Iranian women’s bodies are becoming a battlefield

Authoritarian regimes rely on patriarchal structures to consolidate their power. In Iran, this partnership serves to control women’s bodies.

Through both strict dress laws — such as the compulsory veiling law — and punitive sanctions, women are shaped into “body objects,” showcases of propaganda that reinforce the regime’s moral and political authority.

Iranian women have always engaged in acts of resistance to this appropriation of their bodies. In Iran today, their struggle has evolved into using acts of disobedience to reclaim their oppressed bodies as tools of emancipation. Their bodies become political statements that symbolize their relentless quest for freedom and dignity, even at the cost of their lives.

I’m an Iranian-Canadian sociologist and doctoral candidate in feminist and gender studies at the University of Ottawa. My research focuses on how Iranian women have resisted discriminatory laws since the 1979 revolution. As a feminist activist and researcher, I am particularly interested in women’s movements in Iran. These movements, which are fighting gender apartheid in the name of emancipation and equality, have become sources of inspiration to feminism on the whole.

Body autonomy performance

Ahou Daryaei, a French-language student at Tehran’s Azad University, has become a recent symbol of this struggle. Attacked by the morality police for wearing clothing deemed to be “inappropriate,” she responded with a radical act: she removed her clothes — which were apparently torn — and stood up, vulnerable, yet powerful.

In an instant, her body became a message, a challenge to the oppressive authority of the regime. This image, shared on social networks, inspired a wave of national and international solidarity, demonstrating the immediate and universal impact of these performances of bodily disobedience. The young woman was sent to a psychiatric institute.

A few days later, Arezou Khavari, an Afghan teenager from an underprivileged district of Tehran, ended her life by throwing herself from the roof of her school after being harassed for wearing jeans under her school uniform.

In this desperate act, we see the ultimate act of resistance: wearing jeans and no hijab, Khavari rejected a system that was trying to erase her identity. This young girl was triply marginalized as a female refugee and resident of a working-class neighbourhood in a society that shows particular contempt toward Afghan women.

Sadly, she is one of the many teenage girls who, in less than a year, have been driven to suicide after suffering harassment and aggression from their family or their school because of their resistance to strict rules about their appearance and dress codes.

Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, died on Sept. 16, 2022, after being arrested and violently assaulted by the vice police in Tehran for wearing a headscarf deemed to be “inappropriate.” Her death triggered the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, a massive and unprecedented wave of protests in Iran against the regime and its discriminatory laws, notably on compulsory veiling.

From body object to body subject

These acts of resistance are part of a continuum in which each gesture of bodily disobedience by women and girls pushes the struggle one step further.

In 2017, Vida Movahed held her veil up on a stick, a simple but radical performance that marked a turning point in Iranian women’s public resistance.

Nika Shakarami, a 16-year-old teenager, defied the prohibitions by burning her hijab and chanting “Woman, Life, Freedom,” before being brutally raped and murdered by regime forces.

These acts of revolt, though suppressed with extreme violence, have gone beyond Iran’s borders. In Egypt, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, published a nude photo of herself in 2011, posing with provocative confidence. Her message was directed not only to the authoritarian regime, but also to the patriarchy that sought to reduce her body to a question of shame and modesty.

Women’s bodies, which have long been the instrument of patriarchal and ideological control of women, are now becoming weapons of emancipation. Each gesture, through its symbolic power, rewrites the patriarchal norms and gives the struggle a universal scope, challenging authority and redefining the autonomy of women’s bodies.

Psychiatric asylums for women who resist

The case of Ahou Daryaei, accused by the regime of suffering from mental instability and sent to a psychiatric hospital after protesting against the compulsory wearing of the hijab, illustrates the systematic pathologization of female dissent.

This tactic recently gained institutional momentum with the announcement of the creation of specialized clinics to “psychologically treat” unveiled women, an attempt to transform their resistance into a “mental disorder” requiring pseudo-scientific treatment.

This practice is reminiscent of medieval witchhunts, where transgressive women were accused of demonic pacts in order to justify their persecution, as analyzed by philosopher Silvia Federici in “Caliban and the Witch.” These contemporary disciplinary institutions seek to discipline bodies and minds in order to maintain an authoritarian patriarchal order.

In “Madness and Civilization,” French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault shows how madness was historically constructed to marginalize deviant individuals, particularly women whose behaviour challenged established norms.

In Iran, this process can be seen in the recent psychiatric treatment of three famous actresses who refused to wear the hijab. The authorities have declared them “mentally unstable.”

These measures disqualify their political acts and reflect a biopolitical mechanism where, under the guise of “care” and “treatment,” the regime imposes absolute control over women’s bodies, turning collective resistance into a pathology.

From body objects to subjects of emancipation

These bodily performances — burning a hijab, dancing in public, stripping naked or even dying in defiance of the rules — embody the performativity described by philosopher Judith Butler.

Through their gestures, these women redefine norms and reappropriate their bodies, once “objects” of patriarchy, to turn them into “subjects” of emancipation. This transition to self-subjectification represents a fundamental empowerment: their bodies no longer submit to the “norms” imposed by the regime, but become a space of freedom and resistance.

These resistances, though rooted in a specific context, reflect what French feminist and writer Martine Storti calls “the emancipatory potential of universal feminism,” where struggles for freedom transcend geographical and cultural boundaries. For Storti, the universal does not impose a single model of liberation, but feeds on the diversity of experiences and struggles, recognizing their ability to transcend cultural and political boundaries.

The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” is much more than a unifying call. It’s a promise of transformation, an affirmation that freedom and justice are not privileges, but fundamental requirements. Each woman, through her courage, writes a page of history where the quest for bodily autonomy becomes a collective act, and a universal desire to live freely in the face of oppressive systems.