Women’s Anti-Compulsory Hijab Movement in Iran and US-Iran Geopolitical Tensions

Keywords: Women's bodies, geopolitics, violence
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 52

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the ways through which geopolitics influenced women's resistance against compulsory hijab during the Resistance Movement against Compulsory Hijab (RMACH) in Iran. I show how women’s participation in transnational anti-compulsory hijab campaigns on social media as part of the RMACH, beginning in 2014, exposed women’s bodies to different forms of violence as the Iranian and the United States' governments pursued their own political and geopolitical interests. I explore how RMACH, under different geopolitical atmospheres between 2014 and 2018, simultaneously opened up new spaces for resistance and increased state’s pressure on women. I show how a series of acid attacks in 2014, targeting women who did not strictly comply with compulsory hijab, created a wave of sympathy with the victims. While women experienced extreme forms of violence during the attacks, it opened up space for a conversation about compulsory hijab and vigilantes' acts against women at a national level for the first time since the 1979 revolution. As a result, the message of RMACH and the anti-compulsory hijab campaign which had been launched a few months before, was amplified. However,when the founder of RMACH social media campaigns helped the Trump administration in its push for the imperial goal of Iranian government overthrow, it turned the Iranian state against women and removed the society’s sympathy with RMACH. Following the US appropriation of RMACH, the Iranian government increased pressure on feminist activists collaborating with RMACH and sentenced them to unprecedentedly long terms of prison.