Prologue

Summary

Focusing on the murder of Mitra Ostad, the Prologue sheds light on the ways that various sociopolitical institutions reduce women to the corporeal, instrumentalizing the female body to political advantage without viewing individual women as autonomous subjects. It also examines the manner in which news and social media handled the murder of a woman, pushing the elimination of the female body to the margins (and to a great extent this marginalization of a woman’s murder), contributing to the normalization of such gendered domestic violence and murder cases. Again, the way that these political parties approached this murder and the portrayal of the murder in the news outlets, including reformist and hard-line newspapers, speaks to not only the normalization of the murder of a woman who was a potential threat to the so-called greater good, but it also speaks about the ways that this female body has been commodified and commercialized in a capitalist system to become a tool of payback for opponent political parties and newspapers while the murder and the elimination of the murdered woman’s body and her rights have been forgotten. The Prologue draws connections between various chapters of the book and this murder case and brings the readers’ attention back to one of the main arguments in the book, which is the mapping out of the sociocultural, religious, and political corruptions of a society upon the female body.