Abstract
This article examines crowds, leaders, and media after the 1979 Revolution of Iran. It focuses on media that contests hegemonic power by acting as a “guide” for an otherwise “leaderless movement,” especially in contexts where conventional “guides” are illegitimate or absent. It argues that such media reveals the partisan reality of political order obscured by the myth of leadership, the idea that the presence of a leader implies a political order. I focus on International Women’s Day 1979 when crowds protesting the Ayatollah Khomeini’s decision to enforce the mandatory veil were caught in a paradox: as subjects of history and objects of representation. With focus on the non-partisan newspaper Ayandegan, the article shows how the crowds, objects of representation, became political subjects, as potential guides. Despite its efforts to remain neutral, Ayandegan became partisan when it unwittingly challenged the “charismatic leader” by giving presence to the partisan crowds. The mediated relation between leader and led on 8 March 1979 and after is instructive for our understanding of the role media can play in leaderless movements.
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Notes
All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
Fardid first introduced the term gharbzaegi in a meeting held by the “Council of the Goals of Education in Iran” in 1961. Al-e Ahmad participated in the meetings and borrowed the term from Fardid (Mirsepassi, 2017, p. 149).
Minoo Moallem (2005, p. 28) defines the “civic body” as “an abstract body that is made public and politicizes in a way that displays the connections between individual and collective identities, and that is marked as a place of inclusion or exclusion.”
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Acknowledgments
Thank you to Kye Barker, Arash Davari, Maya Gonzalez, Murad Idris, Ed Kazarian, Milad Odabaei, and Davide Panagia for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I also benefited greatly from questions I received from the University of Virginia’s and Rowan’s political theory workshops. Finally, I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers at CPT along with Andrew March’s editorial oversight for helping me clarify the article’s framing, structure, and argument.
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Mansoori, N. A mirror for the crowds: the mediated terrain of political leadership in post-revolutionary Iran. Contemp Polit Theory 23, 249–268 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00648-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00648-y