The two different but interconnected subjects of “women” and “petroleum” are the main focus of this essay. However, the connection between the two has remained an untold story. The term “petroleum patriarchy” was used first by writer and scholar Michael Ross to show how the marginalization of women in politics and the labor market is related to the structures of oil economies.1 Scholars such as Sheena Wilson, Sharae Deckard, and Cara Daggett argue that oil reinforces the patriarchal characteristics of a society and thereby maintains women’s status as inferior citizens, keeping them outside the social reproduction of labor.
Cara Daggett coined the concept of “petro-masculinity” to explain that fossil fuels have effects beyond the generation of profits: they also recreate social identities.2 Daggett connects petro-masculinity to a “fossil fuel system” — a system that is entrenched in fossil fuel–based lifestyles and is powered by an unlimited and fast-growing resource: petro-money. Petro-money creates what appears to be a secure cultural system, but that system is in fact based on political subjectivity and fully supports hypermasculinity.
This hypermasculinity can be seen in the military power of petro-states. Here I would like to focus on the militarized aspects of Iran as one of the oldest petro-states in the Middle East. In this context, I am using the term “petro-military” to describe the power dynamic in Iran.
In using this term, I emphasize a petroleum-producing region’s military power, which is used against human rights and acts as a patriarchal power. This connection is shown in the works of the Iran-based visual artist Hossein Roozaneh. These images are part of a series called Zan, Naft, Eghtedargarai (Women, Oil, and Authoritarianism, 2023) which has not yet been exhibited. The main goal of the series is to show women’s embodiment (تنانگی), domination, and resistance.
Form the very first days of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in the fall of 2022, the freedom of women became the motivation behind the production of many artistic works. And in fact, like all other movements facing oppressive state power, “Women, Life, Freedom” triggered the use of a metaphorical language in various forms of cultural and artistic production.
In 2022, Roozaneh asked several women to give him strands of their hair. These women had either been arrested or been the target of police violence. By using these strands, he highlights the very reasons behind the movement, which was a reaction to the murder of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a twenty-two-year-old woman in Tehran, by the police. The reaction of the authorities to the protests was brutal. Many men and women were arrested or shot in Tehran and other Iranian cities.
Roozaneh is omitting the body, face, class, and education of these women to show how these bunches of hair — collections of dead cells, soulless objects — have become controversial. As seen in the images, the strands of hair are placed in frames filled with petroleum. From these sixty-by-sixty-centimeter frames, the feeling that reaches the audience is very interesting. First, because the petroleum is enclosed in very hard, cohesive, and closed frames, the frames act as borders, which have layers of meanings in today’s Iranian society. And then there are the strands of hair, which, despite being placed in a seemingly free space, are moving slowly in the thick oil. Hair represents femininity, and crude oil represents the masculine force within society. The hair does not have the power to move freely due to the specific nature of the crude oil. Roozaneh pumps the petroleum into the artwork, which makes the oil move continuously. The slowly-moving hair resembles women dancing in slow-motion within a heavy atmosphere.
In order to find the source of the masculine authority and armed power of the state, Roozaneh is searching for the cause of the conflict between military power and women in Iran. In the conversation I had with him, he said that to discover the main source of this power, he looked at the weapons, at the soldiers holding the weapons, at police commanders, and at male power. Behind all of these he saw petroleum: the financial underpinning of the bullying power of the Iranian state.
In another work, Roozaneh decided to connect the bunches of hair to the main object of violence: the weapon. Not being able to show the weapon itself for political reasons, Roozaneh tried instead to show the bullet marks on the back of the hand of a woman who was shot during the uprising. The piece became abstract, at first looking like the branches of a river finding their path to the sea. The veins on the back of the woman’s hand resemble land, a river, and the branches of a tree. There are two black lines, emerging from two bullet holes, down the middle of this work. Similarly to the framed works discussed previously, crude oil is pumped through the holes on the surface by a small generator.
Returning to the concept of “petro-military,” the question is whether Iran would be less militarized and less patriarchal if the country had no oil. This is the question that Sharae Deckard asks about the relationship between women and petroleum in another context: If petroleum as a concept has masculine characteristics, how can a society that is built upon petro-money get rid of its toxic masculine and anti-women characteristics?3
These artworks juxtapose hair and crude oil to demonstrate power relations and resistance in today’s Iran. Roozaneh is currently working on the rest of this series with works that focus on the bodies and clothes of women. He is trying to directly emphasize the relationship between women’s embodiment and petroleum patriarchy. Roozaneh is making women’s bodies and clothes into characters in his work, making them subjects of resistance instead of objects of torture. By connecting these subjects to the issue of oil authoritarianism as a political and social phenomenon, he is omitting all the distracting elements between them, and he makes it clear for us: To make the “hair of women” free, we have to end petroleum patriarchy.
1 Michael L. Ross, “Oil, Islam, and Women,” The American Political Science Review 102, no. 1 (2008): 107–23.
2 Cara Daggett, “Petro-Masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 47, no. 1 (2018): 25–44.
3 Sharae Deckard, “Gendering Petrofiction: Energy, Imperialism and Social Reproduction,” in Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere, ed. Stacy Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021).
Roya Khoshnevis, “Hair and Petroleum,” in mohit.art NOTES #15 (February/March 2025); published on www.mohit.art, January 31, 2025.
