{"id":27249,"date":"2026-01-21T09:00:58","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T08:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/?p=27249"},"modified":"2026-02-19T13:19:35","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T12:19:35","slug":"the-everyday-revolt-of-bodies-in-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/the-everyday-revolt-of-bodies-in-iran\/","title":{"rendered":"The Everyday Revolt of Bodies in Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

Iran is currently witnessing a large-scale uprising, with women\u2019s 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\u2019s resistance to the state’s violent body politics, particularly the imposition of hijab laws, showing how human rights \u2013 read through Ranci\u00e8re<\/a> and Butler\u2019s notion of \u201cbodies in concert\u201d<\/a> \u2013 functions as a democratic force that enables collective action to enact rights that are not yet legally recognized.<\/p>\n

International Human Rights and Enacting of Legally-Unrecognized Claims<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a>; Golder 2014<\/a>). 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<\/a>; McLoughlin 2016<\/a>). Despite their widespread appeal, critical scholars from a range of perspectives \u2013 including Marxist, Decolonial, and Feminist approaches \u2013 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<\/a>; Badiou 2012<\/a>; Anghie 2012<\/a>; Mutua 2002<\/a>). 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\u2019s capacity to act as agents of legal and political change (e.g., Mamdani 2010<\/a>; Phillips 2015<\/a>; Rajagopal 2009<\/a>). 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<\/a>; Burke’s Position explained in Waldron 2015<\/a>). Human rights, in this view, risk functioning as obstacles to radical transformation rather than vehicles for it.<\/p>\n

Post-Marxist thinkers often<\/a> 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, <\/em>Ranci\u00e8re centres \u2018political subjectivation\u2019 at the heart of how issues come to be framed as matters of \u201chuman rights\u201d. He explains<\/a> how human rights serve as a catalyst for asserting demands and forms of freedom that are yet to be recognized by law. Similar to Lefort\u2019s Political Forms of Modern Society, <\/em>which conceptualized the gap between \u201cthe symbolic\u201d (rights) and \u201cthe real\u201d (people\u2019s actual lived conditions) as an invitation to democratic struggles, Ranci\u00e8re came to identify a similarly productive tension \u2013 an ever-present interval between \u201cthe rights of man\u201d and \u201cthe rights of the citizen.\u201d Rights come<\/a> 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<\/a> this insight by foregrounding embodied political action, arguing that rights are not only claimed verbally but materialized through \u201cbodies in concert\u201d appearing together in public space. For Butler, such performative collective presence \u2013 especially by precarious or politically unrecognized lives \u2013 produces new modes of political subjectivation, as rights emerge from \u201cthe persistence of the body against those forces that seek its debilitation or eradication\u201d (p. 83<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Criticising Ranci\u00e8re and Butler\u2019s account of political subjectivation, Madhok argues<\/a> 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\u2019s struggles to gain bodily autonomy<\/a> 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\u2019s violent bodily politics. Drawing on Ranci\u00e8re and Butler\u2019s concept of political subjectification and tracing the history of human rights discourse within the Iranian women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Human Rights and the Women\u2019s Struggle for Bodily Autonomy in Iran<\/strong><\/p>\n

The regulation of women\u2019s 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 \u2013 rather than abolished \u2013 by the 1928 Civil Code. Resistance also predates the emergence of human rights discourse; for instance, around 1850, Tahere Ghoratolein<\/em> publicly removed<\/a> her veil and challenged<\/a> women\u2019s social status. More organized gender-focused activism emerged<\/a> during the Constitutional Revolution (1905\u20131911), though its demands centered<\/a> on suffrage and girls\u2019 education and were framed less as women\u2019s rights than as prerequisites for national progress. Following the constitution\u2019s failure to address women\u2019s needs, independent women\u2019s organizations emerged<\/a> in the 1920s, during a period of strong foreign influence that facilitated<\/a> connections with international feminist movements. Women\u2019s magazines circulated<\/a> news of the international feminist movement, helping the language of \u201cwomen\u2019s rights\u201d and \u201cfreedom\u201d 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<\/a> under scrutiny of women activists as some elite women appeared unveiled in public for the first time. However, these efforts failed<\/a> to coalesce into a movement capable of transforming women\u2019s legal or social status.<\/p>\n

Under Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925\u20131941), the women\u2019s movement declined<\/a> amid his authoritarian rule, even as state-led modernization reshaped<\/a> women\u2019s legal and social status through compulsory unveiling, limited family-law reforms, and expanded access to education. These measures reshaped<\/a> urban gender roles but had<\/a> little impact in rural areas, while compulsory unveiling led<\/a> many women to withdraw from public life. While the major women\u2019s movement viewed the veil as \u201csymbolic representation of the low status of women\u201d (p. 63<\/a>), in this period, it was not regarded as a right but rather as a marker of \u201cbackwardness of the society\u201d (p. 13<\/a>). Rather than enabling political subjectivation, the state\u2019s enforced visibility deprived women of the right to choose and foreclosed<\/a> the possibility of a long-term solution to the veil. Under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941\u20131979), women\u2019s organizations initially expanded but were<\/a> curtailed after the 1953 coup d\u2019\u00e9tat and absorbed into state structures, as rights-based language entered official discourse. Shah was not viewed<\/a> as a believer in women\u2019s equality and legal reforms \u2013 including women\u2019s enfranchisement in 1963 and the Family Protection Laws of 1967 and 1975 \u2013 aimed<\/a> at consolidating political authority rather than enabling women\u2019s ability to act as autonomous political agents. The education system was also designed<\/a> to install traditional values in women, while women\u2019s magazines sent<\/a> contradictory messages, linking bodily autonomy to Western women and anti-imperialist sentiment. In this context, many Iranians, including women, supported<\/a> the Islamic Revolution without fully anticipating its consequences.<\/p>\n

Following the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic Republic repealed<\/a> the family-law reforms, introduced<\/a> mandatory hijab laws, and enforced<\/a> them harshly through \u201crevolutionary committees\u201d. The new Sharia-based law \u201callowed a man rights to his wife\u2019s body\u201d (p. 128<\/a>); reduced<\/a> the marriage age to 13, encouraged<\/a> polygamy while strengthening men\u2019s divorce rights, and banned<\/a> women from singing and dancing in public. Reacting to decades of Imperialism and Westoxification (gharbzadegi<\/em>) and informed by Islamic ideologies, the new regime solidified<\/a> itself by opposing Western values, including what it perceived as \u201cthe unveiled\u201d \u201cpublicly visible modern woman\u201d. Following the enactment of the mandatory hijab law, women protested<\/a> for six days in March 1979, articulating<\/a> 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<\/a> many to leave the country, and those who remained were left with no public forum to express their ideas. This environment contributed<\/a> to the rise of Islamic feminism in the 1980s, shaped by both global Islamic feminist thought and the regime\u2019s rejection of Western human-rights discourse. Within this framework, women\u2019s rights were pursued<\/a> through reformist interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence. Informed by rights-based discourse, some Islamist feminists explicitly framed<\/a> issues such as fertility as women\u2019s bodily autonomy and a core human right. As discriminatory laws targeting women increased under Islamization, secular forces gained<\/a> greater legitimacy in the eyes of the public.<\/p>\n

Human rights have served as a crucial legitimizing and advocacy framework, particularly since the 1990s, when Iranian feminists strategically drew on<\/a> UN women\u2019s rights conferences and CEDAW to articulate demands for gender justice. Following Khomeini\u2019s death, limited reforms under President Rafsanjani (1989-1997) and later President Khatami (1997-2005) expanded<\/a> women\u2019s access to education, civil society, and public space. Moreover, feminist discourse flourished<\/a> through women\u2019s press and the growing use of the Internet, enabling greater engagement with universal human rights. Despite the resurgence of state violence<\/a> and anti-women policies<\/a> under President Ahmadinejad (2005-2013), this period saw human rights norms increasingly enter everyday consciousness, enabling women to frame acts of resistance<\/a> \u2013 especially against compulsory hijab \u2013 as assertions of bodily autonomy. They also engaged in organized activism, such as the One Million Signatures Campaign, which helped<\/a> mainstream human rights discourse in everyday life. These mobilizations shaped women\u2019s participation in later movements, including the Green Movement (2009), which linked<\/a> democratic aspirations to gender equality, though the suppression of these aspirations and President Rouhani\u2019s subsequent presidency (2013\u20132021) yielded few concrete gains for women. Nonetheless, sustained civil society campaigns against mandatory hijab, grounded in the right to bodily autonomy<\/a> and the right to choose what to wear<\/a>, as well as growing use of the internet, have deepened<\/a> general public engagement with human rights norms, particularly among younger generations. Something Tohidi and Daneshpoor illustrate<\/a> as a process of \u201cglocalization\u201d in which Iranian women\u2019s resistance to local ideological controls is simultaneously embedded in and energized by a broader global feminist struggle for bodily autonomy.<\/p>\n

Since the 2010s, women have increasingly turned to their bodies as sites of protest in their everyday lives, a form of resistance described<\/a> by Bayat as \u201cresistance through public presence\u201d. Examples include<\/a> 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<\/em>\u2019s act<\/a> \u2013 standing on an electricity box with her scarf on a stick until her arrest \u2013 represents a significant moment, constituting a direct and visible challenge to state-imposed body politics. The death of Jina Mahsa Amin<\/em>i<\/a> in police custody in 2022 further intensified this trajectory. During the subsequent uprising, using the slogan \u201cWoman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi<\/em>)\u201d, originated from Kurdish women\u2019s liberation in Kurdish (jin, jian, azadi<\/em>) women in small and big cities publicly burned their scarves and cut their hair<\/a>. 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<\/a> the compulsory hijab, creating a contemporary image<\/a> of Iran very different from that of four decades ago \u2013 an image Butler describes as the performative dimension of rights.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, regardless of state policies, women continued to expose their bodies to violence, arrest, and even death in defiance of the state\u2019s violent body politics. They echo Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s 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- and bodily autonomy, thereby enacting rights that are not yet in place and transforming the political order through collective, visible action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Iran is currently witnessing a large-scale uprising, with women\u2019s 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\u2019s resistance to the state’s violent body politics, particularly the imposition of hijab laws, showing how human rights \u2013 read through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6639],"tags":[4658,7839,5631],"authors":[7890],"article-categories":[6000],"doi":[],"class_list":["post-27249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-feminist-perspectives","tag-gender-justice","tag-iran","authors-shima-esmailian","article-categories-article"],"acf":{"subline":"Women\u2019s Struggles for Bodily Autonomy and the Democratic Potential of Human Rights"},"meta_box":{"doi":"10.17176\/20260121-171705-0"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27249"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27593,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27249\/revisions\/27593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27249"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=27249"},{"taxonomy":"article-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-categories?post=27249"},{"taxonomy":"doi","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doi?post=27249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}