chanted at protests across the country, along with more familiar chants. It was the first time that a Farsi translation of this Kurdish slogan would be widely used.
Two years on, and the uprising is almost universally known as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement or revolution; some scholars, particularly those who are Kurdish, choose to refer to it as the ‘Jina Uprising’, to remember the young Kurdish woman whose killing sparked it all.
Since the start of the Jina Uprising, academics and other writers (many of them Kurdish women, though not all), have pointed to a patterned and persistent erasure of Kurdish women in how we record and write about not just this uprising, but the history of protest and other forms of resistance in Iranian Kurdistan and Iran.
Iranian Kurdish academic Farangis Ghaderi, describes the almost exclusive use of Jina’s legal, Farsi-language, governmentally approved name, Mahsa, in media, protests, commentary, and academic discussions instead of her Kurdish name, as well as the lack of acknowledgment for the Kurdish origin of the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” cry, as “among the most egregious of erasures”.
In November 2022, Ghaderi co-wrote an article on the erasure of Kurdish women from the uprising with Kurdish academic Ozlem Goner, where the two described how Kurdish struggles both in and outside of Iran were being dismissed in discussions of and expressions of solidarity with this uprising.
As time passed, protests on Iran’s streets were smothered by a brutal crackdown by security forces that killed more than 500 people. As media outlets, universities, and art spaces memorialized the uprising, Kurdish women’s voices were virtually nowhere to be heard, save for responses to this very erasure in academic scholarship or op-ed pieces.
In recent months, several books that bear the “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan as their title or subtitle and that commemorate and contextualize the uprising have been released by trade publishers. With two years having passed since Jina’s death, trade and non-academic book publishing is a new opening to address these erasures in the narration of this uprising.
Retrospect allows these works to be a slower and (hopefully) more thorough look at what happened, than a short news article under the World section of a news website, or real-time updates posted to Twitter or Telegram; they also reach a much broader, much less specialized audience than an academic article. They are part of the concretization of the public understanding of the past and present of a resistance movement in what might be a distant country for some of their audience. They set a movement in public memory and are a means of mourning those who were killed during the uprising in a lasting way.
Yet, while it is early days, we are alarmed by the persisting marginalization of Kurdish women in the books published so far. We write this with the hope that publishers, editors and authors will break this pattern in publications to come, especially when these publications take up the Kurdish-rooted Woman, Life, Freedom slogan as their titles.

Jin, Jiyan, Azadi in Kurdish women’s struggle
Kurdish women in Iran face multiple forms of oppression – on top of the gendered oppression that ethnic majority Persian women deal with, they also face linguistic, ethnic, and, in some cases, religious discrimination. The multifaceted oppression faced by Kurdish women has necessitated deep and persistent resistance on multiple fronts, but the acts and the narration of this resistance have been stifled.
The origins of the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi slogan lie in the Kurdish women’s freedom movements that draw heavily on the writings of Abdullah Ocalan, founding member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkish Kurdistan. He put forward the framework of jineology, a form of feminism that says no society is free until women are free. According to sociologist Somayeh Rostampour, who has traced the origins of the slogan, a predecessor of the slogan, “Jin, Jiyan” (Woman, Life) was being used widely in Bakur (Kurdish name for Turkish Kurdistan) from around the year 2000 onwards. As for the phrase in its current form, Rostampour writes that an interviewee told her that in 2002, during a ceremony held by PKK supporters for the burial of a woman who lost her life in a so-called honor killing, the women chanted “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” – a precedent of sorts for Jina’s funeral 20 years later. The slogan has been used at protests in Istanbul by the Saturday Mothers since as far back as 2006.
Through leftist Kurdish liberation groups (including the PKK and the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) it shares links with), the Kurdish women’s freedom movement transcends the borders that separate a people. In her genealogy of the slogan, Rostampour points to an early transmittance of the phrase in Iran between PJAK member Shirin Alamholi and student activist Atefeh Nabavi at Evin Prison in Tehran in the late 2000s. The Jina Uprising appears to be the first time that a Farsi translation of the phrase was used publicly in Iran.
Ghaderi and Goner write that the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi slogan was “developed against colonial, patriarchal states and societies”. The slogan is a reminder of how all kinds of oppression fit together and how they have to be fought together all at once, pushing back on the idea that some people must wait for their freedom to come later. That Jina’s burial and funeral simultaneously mourned her death and were a call for deep political upheaval is a testament to this.
The slogan was borne out of the particularities of the Kurdish women’s struggle against colonial, patriarchal states and societies, but its message has appeal beyond Kurds. Australian linguist Ingrid Piller points out that it is one of the rare few non-English slogans to have traveled so far – considering the global hierarchy of languages, its spread from Kurdish and Farsi into other languages is “quite miraculous”.
Kurdish women have welcomed expressions of solidarity from all over the world, and have welcomed the use of the term beyond the Kurdish context. We first saw its wider use outside of Kurdish-majority areas during the Rojava Revolution through the feminist, internationalist, and democratic confederalism movements, where, as writer Rojin Mukriyan explains, “concepts such as world women’s confederalism were discussed under the umbrella of Jin, Jiyan, Azadi”. The slogan was also heard at protests that took place in solidarity with that revolution, where the slogan would be chanted loud and printed large in Kurdish, alongside other languages.
During the Jina Uprising itself, there were beautiful and unprecedented examples of solidarity with Kurdish women and Kurds as a whole by other Iranians, the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi slogan left intact and untranslated. Iranian actress Taraneh Alidoosti was arrested and imprisoned after posting a photo of herself to Instagram without a headscarf on and holding up a sign bearing the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi slogan during the uprising. In the city of Tabriz, East Azerbaijan province, university students chanted “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” in an act of solidarity. Ghaderi and Goner said the protest movement “generated an inspiring and newfound solidarity among Iranians of all ethnic backgrounds, as well as promising internationalist feminist solidarity.”

However, the breadth and generosity of the slogan leaves it and its points of origin vulnerable to distortion. What immediately marks the slogan as coming from Kurdish women’s freedom movements is that it was formulated in the Kurdish language. As soon as we translate it out of Kurdish and into another language, we are reliant on the context given and the telling of its history to learn that— it was formulated in Kurdish – a language whose use has been suppressed at least in some periods in modern history across the countries that Kurds have been split across, but with special vigor and persistence in Turkish Kurdistan, and that it was borne out of the particular though distinct struggles that Kurdish women split across Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey face or have faced.
In protests in Iran and internationally, the slogan was far more commonly seen in its Farsi form, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi, than in Kurdish; it has been branded in some media and by some commentators as the slogan of an “Iranian” or “Iranian women”’s movement. We quickly saw the phrase peeled from its Kurdish origins and recognized simply as “Iranian”.
Farsi, the language of Iran’s Persian ethnic majority, is, unsurprisingly, Iran’s most commonly spoken language. But it is also the language of power and Iran’s only official language. As Ghaderi and Goner argue, the erasure of minority languages and the “pursuit of uniformity of language and identity was concomitant to producing the modern state of Iran”. According to Iranian Kurdish socio-anthropologist Ahmad Mohammadpour and historian Aso Javaheri, “the securitization and silencing of non-Persian languages and identities has increased in the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1979”. The state’s self-image is centrally constructed through what Mohammadpour and Javaheri describe as a “selective appropriation of the past” – an imagined history that elevates the status of those in power – in Iran’s case, its Persian ethnic majority and Shia Muslim religious majority – and at once both erases ethnic minorities, rendering them invisible and marks them as security threats to the nation’s ‘unified’ identity, rendering them hypervisible.
For Ghaderi and Goner, “interrogating this uniformity and the Persianisation policy and attending to the historical erasures minoritized peoples such as the Kurds have experienced is key to the understanding of the current uprising and the forms of resistance displayed in Kurdistan.” Failure to do so by anyone writing about the movement means there will be a fundamental misunderstanding – or no understanding at all – of protest and resistance in Iranian Kurdistan, particularly by Kurdish women, and of its associated Jin, Jiyan, Azadi slogan.
Woman, Life, Freedom in trade books
Since the first anniversary of this movement, several non-academic books about the protest movement have been published with the title or subtitle ‘Woman Life Freedom’ by publishing houses in Western countries. These include: What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom, by Arash Azizi, Woman, Life, Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women’s Protests in Iran, ed. Malu Halasa, Woman Life Freedom, by Marjane Satrapi and In the Streets of Tehran: Woman. Life. Freedom., by Nila (a pseudonym). Publishers have also acquired the rights for another book whose title will bear the slogan; this book is being written by journalists Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati and is set to be published in Autumn 2025.
All of these books tell stories that need to be told and provide some important historical context to protest and resistance movements in Iran. The stories told in all these books are necessary and valuable contributions to the documentation of the movement. In the Streets of Tehran is a first-hand account from an Iranian woman who took part in the protests in Tehran, while Azizi’s What Iranians Want tells of histories of resistance in Iran rarely heard in Western publications, including those by Afghan refugees, environmental activists, and public transport workers.
While Azizi’s book covers an impressive range of movements, there is no chapter on Kurdish or Kurdish women’s resistance, nor are stories of their protests or resistance woven into other chapters; Kurds are mentioned only in passing. Where Ghaderi and others had in the months after Jina’s death pointed to her being named Mahsa as a form of erasure, Azizi refers to her all but once as Mahsa. In her introduction to Nila’s book, foreign correspondent Christina Lamb says Jina was “known to family and friends as Jina”, before the hyphenate Mahsa-Jina is used for the rest of the book. While primarily using Jina’s state-sanctioned name, Mahsa, and not providing context for the discriminatory and widespread ban on Kurdish and other minority-language names in Iran, these books and other publications that name her in this way echo the state’s suppression of her Kurdish identity.
There is also a distinct absence of Kurdish women as contributors to these books, as writers or as editors – at least in a way that is explicitly acknowledged. The exception is the Halasa-edited Woman Life Freedom, which includes an essay by Iranian Kurdish journalist Kamin Mohammadi that sheds some light on the Kurdish women’s freedom movement across borders and on the especially violent measures used by the Iranian state and security forces to suffocate the uprising in ethnic minority areas. Of course, the inclusion of Kurdish women as contributors to these texts does not guarantee faithful narration of the past and present of Kurdish women’s resistance, but their apparent absence in the production process of these books is an unfortunate mirroring of the invisibilization of Kurdish women that we see in Iranian society.

Little to no regard is cast in these books at the origins of the Woman, Life, Freedom slogan and the Kurdish women’s freedom movement it came from, or the particular difficulties Kurdish women in Iran face on account of the multiple kinds of oppression they are subjected to. Granted, Satrapi’s anthology at least offers a very brief (one-page) explanation of the origins of the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” slogan, tracing its origin to Turkish Kurdistan and the PKK in the 2000s, while the visual arts-focused chapters in Woman Life Freedom uses captions to point the reader to Kurdish script and symbolism in artwork produced before and after the uprising, including Jina’s name and the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi slogan. But if a publisher, editor or writer is to borrow a phrase for a book’s title, a passing reference or clause that merely notes that said phrase came from a Kurdish-language slogan is not enough. Considerable time and space ought to be dedicated to the movement’s origins and the political context it came out of, not just a nod.
We call not just for Kurdish women’s contributions as actors of protest and resistance in Iran to be heard, but for Kurdish women to be among the first voices turned to in the narration of this and other uprisings in Iran. Their voices should not be contained to their current limited scope. They should not feature only in academic scholarship, and their writing should not only be read in response to erasive work in media or by publishers.
Against erasure, toward solidarity
Authors, editors, and publishers have a responsibility – one that is shared and collective – to not homogenize the struggle of women in Iran and erase Kurdish women actors and narrators.
Iranian women face layers of oppression, depending on who they are. Marginalization based on class, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality shapes the oppression of Iranian women in tandem with patriarchy. For Kurdish women in Iran, this includes linguistic suppression, higher exposure to deadly state violence, and regional economic de-development. Kurdish women’s resistance in Iran demands recognition of the distinct struggles that many ethnic-majority Iranian women have not faced. It is not a uniform struggle.
To flatten the narration of this struggle by discounting or erasing the oppression of Kurdish women in Iran distorts the potential and promise of the movement that they originated, one that has acknowledged and accommodated different and connected struggles. Arguing against this flattening of Iranian women’s struggle in the retelling of the Jina Uprising, Mohammadpour says that there is the possibility of a narrative that “recognizes a plurality of women, particularly those from marginalized nations, such as Kurdish and Balochi women, and underlines the structural national, ethnoreligious, and linguistic oppression elided in the narrative of undifferentiated Iranian womanhood.”
To even teach the Kurdish language in Iran lands Kurdish women with heavy jail sentences on charges of attempting to bring down the state. High-profile cases include that of Zahra Mohammadi, who was imprisoned for five years and accused of membership of a Kurdish separatist group and an independent labor union. In 2022 Mojgan Kavousi, a Kurdish language writer and teacher who is a Yarsani Kurd, was arrested and imprisoned on charges including “assembly and collusion against national security”. And even Jina, who had no known political affiliations, was linked by the Iranian state to Kurdish separatism posthumously. In the days after her death, Jina’s cousin said that intelligence officials claimed he had taken her outside of Iran to receive “political and security” training by Kurdish separatists outside of the country – a claim he vehemently denied.
These are the conditions in which Kurdish women in Iran call out “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi”.
Resistance to class, ethnic, gendered, linguistic and religious oppression persists in Iran. More books will tell the story of the Jina Uprising and the resistance movements that precede, follow, and run alongside it. They too may bear the slogan Woman, Life, Freedom in their titles. We can only hope that these future texts, or even future editions of the books that already exist, pay the necessary homage to the Kurdish women who have already carried the slogan for decades.