The Everyday Revolt of Bodies in Iran

Iran is currently witnessing a large-scale uprising, with women’s rights part of its demands. Yet, this struggle predates mass protests, rooted in decades of activism and everyday acts of resistance. This blog post examines women’s resistance to the state’s violent body politics, particularly the imposition of hijab laws, showing how human rights – read through Rancière and Butler’s notion of “bodies in concert” – functions as a democratic force that enables collective action to enact rights that are not yet legally recognized.

International Human Rights and Enacting of Legally-Unrecognized Claims

For decades, human rights have been a central language for advancing claims to justice across a range of liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes (Santos 1997; Golder 2014). However, some scholars link the rise of human rights politics in the late 1970s to the retreat of the organized left and the weakening of revolutionary imaginaries. They argue that this positioned human rights, with its modest utopian vision aimed at alleviating suffering rather than radically transforming the world, as a compelling new framework (Moyn 2010; McLoughlin 2016). Despite their widespread appeal, critical scholars from a range of perspectives – including Marxist, Decolonial, and Feminist approaches – have contended that human rights instruments have done little to achieve global justice or, in cases, reproduced global inequalities and imperial subordination (e.g., Kapur 2013; Badiou 2012; Anghie 2012; Mutua 2002). Some scholars go further, contending that contemporary human rights discourse depoliticizes populations by marginalizing collective struggles, relocating rights claims from collective struggle to states, and obscuring people’s capacity to act as agents of legal and political change (e.g., Mamdani 2010; Phillips 2015; Rajagopal 2009). On the same line, some argue that meaningful rights advancements have historically been driven not by legal mechanisms but by social movements, revolutions, and political struggles from below (Douzinas, 2000; Burke’s Position explained in Waldron 2015). Human rights, in this view, risk functioning as obstacles to radical transformation rather than vehicles for it.

Post-Marxist thinkers often share this scepticism, yet some adopt a more ambivalent position, acknowledging its limitations while still viewing it as a tool for democratic struggle. For example, in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Rancière centres ‘political subjectivation’ at the heart of how issues come to be framed as matters of “human rights”. He explains how human rights serve as a catalyst for asserting demands and forms of freedom that are yet to be recognized by law. Unlike Lefort’s Political Forms of Modern Society, which conceptualized the gap between “the symbolic” (rights) and “the real” (people’s actual lived conditions) as an invitation to democratic struggles, Rancière came to identify a similarly productive tension – an ever-present interval between “the rights of man” and “the rights of the citizen.” Rights come into existence only through political action, such that the subject of rights is not a pre-given legal entity but is constituted through the act of claiming a place within the political order. Judith Butler extends this insight by foregrounding embodied political action, arguing that rights are not only claimed verbally but materialized through “bodies in concert” appearing together in public space. For Butler, such performative collective presence – especially by precarious or politically unrecognized lives – produces new modes of political subjectivation, as rights emerge from “the persistence of the body against those forces that seek its debilitation or eradication” (p. 83).

Criticising Rancière and Butler’s account of political subjectivation, Madhok argues that liberal human rights presume a universal, Eurocentric political subject and shows, through the case of India, how locally grounded imaginaries produce political subjectivities and claims beyond liberal rights frameworks. While persuasive, this critique does not preclude international human rights language from functioning as a mobilizing resource alongside local idioms of justice. Iranian women’s struggles to gain bodily autonomy exemplify such political subjectivation. In this case, over time, human rights values entered the public conscience and supplanted other vocabularies, enabling everyday acts of resistance against the state’s violent bodily politics. Drawing on Rancière and Butler’s concept of political subjectification and tracing the history of human rights discourse within the Iranian women’s rights movement, this section illustrates how human rights operate as democratic instruments, enabling collective action to pursue claims and enact rights that remain unrecognized under existing legal frameworks.

Human Rights and the Women’s Struggle for Bodily Autonomy in Iran

The regulation of women’s bodies in Iran long predates the 1979 Islamic Revolution, rooted in patriarchal and religious structures in which practices such as polygamy and child marriage were governed by Islamic jurisprudence for centuries and later codified – rather than abolished – by the 1928 Civil Code. Resistance also predates the emergence of human rights discourse; for instance, around 1850, Tahere Ghoratolein publicly removed her veil and challenged women’s social status. More organized gender-focused activism emerged during the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911), though its demands centered on suffrage and girls’ education and were framed less as women’s rights than as prerequisites for national progress. Following the constitution’s failure to address women’s needs, independent women’s organizations emerged in the 1920s, during a period of strong foreign influence that facilitated connections with international feminist movements. Women’s magazines circulated news of the international feminist movement, helping the language of “women’s rights” and “freedom” gain traction. The transnational circulation of feminist ideas enabled women to frame their demands as claims grounded in norms such as equality and autonomy, expanding the space for political subjectification. Veiling, polygamy, child and forced marriage, and unilateral male divorce, among others, came under scrutiny of women activists as some elite women appeared unveiled in public for the first time. However, these efforts failed to coalesce into a movement capable of transforming women’s legal or social status.

Under Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925–1941), the women’s movement declined amid his authoritarian rule, even as state-led modernization reshaped women’s legal and social status through compulsory unveiling, limited family-law reforms, and expanded access to education. These measures reshaped urban gender roles but had little impact in rural areas, while compulsory unveiling led many women to withdraw from public life. While the major women’s movement viewed the veil as “symbolic representation of the low status of women” (p. 63), in this period, it was not regarded as a right but rather as a marker of “backwardness of the society” (p. 13). Rather than enabling political subjectivation, the state’s enforced visibility deprived women of the right to choose and foreclosed the possibility of a long-term solution to the veil. Under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941–1979), women’s organizations initially expanded but were curtailed after the 1953 coup d’état and absorbed into state structures, as rights-based language entered official discourse. Shah was not viewed as a believer in women’s equality and legal reforms – including women’s enfranchisement in 1963 and the Family Protection Laws of 1967 and 1975 – aimed at consolidating political authority rather than enabling women’s ability to act as autonomous political agents. The education system was also designed to install traditional values in women, while women’s magazines sent contradictory messages, linking bodily autonomy to Western women and anti-imperialist sentiment. In this context, many Iranians, including women, supported the Islamic Revolution without fully anticipating its consequences.

Following the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic Republic repealed the family-law reforms, introduced mandatory hijab laws, and enforced them harshly through “revolutionary committees”. The new Sharia-based law “allowed a man rights to his wife’s body” (p. 128); reduced the marriage age to 13, encouraged polygamy while strengthening men’s divorce rights, and banned women from singing and dancing in public. Reacting to decades of Imperialism and Westoxification (gharbzadegi) and informed by Islamic ideologies, the new regime solidified itself by opposing Western values, including what it perceived as “the unveiled” “publicly visible modern woman”. Following the enactment of the mandatory hijab law, women protested for six days in March 1979, articulating explicit claims to rights, equality, and freedom. These demonstrations marked an early collective political subjectification of women, who were contesting their exclusion from political and legal recognition. The repression of these women forced many to leave the country, and those who remained were left with no public forum to express their ideas. This environment contributed to the rise of Islamic feminism in the 1980s, shaped by both global Islamic feminist thought and the regime’s rejection of Western human-rights discourse. Within this framework, women’s rights were pursued through reformist interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence. Informed by rights-based discourse, some Islamist feminists explicitly framed issues such as fertility as women’s bodily autonomy and a core human right. As discriminatory laws targeting women increased under Islamization, secular forces gained greater legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

Human rights have served as a crucial legitimizing and advocacy framework, particularly since the 1990s, when Iranian feminists strategically drew on UN women’s rights conferences and CEDAW to articulate demands for gender justice. Following Khomeini’s death, limited reforms under Rafsanjani (1989-1997) and later Khatami (1997-2005) expanded women’s access to education, civil society, and public space. Moreover, feminist discourse flourished through women’s press and the growing use of the Internet, enabling greater engagement with universal human rights. Despite the resurgence of state violence and anti-women policies under Ahmadinejad (2005-2013), this period saw human rights norms increasingly enter everyday consciousness, enabling women to frame acts of resistance – especially against compulsory hijab – as assertions of bodily autonomy. They also engaged in organized activism, such as the One Million Signatures Campaign, which helped mainstream human rights discourse in everyday life. These mobilizations shaped women’s participation in later movements, including the Green Movement (2009), which linked democratic aspirations to gender equality, though the suppression of these aspirations and Rouhani’s subsequent presidency (2013–2021) yielded few concrete gains for women. Nonetheless, sustained civil society campaigns against mandatory hijab, grounded in the right to bodily autonomy and the right to choose what to wear, as well as growing use of the internet, have deepened general public engagement with human rights norms, particularly among younger generations. Something Tohidi and Daneshpoor illustrate as a process of “glocalization” in which Iranian women’s resistance to local ideological controls is simultaneously embedded in and energized by a broader global feminist struggle for bodily autonomy.

Since the 2010s, women have increasingly turned to their bodies as sites of protest in their everyday lives, a form of resistance described by Bayat as “resistance through public presence”. Examples include finding innovative ways to remove the hijab, gradually reshaping hijab standards through progressive street fashion, dancing and singing without hijab in public, and posting nude photos on social media. Within this continuum of embodied resistance, Vida Movahed’s act – standing on an electricity box with her scarf on a stick until her arrest – represents a significant moment, constituting a direct and visible challenge to state-imposed body politics. The death of Jina Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022 further intensified this trajectory. During the subsequent uprising, using the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi)”, originated from Kurdish women’s liberation in Kurdish (jin, jian, azadi) women in small and big cities publicly burned their scarves and cut their hair. This movement illustrates both Ranciere’s and Butler’s idea of political subjectification, in which the right to bodily autonomy is articulated both discursively and also enacted through embodied appearance in public space. Since then, many women have rejected the compulsory hijab, creating a contemporary image of Iran very different from that of four decades ago – an image Butler describes as the performative dimension of rights.

In conclusion, regardless of state policies, women continued to expose their bodies to violence, arrest, and even death in defiance of the state’s violent body politics. They echo Rancière’s idea of dissensus, where the gap between existing rights and lived realities becomes a space for contestation and the emergence of new political subjects. These everyday acts of protest can be understood as forms of human rights function of political subjectivation. In defying these repressive laws, women are not only resisting a law but also asserting a claim to equality, bodily autonomy, and against gender apartheid, thereby enacting rights that are not yet in place and transforming the political order through collective, visible action.