The Scarlet Letter | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Azadeh Dastyari

Plot twist! In this episode, we shake things up by putting last episode’s co-host Dr Azadeh Dastyari in the hot seat. Our co-hosts Dr Tamara Wilkinson and Dr Ronli Sifris welcome Dr Dastyari to talk about her journey as a feminist, a scholar, and an advocate for asylum seekers. She shares powerful childhood memories of growing up in a politically active family, including being arrested as a toddler at a protest in post-revolution Iran. From there, she traces how Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and some incredible teachers helped shape her feminist identity. Dr Dastyari unpacks her research into feminist issues, such as Australia’s offshore detention system, the horrific treatment of refugees, and the urgent need for change. Heavy stuff, but crucial listening.

First published 2017.

The Scarlet Letter podcast is produced by the Feminist Legal Studies Group. This podcast features interviews with feminists connected to the law, discussing their life, work, and feminist perspectives. It's perfect for anyone passionate about feminist legal scholarship.

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Transcript | The Scarlet Letter | Season 1 |Episode 4 | Azadeh Dastyari

Azadeh Dastyari: [00:00:00] Good morning, we are Azadeh Dastyari and Ronli Sifris, and welcome to the fourth episode of the Scarlet Letter, the podcast of the Feminist Legal Studies Group at Monash University's Faculty of Law. Today, we're joined by Tamara Wilkinson.

Ronli Sifris: Hi. Tamara is a researcher in the Faculty of Law and a Monash University graduate.

She's spent the past three years researching Australian innovation and venture capital law and is responsible for managing an Australian Research Council grant which is focused on designing world class venture capital programs.

Azadeh Dastyari: As a committed feminist, Tamara is also a very valuable member of the Feminist Legal Group here at Monash.

Welcome, Tamara. Thank you. It's good to be here.

Ronli Sifris: As we're beginning this podcast series by interviewing members of the [00:01:00] Feminist Legal Studies group. In today's episode, we're mixing it up a little, and rather than interviewing Tamara, she'll be helping me interview my co host, Azadeh.

Tamara Wilkinson: Azadeh's main areas of research are international and domestic laws relating to the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees.

Ronli Sifris: Az, perhaps you can start by telling us when you became aware of feminist ideas.

Azadeh Dastyari: I don't know when. I came to understand feminism per se. I come from a very political family. My mum is incredibly strong and incredibly committed to a whole heap of ideas. And I grew up in a family that really valued equality with people who fought and dedicated their lives to making The world a better place.

And some of my earliest memories were Being arrested with my mom.

I grew up during well in the aftermath [00:02:00] of the Iranian Revolution, so my name Azadeh means freedom in Farsi because my parents thought as many mothers and fathers of daughters in 1979 thought that they were going to get freedom.

So there were a lot of girls out there called Azadeh who are Iranian and very few after and very few before. I never knew that. There you go. And my surname means to lend a helping hand. There you go.

Tamara Wilkinson: You're an activist by name and practice.

Azadeh Dastyari: I hope to be. I'm not sure if that's true, but I hope to be.

But my that was definitely what my parents wanted me to be and So my parents were very politically active. They fought to have the revolution, and then when the revolution came, they fought against the revolution because it wasn't really the country that they believed in. And what was really interesting about the Iranian revolution is that there were a lot of women involved in the revolution, whereas In many countries in the Middle East women have been subjugated, women of course have been subjugated in Iran, [00:03:00] there's no question about that.

But perhaps to a lesser extent than they could have been and have been in other Middle Eastern countries because of the involvement of women in the Iranian revolution. And so my mom was in a batch of very strong, very active women who fought for the revolution and then fought against the revolution as well.

And so the story I was hinting at was when I was, I think maybe two or three my mom took me to a protest. Most of my life I've been in protest and my mom and she was she was arrested that day and we were taken into a holding cell. And I have these memories and, I've had long conversations with my family about what I can actually remember and what's real and what's not real.

But I remember the smell of urine everywhere and I remember the fear and I was, I was a toddler basically, but my mom was eventually let go that day. But many of her friends were not. And One of my [00:04:00] dad's friends was actually killed on, at the very same protest, but So that's the kind of family I grew up in.

Politics was everything. And I was always aware that equality was important. I always knew that my mum never saw herself as any less than my dad, nor did my dad ever see her as any less than him. In fact, he had enormous respect for her. But I couldn't give that a name. I wouldn't have said that was feminism because that wasn't the language we used in my household. So it wasn't until I was in high school and we had to study Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own that I, I was able to, give that a name.

I wouldn't have said that was feminism because that wasn't the language that was being used in my household. hit home for me. And I had this fabulous high school teacher, those amazing teachers that completely change your life. I had one of those Mrs. Coburn, if you're there. I miss Ms.

Coburn. I'm so sorry. I've learned nothing in all these years. Ms. Coburn, they fought wanted us to learn [00:05:00] about Virginia Woolf with her and A Room of One's Own completely changed the way I looked at the world. And the ideas weren't particularly revolutionary for me, because they were things that I'd been familiar with throughout my life, but she gave it a structure that I wasn't familiar with.

And that was I guess maybe that's when I understood what feminism was and why it was important.

Ronli Sifris: Yeah. So would you say that was the point when you began to actually identify yourself as a feminist? Or were there other sort of stages in your life where you, where that identity became more firmly entrenched?

Azadeh Dastyari: I think that was a big turning point. I also did a year of study in Leiden, in Holland. doing English literature because I was a lot more interested in other things I could do in Leiden than I was actually learning anything. But I had a really amazing feminist, teach me about feminist history in Leiden as well.

And that, that also had a huge impact on my life and [00:06:00] changed my view of the world and how I viewed myself. I think the combination of these amazing teachers in my life, I think or helped me identify as a feminist. Yeah. Yeah.

Tamara Wilkinson: How has your feminism changed the way you live your life?

Azadeh Dastyari: I think when I came to the university, I became exposed to these ideas initially through Virginia Woolf and then Simone de Beauvoir when I studied feminism in Leiden and then Catherine MacKinnon had a massive influence on my life as well.

I studied Catherine MacKinnon in some subject. These these feminists that could show, us that the world is, and relationships are all about power, have really influenced the work that I do because even though I don't necessarily work on issues that are directly feminist in nature, I don't deal with women's issues.

I work on refugee law issues, [00:07:00] but ultimately I think these feminists help me understand what power really means and what inequality really means and how power structures shape people and shape our perception of people and change people themselves as well. So even though I don't directly work in that area, it's definitely impacted on my research.

And I guess in my life personally, it's made me So much more, again, aware of power relationships and in any dynamic, I think I look for the inequality and look for where the power may be and I'm quite committed to ensuring that whoever might be the less powerful person in an environment has a voice and has has their, it's visible.

So I think it's really influenced [00:08:00] the relationships that I have in my life as well. I have a little daughter who is going to be two soon and it's, These feminist ideas, have really It made me very conscious of the way I'm raising her and also raising my seven year old son as well.

Ronli Sifris: Do you feel like that the world they're growing up in is different to the world you grew up in from a kind of feminist standpoint?

Azadeh Dastyari: Is the world different? I think they're tackling different issues to, to what we were tackling. And I, my experience is so different to theirs anyway, because, I moved to Australia when I was nine. It wasn't just that I was a girl that wasn't the only thing that was impacting on my life, but I was also coming from the Middle East, English was my second language.

There were all these other issues in West, living in Western Sydney. I can't say how [00:09:00] much of The things that I perhaps found limiting were because of my gender and how much were because of all these other factors. I can see that my kids get to grow up in a, it's in a different environment. Yeah I think, I'm hopeful that there's greater awareness and greater resistance to some of the sexist ideas that surrounded us when we were growing up and the things that limited what we were allowed, not allowed to do.

I think there's great awareness of fluidity and Yeah. Gender being a constant construct. I hope anyway, I hope.

Just mother's optimism.

Tamara Wilkinson: Az would you mind telling us a little bit about the research that you're doing?

Azadeh Dastyari: Yeah. So I look a lot at offshore processing centers in particular.

And by that, the camps that Australia is funding in Nauru and Manus Island. And. I think [00:10:00] there are a lot of things to be concerned about in these places. And I think for feminists, especially, there are a lot of things to be concerned about. We have these detention centers where people aren't accessing basic health care.

That goes across the board, women, men, and children are not getting the health care that they need. But we've also had cases of women being raped at these detention centers without identifying the rapist. That's one stage when a woman had been been sent to Papua New Guinea in the hope that they would be able to give her an abortion in Papua New Guinea because they didn't want to bring her to Australia and they couldn't get access to a safe abortion for her in Nauru where, when Papua New Guinea abortion is illegal and all sorts of crazy things that we're doing to very vulnerable people.

It's a really [00:11:00] dark chapter, I think, in Australian history. I think we're going to struggle in. I think we're going to struggle describing this to people now, let alone in the future. But how do we tell people that we got people who came to us for help, shipped them off to Pacific islands where they had very little and treated them the way that we have and subjected them to years of abuse.

And we've got all of these proof of, sexual assault of children, physical assault of children, sexual assault of women and men. We know this is happening and yet it still continues to happen at massive expense to us. We're spending billions of dollars to make this happen.

So my research, looks to uncover that a little bit and to draw attention to some of the abuse that might be happening. And in the [00:12:00] hope that maybe we can contribute to it coming to an end. But I have to say decades of doing this, it doesn't feel very hopeful at the moment. It doesn't feel like we're getting very far because every time more is exposed that it doesn't seem to be the catalyst we always think it's going to be for the change that we know we need.

Tamara Wilkinson: Yep. Yeah. That's that's really interesting and obviously really awful. I think it's clear that's incredibly important work that you're doing. So well, Well done. So you talked a little bit before about the connections between your work and your feminist outlook, and it's clear that there's a lot of overlap there especially in a sort of intersectional way.

Are there any sort of particular areas to do with feminism that you'd like to develop in your work in future? Yeah, that's a really good question, Tamara. I think

Azadeh Dastyari: I would like to do more work on social movements and and [00:13:00] looking at feminists and how they influence change. I think that would be really interesting.

I've started doing some work looking at church groups and how the sanctuary movement, for example, is influencing politics and what are the factors that have gone into Church decision making around whether or not to participate in political activity. But I'm also really interested in looking at women's issues and how different factors shape kind of social change in this area.

I, I'm finding this group extremely exciting and this podcast in particular, the fact that we get to sit down with women's issues Some women, and men, some feminists one on one, and talk to them about their work is really inspiring and it's made me much more energized and interested in pursuing more directly, feminist work.

So I'd also like to look at some of the things that I was telling you [00:14:00] about in greater detail, like the health rights of women, for example, in our offshore processing centers. It's not something I've worked on directly before. And I'd really perhaps like to work on that a little bit more, but yeah, I'm finding this group fantastic.

Ronli Sifris: And I think it's also a really good vehicle for actually recognizing the synergies between our work, because you were talking about wanting to look more at health related issues in detention centres. And the work that I do is very much focused on women's reproductive health. And so it makes you think there are clear connections, which we may not have realised otherwise.

Azadeh Dastyari: So listeners, if in six months time, you get a tweet about the latest paper from our Azadeh and Ronli, you'll know where it came from. You heard the Genesis.

Ronli Sifris: Yeah. thank you very much, Az this has been a really interesting, fabulous conversation.

Azadeh Dastyari: Oh, thanks, guys.

Tamara Wilkinson: And thank you all for listening to The Scarlet Letter. [00:15:00]