Women’s Bodies as a Political Battleground: Repression and Resistance in Iran Today
How Iranian women transformed their bodies from sites of state control into instruments of political resistance and social change.
Women’s Bodies as a Political Battleground: Repression and Resistance in Iran Today
From the earliest days after the 1979 revolution, women’s bodies became one of the central battlegrounds of the Islamic Republic’s ideological project. Even before the revolutionary slogans had faded, mandatory hijab was imposed as the first symbolic law of the new order—a law that was not only about dress, but about power, control, and redefining women’s place in society. The female body became a political language, and by legislating it, the state sought to embed its ideology into everyday life.
Mandatory veiling was only the beginning. It was followed by a web of family laws governing marriage, divorce, custody, inheritance, and employment, gradually reducing women’s social position to one of dependency. Women were no longer recognized as autonomous individuals but were redefined as subjects under guardianship. Law, in this context, was not simply a mechanism for regulating social relations; it became a tool for producing obedience and securing a patriarchal order rooted in an ideological interpretation of religion.
But repression did not stop at law. What emerged in Iran was a system of both visible and invisible control that penetrated every dimension of women’s lives. From the street to the home, from school to the workplace, the female body became a space of constant surveillance. The looks, warnings, patrols, and threats were the outward signs of this control. Its deeper and more enduring form was internalized: fear, shame, and self-censorship, through which women learned to police themselves before the state ever had to.
In such a system, politics was no longer confined to the state or its institutions. Politics lived in walking, laughing, dressing, speaking, and even in silence. The female body became a site of constant negotiation with power—an unequal negotiation in which every movement could carry the risk of punishment. This is where everyday life itself became political.
Yet the story of Iranian women is not only one of repression; it is also a story of resistance. A resistance that began in the 1980s in quiet forms—small retreats, private spaces, and silent refusals. Over the following decades, it took new shapes: gradual changes in dress, mass entry into higher education, increased presence in the workforce, and the slow reclamation of public space. Every loosened scarf, every raised voice, every visible presence became a political act.
In the 2010s, with the rise of social media, women’s bodies moved beyond physical control and became sites of narration. Women documented their experiences of repression, shared them, and transformed them into a collective language. The body was no longer only a site of power; it became an instrument of exposure, solidarity, and resistance.
Today in Iran, politics is no longer an event—it is a condition. Women can be seen in the streets during protests, but also in mourning ceremonies where mourning itself is restricted; in homes turned into shelters and organizing spaces; in shaky videos recorded with trembling hands; in headscarves that fall and are never put back on. Grief has become a new political language, and the body a medium that refuses to be silenced.
Iranian women are carriers not only of courage, but of innovation. They have transformed the very form of protest: from walking to standing, from silence to shouting, from tears to images, from burial to the streets. A regime that engineered women’s bodies to secure its ideology now confronts bodies that generate new meanings of politics every day. This is no longer mere reaction—it is creation. Politics are born from everyday life, not from decree.
The Islamic Republic sought to control women’s bodies in order to control society. What we witness today is the inversion of that project: the female body has become the point at which power begins to fracture. Amid repression, grief, and exhaustion, Iranian women have pulled politics out of the hands of the state and returned it to life itself. And perhaps it is here—in these wounded yet creative bodies—that a different future is being formed, one that has no name yet, but is no longer reversible.
