The Spectre of Feminism in Post-October Iraq: on Political Absence and the Paralysis of Organising

Introduction

“Words are dead,” is how one feminist expressed the silencing she endured over her feminism following the October 2019 uprising (Tishreen). Feminism was far from absent during the protests that swept across the country; it was persecuted and forced into silence. Its withdrawal from the public sphere was recast as defeat, and as proof of foreign allegiance bent on “destroying the cohesive Iraqi family."

Before Tishreen, the state allowed cooperative relations with the feminist movement, so long as it posed no threat and presented its issues devoid of political substance. The movement operated through pseudo-unified organisations funded by political parties or foreign donors, addressing audiences that were often elite or educated. Yet, the October uprising, with its strong feminist presence, reached a socially diverse audience unfamiliar to feminism in Iraq, which confronted it to its own vulnerabilities. Rather than seizing this opportunity to address and remedy its weaknesses, the movement chose to celebrate the sheer visibility of women’s participation – taking numbers as a victory two decades in the making – while overlooking the erosion of its grassroots base. The result was a series of lasting difficulties and internal challenges.

The question remains: why hasn’t this presence evolved into an organised political force, and what are the reasons behind the inability to materialise it as such?

As Jacques Derrida reminds us, presence can only be understood through absence. The current absence of feminist organising is not a total disappearance, but a spectral presence conjured by the system with every attempt at erasure. The feminism that prevails today is not an organised political reality, but a phantom invoked to justify the persistence of symbolic violence that serves those who profit from it.

In this paper, I provide a contextual background of the Iraqi feminist movement prior to October 2019. The weaknesses within affected the movement during the uprising, leading to its post-October outcomes: political fragility, organisational paralysis, and feminist stagnation. I explore the dynamic through which feminist absence is maintained in smear campaigns, the suspension of funding, media restrictions, and the exclusion of feminist voices. I propose hauntology as a framework for understanding this alternation between absence and presence. Nevertheless, symbolic and organising absence might be confronted through acts of re-narration and the documentation of history from a feminist standpoint, as well as through re-imagining collective organising – or, in other words, moving from spectrality to political action.

Iraqi Feminism Prior to October 2019

Before Tishreen, the feminist movement in Iraq was relatively active following the country’s transition to a democratic system (Rasheed, 2017) and the widening of political expression after the fall of the Ba‘ath Party regime in 2003. The right to organise and assemble was reinstated (Al-Ali, 2021) and enshrined in the 2005 Constitution, marking the beginning of a new phase in feminist activism – one whose backbone was its NGO form (Hameed, 2025).

With the hegemony of this characteristic, feminism in the Iraqi context remained alien to the general public due to deliberate misrepresentation (Mustafa, 2024). NGO feminism refers to activities and institutions that promote women’s rights and gender equality, whether through independent feminist organisations or through broader development organisations that include feminist programmes (Ali, 2018). These development organisations worked to combat violence against women, enhance their political participation, and provide programmes for economic and social empowerment. They often operated according to the logic of partial independence, which made them part of the organisational feminist field prior to Tishreen.

Nevertheless, this organisational mode was partially paralysed, as many civil society organisations established themselves by adopting broad slogans such as “human rights” and “development,” in an attempt to avoid waves of repression, even while adopting feminist goals (Al-Khatib). However, some organisations with feminist-oriented projects abandoned the feminist component of their work after they were targeted by anti-gender campaigns, which calls us to reconsider the importance of openly embracing effective political action (Al-Khatib).

Before Tishreen, feminist activism had turned into a rights-based practice stripped of political sensibility. It warned of approaching feminist issues from a political perspective and focused on social and legal aspects to ensure that their funding continues. This reliance on international funding after 2003 created the impression that feminism was merely a collection of organisations and projects tied to donor support, rather than a political movement or an independent form of organising (Hameed, 2021).

As a result, the movement became restricted to organisations supported by political parties or reliant on international funding, detached from a grassroots base. This detachment meant that women’s participation in protests reflected the absence of a genuine organisational structure – one of the key weaknesses that surfaced during the October uprising. This phase was characterised by a “demand-based,” single-issued feminism that lacked a clear strategy or organisational vision, as feminist institutions remained confined to the very power structures they sought to transcend (Jalabi, 2023).

Tishreen as a Feminist Interruption

In October 2019, an uprising erupted with the force of a storm, confronting all the forces of political Islam – particularly the Shi’a ones (Al-Saidi, 2020) – for having dragged the country into intolerable levels of poor public services, financial and administrative corruption, sectarian power-sharing, and unemployment that affected even those with higher education degrees. To top it all, Iraq’s lack of sovereignty left it exposed to regional and international interventions (Mohammed, 2019). Yet the straw that broke the camel’s back came when protests by graduate students – that included women and top-ranking university students demanding their right to public employment – were violently suppressed. They were met with scalding water and tear gas, which violated the dignity of the women protesters in ways that provoked public outrage, but only because they were women of a certain class and access to education (Mahmoud, 2022). The uprising spread across the capital, Baghdad, the southern provinces, and the cities of Iraq’s Middle Euphrates region. It was led primarily by young university students, who were later joined by people of other age groups (Al Jazeera Net, 2019). Women students were present in the squares during class hours, while men continued the sit-ins for the rest of the day, until university attendance was completely suspended as a result of the general strike launched by the revolutionaries.

The participation of women students in the protest squares was not an easy matter. They went out secretly without their families’ knowledge; many could only do so after long attempts at persuasion, or accompanied by their relatives. Most of them were careful not to show their faces, wearing medical masks or veils to avoid threats and blackmail. Women were assigned roles that focused mainly on first aid, medical care, and all forms of caregiving work. Later, after gaining a small margin of safety in the squares, women’s artistic collectives began to appear, continuing to express political demands through paintings on the walls of tunnels (Abu Ghoneim, 2021).

It was a revolution – as its people liked to call it – with a clear civil and secular orientation (Nazmi and Hatem, 2022). The desire for radical change prevailed, even though its official slogans called for legal and political reform. This made the dream of achieving equality and justice between the sexes not impossible but rather urgent and transformative (Maki, 2021).

The participation of women in protests has existed since the 1940s and throughout the four waves of protests (Nazmi and Hatem, 2022) that preceded October 2019. However, it had been almost confined to activists within civil society organisations and secular political parties. During Tishreen, by contrast, women’s participation was remarkably broad, including housewives, workers, women without formal education, young girls, and women who had never before accessed public spaces in such a way. This moment of protest distinguished itself by its density, momentum, and sacrifices for political change compared with previous waves. It toppled a government, forced the regime to hold early elections, and produced an electoral law that satisfied the public. What set it apart was its youthful spirit and its desperate revolutionary devotion to two concepts the political system had stripped away: homeland and equality, embodied in the slogans “We want a homeland” and “I am coming to take my rights back” (Nazmi and Hatem, 2022). At the time of writing this paper, it remains as the last mass attempt at civil rebellion.

Women’s participation in the protests – across class, age, educational, and professional differences – was a source of strength that sustained the demonstrations. The very physical presence of women in public squares, spaces previously monopolised by men, created a crucial difference for the revolution itself, which provoked the regime’s vengeful fear of them. Even those who were unable to be physically present in the protest squares found ways to participate despite the forced absence imposed on them by domestic confinement by families, social scrutiny, or geographical distance from protest sites. Additionally, while their national demands stood on a shared ground with men’s, feminist demands were mostly raised in the digital sphere, as women’s voices were muffled by protest coordination committees. Mostly led by men, these committees restricted the articulation of feminist politics under the pretext that they would “distract the demonstrations from their main demands.” Yet, these same coordinators would position women at the forefront whenever international media cameras were present or during live broadcasts of statements written by committees in which women had no input. Thus, when one searches online for the Iraqi October Revolution, most of the images that appear show women protesters at the front lines – a visible presence coupled with real absence of influence (Bourdieu, 1994).

The stereotypical division of roles between male and female protesters extended from the home to the protest squares, where men stood at the front lines of confrontation, mobilisation, planning, organisation, and drafting of statements, while women remained in the rear lines performing first aid, caregiving, and logistical tasks such as cooking, baking, cleaning, and washing clothes. Those who continued to protest without feminist demands, especially women unaware of the history of feminist protest, adopted men’s perspectives and believed that feminism would be achieved once the revolution triumphed and national demands were met. A considerable number of participants justified their presence in the protests as merely “supporting” the revolutionaries, meaning that their role was reduced to assisting another actor – the man – in defending his rights and cause. The presence of this mass base of women in the protest squares, regardless of their specific roles, was a moment of release from the grip of authority – a moment the movement failed to value or seize as an opportunity of a rare occurrence, and failed to use in order to build a permanent structure for organising, with Tishreen as its starting point.

When I organised a feminist discussion session with the “Women’s Tent” at Al-Sadrain Square in Najaf, with my fourteen-month-old child in his stroller beside me, I discussed the importance of having feminist demands. At that moment, male revolutionaries gathered around us, debating aggressively, as if our discussion itself posed a threat to the revolution. They saw me as a source of division, not of “support” as they imagined it to be. The women present tried to calm them down, humouring them a little before ending the session politely. For them, our demands were trivial, unworthy of men’s or the revolution’s concerns. The repetition of such encounters requires resisting the constant relegation of women’s demands to the background, regardless of circumstance. What is deemed “urgent” is so, simply because it is defined by patriarchal authority, which positions itself as the measure and the standard, even in matters of social needs – a discourse that must be revolted against (Stipo, 2019). The large, well-funded, and long-established women’s organisations since 2003 failed to form a feminist protest bloc capable of asserting a presence proportionate to its size, influence, and the sacrifices women made through their participation. But it enabled young women, who took advantage of their daily presence together for discussion and intellectual and revolutionary exchange, to form their own feminist or community groups. New women activists, who had never belonged to women’s rights organisations, emerged, creating alternative spaces within their protest tents. The authorities regarded the protesters’ challenge to patriarchal gender norms as a threat to the entire political order (Mustafa, 2025).

However, women protesters paid a higher price than the gains they achieved. The regime and the militias identified the vulnerability in the protests and targeted it through a society unaccustomed to women’s public visibility. The authorities used various methods, including speeches by political figures such as Muqtada al-Sadr, who initiated this rift as early as October 2019 (Al-Ammar, 2020), alongside other clerics from different sects. They incited families against women protesters, distorting their image and accusing them of being the sexual playthings of the revolutionaries. With the support of the revolutionaries, women resisted these narratives through their sustained presence on the ground. They marched in women-led demonstrations protected by protesters under the slogans “Daughters of Your Homeland” and “A Woman’s Voice Is a Revolution, Not a Shame,” in direct response to al-Sadr’s tweet claiming that a woman’s voice was shameful and should not be heard in protests. The protesters moved from the back lines to the front, but the slogan was later distorted into “Your Whores, O Homeland” (Ali, 2023), after which many women participants became reluctant to discuss or even mention it.

Later, the policy of expelling women from the squares escalated through acts of kidnapping, rape, and blackmail, such as threats to release photos or videos taken during detention or private images from their phones. These methods of intimidation achieved what the authorities and militias intended, as the number of women participating in the protests declined sharply, and families increasingly forbade them from joining (Najah-Baghdad, 2020). The expulsion policy extended from the public space to the digital sphere, where they were threatened with social cancellation when their social media accounts or phone numbers were identified as the stigmatising denominator “girls of the tents.” Amid all these losses and the absence of a political feminist bloc, the mere mingling of genders in revolutionary squares cannot be accepted as a feminist goal in itself (Ali, 2021).

From the moment clerics began their incitement against women, the first wave of what I call “feminist taqiyya”1 emerged. At that point, feminist discourse became cautious and restrained across all public, private, and digital spaces.

The Creation of a Feminist Spectre

As a result of the October uprising, early elections were held in 2021. This ushered in a political climate that can be described as toxic, or at the very least, unwelcoming to women – whether from the civil political forces that emerged from the uprising or from the forces of political Islam that had been in power since 2003. While women protesters were branded as “immoral,” male protesters held the view that women had no real grasp of politics and little knowledge of negotiation, organising, drafting statements, or developing and debating ideas that sustain the movement (Al-Hassan, 2022).

This condescending attitude paved the way for the authorities’ policies toward the “Tishreen women” in particular, and toward women in general, after the revolution. They organised themselves into parties, alliances, and movements in which women’s presence was largely symbolic, and gender bias pushed many women to leave these formations (Al-Hassan, 2022). This bias was an extension of the same dynamics women had faced in the protest squares. Many of these men went on to defend oppressive extremist Islamic laws – such as amending child custody provisions, the proposal of the Ja‘fari personal status code to replace the civil law that protected women’s rights, and defending anti-prostitution laws, hostile to women and indifferent to economic realities. They also aligned themselves, through silent complicity under the guise of “neutrality,” with the anti-gender campaign that targeted feminists and feminism, openly celebrating the banning of the term “gender” itself (Inan.M.Play, 2024).

The early elections took place two years after the uprising, under an interim government. During that time, the feminist groups, teams, and organisations that had emerged from Tishreen gained a small margin of freedom to engage in relatively radical feminist work, infused with a revolutionary spirit derived from the movement itself. Their activities focused on political empowerment for women – education on political rights and confronting political violence – while also accounting for the fears of women protesters who wanted to enter political life but feared possible retaliatory harm from militias. Feminist demands were expressed in the celebrations of International Women’s Day and on the anniversaries of the uprising, through marches and demonstrations in public squares. These events were large, dignified, and inspiring, encouraging more initiatives; yet, they were closely monitored by the authorities.

Since 2003, International Women’s Day has served as a show of feminist presence and its numerical strength across Baghdad and other provinces. In the post-Tishreen phase, this presence became so strong that the government deployed riot police to secure it (Worker Communist Party of Iraq, 2022), at an average of nearly one soldier per protester – an astonishing and ironic sight, as they were facing unarmed women protesters who carried nothing but signs and chanted feminist slogans. However, this large mobilisation gradually began to fade as the state employed forms of symbolic violence against it.

By mid-2022, after a series of dissolutions and reconvenings among armed political blocs, parliament was reconstituted with a majority led by the Coordination Framework forces allied with Iran (Al-Dabbagh, 2022). These forces were supporters of the militias that had assisted the government in brutalising protesters (Koli, 2020), and who resented them, as they had burned most of their headquarters across cities. They were eager to exact revenge on protesters and organisations of all kinds, especially feminist ones.

The new government had several fears and found no way to dispel them except through the erasure of feminism and politically active women. Their persecution campaign fabricated what I call a “feminist haunting” – creating a spectre, a scarecrow, to repel people. One of the government’s chief fears was the resurgence of protests in general, and particularly the renewed presence of women within them. The regime thus spread the notion that protests were futile, citing the return of entrenched power blocs to rule after the October uprising as proof. Another fear was the potential “contagion” of the Iranian protests (Al-Rawabet, 2019) spreading into Iraq, whose government was loyal to and backed by Iran. Suppressing women thus became a necessity – to preserve both political and religious-patriarchal authority. Clerics played a significant role in these campaigns, defending their “dignity” and fearing a repetition of the “Down with the Turban” campaign or the burning of the hijab that occurred during the Iranian protests.

Following the first elections after the revolution, ninety-seven women succeeded in securing parliament seats, some of whom were “Tishreen women.” However, this presence did not bring any noticeable change due to the deeply entrenched sectarian-gender quota system that has characterised the country for two decades, and due to the political violence they faced inside parliament. Women MPs, particularly the “Tishreen women,” were treated as invisible – even during celebrations and events dedicated to women. More broadly, there was no exchange or discussion of perspectives or visions between these MPs and their constituencies, whether women voters or non-voters. In an electoral session, eighty out of the ninety-seven women MPs voted in favour of amending the discriminatory child custody law, marking that moment as the worst instance of women representation in parliament to date (Majid, 2024). The political absence of women became felt each time one of their rights was eroded or a gain was stripped away. This was despite the presence of a numerically significant women’s bloc that could not organise into a political force commensurate with its size, as it had exceeded the quota of eighty-three MPs.

Within parliament itself, feminist voices were suppressed by the leaders of political blocs, whether in general sessions or in committee meetings. For instance, MP Noor Nafi, who emerged from the October uprising, was forcibly silenced every time she voiced objections or spoke of women’s rights. However, these instances were treated as individual cases, and did not evolve into a collective parliamentary movement with a clear agenda capable of effectively advancing women’s issues (Majid, 2024). The denial of women’s political presence – of the woman politician simply for being a woman – is a symptom of the symbolic violence that women continue to face to this day. When women struggle to assert their authority, when their qualifications are questioned on the basis of their gender, their ideas are appropriated by men (Al-Hassan, 2022). The majority, however, have found assimilation into patriarchal structures a means of retaining their positions, hesitating to speak on women’s issues for fear of defamation or blackmail.

In January 2023, the Iraqi government launched the platform “Ballegh” (Report) (Ministry of Interior, 2023), aimed at reporting what it described as “offensive” online content – without defining or clarifying what “offensive” meant or by what standards content would be classified as such. This created fear among bloggers, particularly those who criticised the government and militias. The campaign began by targeting women content creators, especially those perceived by the general public as “immoral” or as “nightclub women” (Al-Moussawi, 2023) – women implicitly agreed upon as guilty. Soon after, a series of laws, regulations, and policies were issued that shaped the moral discourse of this period (Mustafa, 2025).

Once the platform was launched, accounts began introducing the idea that feminists should be targeted by the campaign, with some even sharing links to feminist pages and accounts and suggesting their mass reporting. This prompted many women active in the digital sphere to deactivate their accounts or delete them permanently. The sequence of events was far from innocent: during the time of the interim government, political parties began founding women’s organisations affiliated to them, but that claimed independence from the authorities, in order to produce a complicit movement that could later be presented as an alternative “feminism,” while adopting what the state desired. These organisations approached women’s issues superficially, and aimed to whitewash the regime, presenting it as democratic to the outside world. They championed the regime’s supposed respect for values that would render it acceptable, or at least recognisable, in the eyes of the international community.

Indeed, the ruling parties succeeded in co-opting several feminist groups, organisations, and collectives, in addition to independent feminist influencers and activists. Chandra Talpade Mohanty defines complicity as actions and words that serve the structure of dominant power even when their narratives are intended as opposition. Feminist complicity occurs when feminist discourse adopts that of the oppressor, or when feminist activism effectively supports oppressive structures (Mohanty, 2006). Several Iraqi women organisations aligned themselves with the state – at times through passive neutrality, and at others, through merging with its discourse and activities. For example, some supported state projects, such as the announcement of the government’s “National Strategy for Iraqi Women (2023–2030),” which included themes such as participation, protection, and economic empowerment, among a variety of social dimensions (Sky News, 2023). This contributed to the flatlined enthusiasm of women who might otherwise have mobilised for events such as International Women’s Day, with some withdrawing their plans altogether on that occasion – a tactic through which the state reaped its intended results shortly after adopting it.

Feminism After Tishreen

For women and for the feminist movement in Iraq, the October uprising did not end with the dismantling of tents, the emptying of squares, the formation of parties that emerged from it, al-Sadr’s supporters storming into parliament, or the ensuing waves of disappointment and division – neither did it end with the repositioning undertaken by feminist organisations. It truly ended when the government reconstituted itself, gathering within it all the forces that the uprising had once erupted against.

In July 2023, the campaign “Against Gender and Social Deviance” was launched, aligning itself with the global anti-queer movement. With the collapse of the traditional concept of sexuality and the spread of debates around what Butler calls gender trouble, the campaign represented patriarchy’s self-defence strategy after losing a significant part of its normative power (al-Miskini, 2023). Here began the second wave of feminist dissimulation, accompanied by a visible feminist disappearance resulting from the systematic terror practised by the state and its informal branches against women.

The aim of the “Anti-Gender and Social Deviance” campaign was to strike two birds with one stone, attacking both feminism and queerness. It adopted various tactics to tarnish the concept and discourse of “gender” (Mustafa, 2025), starting with a spark ignited by Sheikh Mohammed al-Ya‘qubi, the spiritual leader of the Islamic al-Fadila Party, known for his persistent work since 2004 to abolish Personal Status Law No. 188 and replace it with a religious Ja‘fari code.

This time, feminists could not clearly identify their adversaries – whether individuals or institutions – as the campaign involved parties who either benefited, were misled, or had been drawn from spaces of neutrality and indifference in the name of religion. Unlike material or direct violence, which targets a specific objective, symbolic violence takes on multiple forms and patterns that collectively constitute signs of indirect confrontation. Its perpetrators operate covertly, without appearing publicly (Bourdieu, 1994). Through social pressure, a campaign of extremists subdued the state and forced it to disown and renounce the term “gender.” Instructions were issued prohibiting its use or even its mention in trainings. Feminist activists were compelled to sign written pledges to not discuss it at all (Mustafa, 2025). The authorities also changed the names of the “Women Empowerment Departments” to the “Women’s Affairs Departments” and further restricted their government funding. These departments were complicit as they collaborated with women from state-manufactured “alternative” movements who justified their superficial work rather than abandon the field entirely – even after the state’s intentions became clear.

This campaign was described as a frenzy against feminists (Mustafa, 2023) in particular, and against civic activism in general. Feminists were stripped of their right to expression through stigmatisation and defamation, especially in media outlets that dedicated months to broadcasting hate speech against them, drawing primarily on clerics who misled the public and entangled them in complex academic jargon. The organisers and supporters of the campaign also employed electronic armies that became guardians of patriarchy, hunting feminists down, tracking their social media accounts, and publicly shaming them to intimidate and silence them.

Thus, words such as “Tishreeni” or “CEDAW” (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) became loaded with stigma and insult, and feminists could only react with silence and withdrawal. Acts of symbolic violence against women here can be divided into two subcategories: acts of commission and acts of omission. Acts of commission include incitement to physical assault through social media, comments, and sexual harassment, as well as pre-emptive efforts to silence women in public life through legal or public means – actions that forced many feminist organisations and activists to deactivate their official social media accounts and delete posts and photos documenting their feminist work. Acts of omission, on the other hand, are characterised by neglect – rendering women invisible and disregarding their demands. Many feminist academics were marginalised and excluded from committees or councils related to women’s affairs, such as university committees and planned conferences.

After this campaign, the movement relied almost entirely on the solidarity of Iraqi and Arab feminists abroad. The inability of Iraqi feminists to confront the violent campaigns or to stand in visible solidarity with one another led to disturbances that seeped into the feminist movement itself. Some activists carried out harsh and angry critical self-reviews that exposed the fragility of the organising. Most of those targeted by the attacks faced the storm alone, without institutional support from their organisations (Hameed, 2025).

Before the campaign, leadership belonged to the older and more experienced generation (Jalabi, 2023), which made the movement operate according to a hierarchy that had not been sufficiently questioned. Afterwards, the crisis provoked a wave of public and silent withdrawals, leaving behind physical absence and spectral presence within organisations. Thus, unintentionally, the campaign pushed feminists to address the long-postponed debate about critiquing feminist organisations internally across generations.

As for the feminist groups, teams, and networks that rejected the traditional structure of feminist organisations and had begun their work during and after Tishreen, they quickly disbanded to protect their members’ safety. Some changed their names and redirected their focus, for instance, towards sustainable development; some announced suspension of their activities until further notice; and others disappeared entirely – especially those operating on self-funding.

The stripping of language, as a policy adopted by the Iraqi state toward feminism, represented an attempt to silence through prohibiting the use of words and terminology. There is nothing more dangerous than the attempt to sever the umbilical cord that connects people to their language; when that connection is cut or rattled, it reflects on the whole self (Maalouf, 2015). Terminology is the tool that allows us to describe injustice and oppression; prohibiting its use, mocking it, or distorting its meanings for the purpose of deception deprived feminists of the right to openly claim a political feminist orientation.

This forced feminist erasure made feminist organising presence real, yet constrained, marked by small attempts to gather what remained of organisations still capable of continuing their work. Ru’a Khalaf, a feminist activist and member of the Administrative Board of the Iraqi Women’s Network, says: “What remains of feminist presence is small in number compared to the magnitude of the issues that must be addressed.” After the government stabilised, feminist protest became one of its primary targets of retaliation: even the simplest organisation of a women’s vigil or march required extensive official procedures and deployment of security forces to intimidate protesters, accompanied by informal interrogations and public scorn of their slogans (Sky News, 2023).

With the continued paralysis of feminist organising, child custody laws were amended in favour of men, and the Ja‘fari personal status code resurfaced, referring personal status matters to religious sects in ways that serve men’s interests. Meanwhile, political and social preoccupations with what were deemed “more important” issues – such as election boycotts, political alliances, and the implementation of the party law – relegated women’s issues once again to the margins.

Funding as an Accusation

As an extension of the campaigns inciting public opinion against feminist organisations, the financial statements of major feminist organisations were published on the campaign’s main Telegram channel (“The Central Campaign Against Deviance”).2 They were then circulated on social media alongside a smear campaign accusing these organisations of “working for foreign powers” and “striking at the traditions and values of the Iraqi family.” This contributed to shaking public trust in these organisations, and the damage extended to the funding structure that had constituted their lifeline. The situation worsened with changes in international funding policies, which increased the vulnerability of these organisations and made them easy targets for the discourse of authority. Latifa, the director of one such organisation, told me: “They hacked the organisation’s email account, infiltrated it, and contacted the international entities I work with to request more money. This disrupted the relations of trust between me and the donors, as well as between me and the employees I work with, since the documents that were published were sensitive and private. I was forced to delete most of the posts documenting our work over the years.” Although funding sustains various organisations – medical, relief, educational, environmental, and even religious – the demonised public image of funding was confined to feminist organisations and feminists.

The campaign against funding also reopened an important and longstanding debate on the selection of funding sources, one of the dilemmas facing the movement and threatening its identity (Mahmoud and Tantawi, 2016). However, the grant as a single-form funding created the illusion that it is impossible to function with limited resources, through voluntary work or symbolic compensation, especially that for years, organisations had received grants worth thousands of dollars, and their women staff had perceived salaries that were much higher than the average wage in the country. The problem, therefore, seems to lie in unfamiliarity rather than incapacity. It is as if everything that happened now compels feminists to review and critique twenty years of feminist activism, bringing back long-postponed issues within the feminist debate.

Pathways to Hauntology

The three pathways to the making of the feminist spectre are (1) the demonisation of feminism; (2) the support of a misleading “alternative;” and (3) the presentation of the kind of “feminism” the authorities desire, after people have rejected the first two. The authorities and militias attempted to claim that their ability to absorb the feminist movement testified of their democracy and their civilised image before the international community. They also asserted that they share the same feminist demands but from an Islamic perspective that preserves customs and traditions, and that they do not derive their ideas from the “infidel West” as secular feminism does. In doing so, they promoted a docile feminism that calls for “fairness and not justice,” as per the familiar Islamic clichés often heard when speaking about women. In truth, under the rule of those who espouse this discourse, women receive neither fairness nor justice.

With the disintegration of feminist organisations and the decline of institutional backing, the result was not only the weakening of the feminist movement but also the manufacture of calculated alternatives: feminisms that conform to the state’s discourse, and that are either complicit through silence, or that actively participate in defaming radical voices. At this stage, feminism was drained from the public sphere as an independent social movement, and a controlled alternative image was presented to the public – one that could easily be rejected and mocked. The result was a political vacuum filled by the memory of a dangerous feminism rather than an active presence. Feminism thus became invoked as an accusation or a threat rather than as an effective force. This can be understood as the transformation of feminism into a phantom that is both present and absent – one whose return is a terrifying possibility (Derrida, 2006), yet is deprived of a vessel that could breathe life back into it.

Feminism bothers (Ahmed, 2010). Even feminists who attempted to ingratiate themselves with the system by conforming to it were not spared this demonisation. On the contrary, they were tamed by the authorities, even after they preached on social media about what feminist work should look like and what its duties toward the nation are. They were still targeted despite their collective abandonment of the linguistic terms that point to feminist commitment, such as patriarchy, masculinity, oppression, sexuality, marginalisation, and repression.

Feminist activist Ru’a Khalaf tells me that when she openly calls herself a feminist or discusses priority issues, she faces responses such as “Feminism is rebellion. Your daughter would come home with her friends and tell you ‘it’s okay baba, it’s normal.’ She would then dress up however she wants and go out as she pleases. Today she is asking for education; who is to say what she will ask for tomorrow? But if you don’t want to shave your armpit hair, that’s fine," as an attempt to patronise her and belittle her views.

The production of a misleading alternative to feminism with a superficial discourse has found ample space on social media, where figures – often women of social privilege – are supported to speak of their individual needs as if they were feminist demands. In parallel, some narratives, celebrated by men and society, glorify women who leave their jobs for their families. Trends such as “Your money is my money and my money is your money” were promoted to instill the uselessness of women’s financial independence for the family, as it makes her absent and away from her “duties.” Other trends portrayed the husbands of working women as emasculated, suggesting that due to their contribution to household expenses, financially independent women are masculinised (Hameed, 2025). Additionally, there were calls to reduce women’s public space which intersected with the growing cases of harassment, violence, and sexual assaults against women.

On the individual feminist level, after the creation of dichotomies such as moderate/extremist feminism and destructive/constructive feminism, feminists grew more defensive, seeking to present themselves as successful mothers, virtuous nurturers, and loyal wives. Yet, this did not prevent them from being labelled “destructive” and “selfish.” Let us, then, embrace being described as “destructive,” so long as we indeed reject the system and work towards its destruction. Let us not forget that it is this very same system that confines and exploits women, feeding them illusions of happiness while threatening them with expulsion, violence, impoverishment, and deprivation of opportunity at any moment.

Creating an Alternative Shiite Feminism

While authorities were suppressing feminist presence, religious institutions began presenting purely Shiite religious feminist programmes focused on Islamist indoctrination. These include institutions affiliated with Shiite parties and religious mausoleums, most notably the Al-Abbas shrine. They organised, for example, mass rituals where thousands of girls were sent on symbolic pilgrimages; allocated ample funds to move university graduation ceremonies into mausoleum courtyards under religious themes; and regularly held celebratory seminars honouring young women who wore the black Zainabi abaya within university halls. Meanwhile, their loyal media outlets flooded social media with videos demonising students who did not wear the abaya (Az, 2024).

The wider base of women did not perceive what was happening as a cause for concern. They viewed it merely as a quarrel between “troublemakers” and those trying to protect the sect, and felt no sense of threat, even with the enactment of the Ja‘fari Law, which amended Personal Status Law No. 188.

The feminist movement as a whole relied on the online sphere to communicate with its grassroots base. But with women’s access to social media not exceeding 32 percent (Alssaa, 2023), this weakened its ability to mobilise and influence – especially during times of crisis. Reaching out to a wide segment of women was further complicated by the exclusion of feminist figures from educational curricula, the surveillance and repression of any new ideas, and the censorship of any feminist knowledge in favour of curricula entrenched in patriarchal, authoritarian ideologies and narratives (Mustafa, 2024). Women thus became a measure for social discipline – a gauge for adhering to moral boundaries through which “commitment,” “manhood,” and “communal identity” could be defined (Saleh, 2025).

In this way, the goal of alternative feminism was met: the image of the “successful” woman – the patient Zainabi woman – was produced by the authorities through government programmes. Meanwhile, all the other women were depicted as immoral. This is what symbolic violence is: the capacity to construct, narrate, and entrench ideological premises; to transform social and cultural conditions by shaping beliefs and altering their aims; and to produce ideological perceptions of the world aligned with the will to dominate (Fayyad).

Feminist Hauntology

After the brutal eradication of feminist activism, a “feminist spectre” that threatens society was manufactured. Although the feminist movement had always operated within the bounds of the political and legal system, it was fought by every possible means. Even the use of the term gender, once recognised and employed by the authorities themselves and by the Shi’a institutions and their affiliated research centres, turned into a sworn enemy with the return of the Islamic Dawa Party to influence and governance (Hameed, 2023). The party adopts a policy well known to us Iraqis: “we create a terrifying illusion, then fight it as heroic saviours.”

Historically, the Islamic Dawa Party fought the communist movement in Iraq in the same way, branding it as atheistic and heretical (al-Haydari, 2012). Its existence and strength were tied to the fight against that supposed “force seeking to destroy society.” Here, the spectre is linked to visible political volatility – a metaphor for ongoing symbolic violence – and it manifests in fears, accusations, and imagined forms of feminism more than in any tangible, collective political act.

This tense silence invites us to consider what I call “feminist hauntology:” a moment when the movement becomes phantom-like. It is invoked in discourse more than it is seen on the ground, and loaded with meanings that may reflect the fears of its adversaries more than the intentions of its agents. It is a stage that challenges our ability to digest and draw from it – critically and practically – which, in itself, becomes a form of resistance to the present condition. For despite disappointment, isolation, exhaustion, and withdrawal, feminists – and feminism itself – remain spectral. As Derrida reminds us, the spectre does not indicate the return of the dead but rather offers a metaphor. Its possible absence provokes questions around justice, as a rejection of grand narratives in favour of their fragmented versions (Rahim, 2012).

Spectres possess no collective body, yet their presence is unsettling. Their discourse is fought, and they are accused of treason even in their absence, without possessing the means to act or to speak. The authorities have defined their presence through their disappearance – making them both visible and invisible – and in doing so, unwittingly produced for feminists a survival tactic: a spectre born of the many forms of containment extending from the October protests to this very moment. How can we make use of this tactic? Our responsibility within this harsh context is to conjure this spectre and discern what it gestures toward. Feminists have avoided public appearance and declaration as a means of survival, turning caution into an indispensable political strategy (taqiyya) – a discretion that has extended even to non-feminists and those engaged in political life. Though born of fear and adaptation, it is a kind of presence – present as a political-cultural spectre, absent as organisation or action.

Despite strong indicators of the need for feminist political organising, most feminists remain confined within the framework of rights-based NGOs, blurring the line between political organising as a strategy for survival and network-building across ideological feminist differences. One example is the 188 Alliance (Al-Marsoumi, 2024), founded to defend Personal Status Law No. 188. It was modelled after the earlier “Iraqi Women’s Network,” in which feminists did not appear as a genuine political force. The alliance was not managed horizontally but according to influence and funding size: decisions were led by the most funded organisations with the widest connections – which nonetheless failed to counter the opposing campaigns. As Rania, a queer feminist writer, expressed: “What is happening is akin to what happens to water buffaloes in the marshes – they are drained of water, left with only small puddles insufficient even for rest, and then die slowly” (Al-Marsoumi, 2024).

Absence here does not represent individual failure, but rather the outcome of structural and symbolic violence – systematic efforts to silence voices whose mere existence is intolerable. This invites us to understand organisational paralysis as a political condition, not as personal weakness, in an attempt to reclaim our feminism from erasure campaigns waged through ideologically driven media, platforms, and patriarchal-nationalist discourses.

The fear-inducing connotation of the spectre in the Iraqi collective imagination clarifies the current state of the feminist movement: the spectre exists metaphorically. Fabricated by its adversaries, it is absent, yet everywhere, and always on the verge of reappearing (Rahim, 2012). Turning feminism into a terrifying ghost is believed to ensure its non-return, but the task of banishing it falls upon feminists themselves. The demonising discourse about them sustains their haunting – a lingering presence that continues to provoke curiosity about the ideas they espouse: “the height of the conjuring trick here consists in causing to disappear while producing ‘apparitions’” (Derrida, 2006). Young women influenced by feminism – or who voice feminist demands – are deemed “possessed;” even a comment on inflammatory posts risks the deletion of one’s digital account (Mustafa and Abd, 2024). Cancel culture now knows no limits, and a raised feminist voice is perceived as a threat to the patriarchal order. Those defending that order unite to silence, contain, and push it back to its “proper” place (Saleh, 2025).

Conclusion

The recovery of political presence after the October 2019 uprising – whether through confronting direct repression or responding to violations under current conditions – has become an act of near-suicide. It demands that we sharpen our tools and stimulate collective imagination to create new possibilities for political organising. The ability to describe the current moment is in itself a form of resistance. It is an attempt to imagine where we are at, whether in relation to the broader social movement or through retracing our own steps within the feminist movement itself.

The October uprising was not a fleeting event in the history of the Iraqi feminist movement; it was the start of a new chapter that forced us to confront our weaknesses. We were left with only a brief moment to understand and grapple with them, before being punished with silencing – which will soon turn into a curse if we do not also confront it.

As Jacques Derrida said: “they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. They give us to rethink the ‘there’ as soon as we open our mouths” (2006).

Despite repression and erasure, Iraqi feminism remains present as a political and cultural spectre – a condition that invites us to rethink our strategies for the future. The challenge now lies in building flexible frameworks of organising capable of resisting repression while maintaining a clear political language. Establishing internal and external support networks would ensure the sustainability of feminist presence and its resistance to symbolic and institutional violence.

Our strategy must not be limited to reshaping our movements, or reviving the same forms of organising that led to the current paralysis. Rather, we need to forge new models that focus on regrouping, to freely and unconventionally discuss and reassess. We must attempt to reclaim our language in this transitional period by spreading our knowledge to regional or global academic spaces, given the constraints imposed on them within Iraq. We also must seriously consider alliance-building and networking with other movements – those concerned with poverty, corruption, labour, or the environment – to reintroduce feminist issues within and through them. Finally, we need to think of alternatives for archiving feminist history – in print and digitally – to preserve our experiences from erasure, and to collectively write the history of this present moment from our own perspectives, with our own feminist methodologies, so it can be protected from manipulation and obliteration.

Even if done quietly and cautiously, even if we tell our stories under the conditions of taqiyya and disorientation, these acts are no short of wilful stubbornness. They are the pathway to breaking the walls of fear between us. Telling our stories from our own perspective would protect us from being forgotten. Let us, then, protect our past from being written over. Let us write ourselves the feminist history of Tishreen, not as a victory, but as a wound that marked and taught us, so that we may no longer be spectres in our present and future.

• 1. Taqiyya is a strategy of Shi’a Islam, adopted by the first Shi’a who concealed their beliefs and positions under oppressive rulers, in order to protect themselves from danger and persecution, without abandoning their faith.
• 2. The campaign’s Telegram messages are reposted on their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100095085627278