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Showing posts from April, 2023

Freedom, Only Freedom

In his writings - both his award-winning novel/memoir No Friend but the Mountains and his journalism, recently collected and analysed in Freedom, only Freedom  - Behrooz Boochani talks about what he calls the 'Kyriarchal System'.  This term is his and Omid Tofighian's translation of the Farsi term system-e hakim.   Tofighian attempts to explain the term as follows: [it] can be translated in numerous ways ... sovereign system, controlling system, ruling system, governmental system, dominating system, oppressive system, subjugating system, ruling system ... but none of these actually capture the essence of what Behrouz is saying.... Wikipedia tells us: In feminist theory, kyriarchy is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. The word was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992 to describe her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a single