Vision and Difference: Genealogies of Feminism Fall 2023

Women’s Bodies and the Imagination of Resistance


Introduction

On September 16, 2022, the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in Iranian custody sparked nationwide protests. Mahsa Amini died tragically as a result of “improperly” wearing a hijab. Her fatal injuries stemmed from arrests and beatings by the Iranian morality police, who monitor Iranian women to wear the hijab. Since the first feminist protests against Mahsa Amini’s death, images of an Iranian woman standing on the top of a car holding a burning hijab have circulated on the internet, which reminds me of similar images from Iran in 2018. A young woman named Vida Movahhed stood on a utility box on a busy street in Iran silently waving a white headscarf tied to a stick to challenge the obligation of women to wear the hijab since Iran’s 1979 revolution. Vida Movahhed's photo was a turning point in the struggle of Iranian women against the mandatory hijab. Her photo went viral on Instagram and sparked The Girls of Revolution Street movement, named after the place where Vida Movahhed first stood. In my project, I will look at photographs from Iranian women's resistance to the compulsory hijab. These photographs are centered on women without hijab. I will explore how vulnerable female bodies resist oppression in public spaces in a gesture that is not allowed by the state.

Research Questions:

More than a video, a photograph focuses on the moment when the vulnerable body expresses resistance and becomes a symbol of resistance. The body framed by this moment inspires the women who see the photographs to imagine their own bodies, which mobilizes vulnerability to make resistance visible and thus inspires more women to be resistant images.
 

Spotlight on the Moment of Resistance - Hijabs in the Air

——Many Iranian Women Remove Their Hijabs in Public, Stand Above the Crowd, and Wave Their Hijabs Like Flags


Vida Movahhed is pictured on January 30, 2018, dressed in black and standing on a busy street in Iran. She stands silently on a metal utility box, waving a stick. The stick is tied with a white scarf. She stood visibly above the crowd on the box, exposed to public space without a headscarf, challenging the obligation of women to wear a headscarf since Iran's 1979 revolution. As an act of protest, Vida Movahhed is acted calmly. She maintained absolute silence and did not react to any verbal exchange. She stood there for an hour until she was arrested by the morality police (Ganjeh 111).

Vida Movahhed's silent photo went viral on social media and became a symbol of resistance against the compulsory hijab for women. Subsequently, many women followed Vida Movahhed's example and began to emulate her symbolic act of protest to form and expand the civil disobedience movement. Many women shared photos of themselves waving their hijabs on social media. Photographs imitating Vida Movahhed continued to circulate on the Internet, and the image of women without headscarves and waving them became a symbol of resistance to the compulsory hijab and the patriarchal culture of the state. The movement became known on the Internet as The Girls of Revolution Street because the street on which Vida Movahhed initially stood is called Enghelab Street, which means revolution in Persian.
 

Turning Point, From Protest Video to Protest Photos

The circulation of the photo of Vida Movahhed standing on the street seems to have been a turning point in the Iranian resistance to the compulsory hijab. Before this photo, the resistance movement had already sprouted. It was preceded by the online campaign My Stealthy Freedom, which was mainly started by Iranian activists. Iranian women were posting videos of themselves without hijabs on Facebook. The videos show Iranian women using their cell phones to record themselves walking down the street without a hijab or holding one up. Vida's photos online have moved the movement from videos to photos. More and more Iranian women are posting photos of themselves standing in public spaces with their headscarves in their hands. 


The difference between Vida Movahed's photographs and the subsequent photographs of Iranian women holding up hijabs and videos of the protests is the shift in visual focus on the movement. In contrast to the videos, the figures in the photographs are still, silent, and fixed. The photographs do not have the shaking and the women's words to the audience in front of the camera that are recorded as they walk. The photograph extracts an image of resistance from the video, which represents continuous time. In contrast to the video, the female body in the photograph is a symbol.


The photo on the right has been circulating in Iran in 2022 because of Mahsa Amini's death for not properly wearing a hijab. The photo shows a woman standing on a car, holding up a burning hijab and a victory gesture. It is a concrete moment of revolution. At the bottom of the photo is the shadowy image of the hand that is applauding, the flashing headlights of the car in the back, the smiling face of the man on the right, and the hijab on fire. I paused for a few seconds looking at this photo, thinking about what was seen and what wasn't captured. We saw this moment of resistance, but the police violence that could have been captured on video was not. Photographs capture moments of resistance. There is no sound of protest videos, no chaotic scenes, and perhaps not always a way to capture the intensity of the protests, but the photographs focus on the bodies and capture the historic moments of the protests.

The Iranian women's resistance to the compulsory hijab that erupted in 2018 and 2022 is not the first protest, but what distinguishes it from previous protests is its figure-centered character. Protests usually revolve around a specific issue thereby mobilizing and gathering like-minded people to form a resistance. As I looked back at these women-centered protest photos, I thought repeatedly about what shocked me and how resistance to the compulsory hijab expanded from Vida Movahhed's photo to a series of protests. How is it that a single photo has such an amazing ability to be replicated across the Internet and thereby inspire so many Iranian women to become part of the resistance? In addition to the cause of the protests - anger, protest slogans, enforced hijab and the oppression of women's bodies - I tried to find other clues that can stimulate protests in the photo. The viewer's surprise comes from the radical picture of resistance formed by the protest photos with the figure as the stimulus. Anyone can be the centerpiece of the photo and be a part of creating this image of radical resistance. Vida Movahhed's photo is the starting point to inspire more people to view the photo. The protest photograph accomplishes a transformation of the viewer into an actor, inspiring a potential, that is, the potential for anyone who views the photograph to become the person in the photograph. In the transformation of viewer to actor, protesting individuals interconnect to form a performance of resistance, galvanizing those who view the photographs to transform society and thus oppose power structures. The dissemination of the photographs provides the preconditions for more unseemly bodies to appear and occupy public space. These female bodies without hijabs are supposed to be erased by social norms. The occupation and gathering of these socially inappropriate and legally prohibited bodies in public spaces makes them vulnerable and susceptible to violence, but at the same time these bodies also challenge the authority and norms defining space in the way they mark it.

The repression of the protest was brutal. Vida Movahhed was arrested after standing on a box for an hour. Women imitating Vida were also violently arrested by the morality police and security forces. Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian human rights lawyer, is a lawyer for some of the women who have protested without headscarves. She said the protesting women were often pulled off the boxes or thrown off by the morality police. One of the women still had holes in her legs from falling off a metal pole when she was in court. Nasrin Sotoudeh was also sentenced in 2019 to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes for engaging in legal activities (Nordisk). Hundreds of people died and tens of thousands were arbitrarily arrested in the massive protests that followed, the exact numbers of which could not be accounted for (Kohli). In the face of such brutal repression, what kept the traces of the protests from disappearing and kept them alive? It's the moment that condenses in the photograph, which carries the history of the body. When you look at the photographs and focus on the women's bodies in the center of the photographs, you are also looking at, feeling, and remembering the entire history. The moment captured in the photograph of the woman waving her hijab intervenes and interrupts the linear narrative of history. Unlike the video, the women in the photographs are not placed in a continuous narrative; they emerge independently from a period of time. These women's bodies are self-sufficient because they carry history. The marginalized bodies in the photographs show traces of state violence and exploitation. They rebel against state regulation in a gesture that is not allowed by norms. This moment is passed on to the next and the next, and the history repressed in the body is liberated and sustains the resistance.

Space of Resistance


Revolution Street is located in the center of Tehran, the capital of Iran. It is an east-west street, five kilometers long, and is Tehran's main artery. Revolution picks up the name in honor of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that gradually transformed Iran into an Islamic state. In addition to the commemorative significance that the name carries, the street also has an important socio-cultural significance in the history of Iran. The street is home to universities, bookstores, performance centers, and places of political protest for major changes. When standing at the western end of Revolution Street, one can see the main entrance of the University of Tehran, with Tehran University students traveling through the campus. The area around the campus has always been a site of protest. Since the Islamization Revolution of 1979, Iranian women have come here four times to rebel against the state regime's control of women's bodies and the oppression of gender. The most recent was in 2022, when Mahsa Amini brutally died after being beaten by the morality police for not wearing a hijab properly. After Vida Movahhed's photo went viral on social media, many women chose to walk the streets for hours without their hijabs and waved them in the air.

City streets provide space for resistance. Hijab-waving protests as performative acts inspire more women to join the protesting crowd. Under the compulsory hijab, women's bodies without hijabs assert their subjectivity by violating social norms and presenting their political will, which reshapes the existing urban space. Inspired by the photographs, women joined the protest as part of the resistance to co-create, expand and share the street as a performance space. One woman who took a long walk in a crowded street without a hijab said "so we could also join the protest if one was happening" (Sepehir Far). Boundaries are reconfigured in the performance space. In this liminal space, women who were not part of the resistance could join in at any time, becoming figures in the resistance and continuing to shape the performance space. Judith Butler elaborates on the relationship between public space and protest. Butler does not think of space as given and accepted but rather emphasizes the collective action of "animate and organize" (70). Women without hijabs go out into the streets and occupy the streets with bodies denied by the state forming a public assembly of struggle. Bodies that should not be in public space are given agency in this space in the form of resistance.

Virtual Space


The series of protests that began with Vida Movahhed's photographs were multidimensional, and the spaces of protest did not only take place and were concentrated in the streets; the reproduction and circulation of these protest photographs on social media created a virtual space of resistance online. Since Vida stood on a utility box and waved her hijab, the photos have provoked two Internet circulations. One was the dissemination of Vida Movahhed's photo, and the other was the spread triggered by a group of women posting photos of themselves holding hijabs on the Internet after mimicking Vida Movahhed's iconic gesture. Diana Taylor's explanation of the patterns of memes' dissemination helps to understand the ways in which protest pictures construct a virtual space of resistance on the Internet. Taylor draws on the work of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' definition of meme to illustrate how the picture of children held up by mothers of the disappeared students at Ayotzinapa was reproduced and spread as traumatic memes (113). The popularization and spread of memes among people is a "version of the survival of the (cultural) fittest" (Taylor 114). In a competitive environment, memes need to be popular and spread by people to be successful, so they must have an advantage over other memes. A cultural unit becomes a meme the moment it spreads, regardless of whether or not it had any intention of spreading in the first place (Taylor 117). Vida Movahhed's iconic gesture of standing on a box holding a hijab aloft became a meme the moment it went viral on the Internet. One cannot seek to prove whether or not Vida Movahhed's gesture had a purpose at the beginning in triggering the spread of the meme on the Internet and the following protests. I lean towards no such purpose because for a long time, despite Vida Movahhed's picture going viral on the internet, people didn't know her name nor what happened to her after she was arrested by the police. People on social media have been referring to Vida Movahhed as the Girl from Revolution Street. She has also refused to be interviewed after Vida Movahhed was released on bail. But it is precisely this dissemination that exemplifies the replicative power of memes. memes build on previous practices rather than on where they began (Taylor 115). As the women posted their photos on the Internet after imitating Vida Movahhed's actions, the power of resistance conveyed by the photos was built up one at a time, and the symbolism was reinforced.

These photographs of protesting women struck me in a way that frightened me but also conveyed a sense of determination. The women in the photographs are still, fully exposed in the public space and clearly above the crowd. The moment when the body demonstrates its vulnerability is captured in the photograph. While looking at the photographs, I couldn't help but worry about the dangers and losses of their violation of the strict laws and felt their pain as much as I could. This is where the power of memes lies. As Taylor mentions, memes are not inherently traumatizing; they are "agnostic" when it comes to spreading violence and demanding human rights, and by then their repetitive nature is an effective replication mechanism (117). More accurately, they are "a form of transmission that conveys the grief, identifies the loss, and makes the claim" (Taylor 117). Traumatic memes bring women's impermissible body forms into the public sphere, mobilizing the people who view the photographs into a new generation of memes, which are then disseminated again. Protest photographs also repeat, spread, and consolidate the symbols of protest in this way allowing protests to take place both on the street and in virtual space, allowing the dissemination of protest photographs not to be limited to any one point so that the process of dissemination can continue from any point.
 

Bodies, Imagination and Feminist Resistance


According to Butler, vulnerability is manifested when people come together to resist the power of the state (12). The assembly reinforces that vulnerability in this performative protest of Iranian women waving hijabs. Women risk their bodies and expose themselves to harm.

“Indeed, I want to argue affirmatively that vulnerability, understood as a deliberate exposure to power, is part of the very meaning of political resistance as an embodied enactment” (Bulter, 22).

The photograph focuses on this moment. This moment of resistance expressed by a vulnerable body. The vulnerability of the body is constituted by the exposure of women without hijabs and holding them up in the expansive public space where women are forced to wear hijabs. You can see in Vida Movahhed 's photo tha polices are holding riot body shields at the bottom. These women's bodies deliberately expose themselves to power, and this is the moment when resistance becomes concrete.

I think a clear distinction needs to be made between recognizing and denying vulnerability. We, as an embodied species, are inevitably vulnerable because of our bodies and living conditions. This vulnerability, as Butler discusses, is socially, politically, and economically created and differentially reinforced (19). Butler does not reject vulnerability. She argues that "vulnerability is not exactly overcome by resistance, but becomes a potentially effective mobilizing force in political mobilizations " (14). The recognition of vulnerability opens up the possibility of resistance.

The demands made by women who do not wear the hijab are not only about dress codes, but a revolt against the will of the State imposed on women. In the new state order, the role of women was that of demure family supporter. This imposed identity demanded that women's material bodies needed to appear in the form of a hijab, which imposed the meaning of women's bodies in public space. The female performative body represents dignity and sacrifice for the sake of the state order. Under the system of state hegemony, the female body becomes an object of surveillance. When Iranian women take to the streets waving and even burning their hijabs, it is not only the dress code that they are rebelling against, but the resistance to the regime and state control is powerfully and clearly articulated. In voicing these resistances, these women risk physical harm. But mobilization against precarity begins precisely with vulnerability. Recognizing vulnerability opens up connections between potential subjects.

“Few struggles are more important than those that call into question so-called common norms by asking whose lives were never included in those norms. Whose lives are, in fact, explicitly excluded from those norms? What norm of the human constrains those common norms? And to what extent is that a masculinist norm......” (Bulter 21)?

By circulating photos on social media, taking to the streets, and on multiple levels, Iranian women are presenting the nation with a body that is not allowed to be present and does not conform to norms in the public space. Butler elaborates that the body is a way to dramatize and recreate historical situations. When Iranian women expose their disallowed bodies to public space by abandoning their fears, the resistance is performative. After the abandonment of fear, the hijab transforms from oppression into a flag, and Iranian women create signs and symbols to express their political visions and thus resistance.

The women in the photographs became icons of protest as images of resistance, mobilizing countless vulnerable female bodies under the mandatory hijab and thus collectively questioning and resisting norms. The dissemination of the photographs focusing on the transformation of women's vulnerable bodies exposed to public space into resistance has stimulated the imagination of the bodies of the women who saw the photographs. The bodies of the women who were inspired by the photographs to walk on the streets without hijabs and waving hijabs were not their original bodies, but rather the bodies they could and wanted to be, as visualized by the photographs that brought together the meaning of resistance. In protest, performative bodies interconnect to form resistance to performativity. Recognizing vulnerability opens up interconnected platforms of resistance (Bulter 13). This enables the body to stimulate social change and oppose state power structures. The inappropriate female body emerges as a subject and regains agency through a resistance that abandons fear.
 

We & Intersubjectivity

A woman who was inspired by Vida Movahhed took a photo of herself on the street without a hijab wrote on Facebook，

“This is me alone, but strong with no fear waving my headscarf in public shouting "Freedom". You arrested the woman who waved her headscarf in Enghelab Ave. Now, we are all repeating her protest.”

The revolutionary behavior of Iranian women is embodied in the imagination of their own bodies inspired by the photographs. This imagination derived from resistance mobilizes vulnerability and allows vulnerability to enter into agency, making other Iranian women become the images in the photographs and inspiring the desire for more bodies to become that image of resistance.

Iranian women's resistance demonstrates the body in the street as a powerful tool for public protest, showing the potential for memes to spread on social media. Taylor emphasizes the difference "between memetic repetition-as-repetition and mimetic repetition as "imitation".(115). Memes enter the brain and body of the person viewing the photo in many forms. The person viewing the photo is the host rather than the agent (Taylor 115). Photographs are distributed on the Internet, and those who view them can create heartfelt reflections of vulnerable bodies at any time, anywhere, and even take to the streets to connect with other bodies. The desire to become the body in the photograph is fueled by the history the body carries through the dissemination of the photograph. Each body has the potential to create a new image of resistance and have that image of resistance spread again. A similar response also emerged after the court hearing of the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa. After the meeting, everyone chanted "vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos" (they took them alive, we want them back alive) and "¡Presente!" (Taylor 114). But this slogan comes from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement in Argentina in the late 1970s. After the end of the session, few who shouted this slogan knew about the Mothers' Movement in Argentina. ( Taylor 114). 

Thus, people's reactions are not rational, but irrational and emotional, especially since protests can be organized online in minutes by spreading information through social media. Irrational reactions should be taken into account when we consider that the protests in Iran were triggered by online photos circulating on social media. The hijab protests in Iran had no planners and the reaction was unpredictable and irrational. Butler emphasizes that receptivity and responsiveness are not separate, but are the basis for mobilizing vulnerability (72). Being open to unforeseen outcomes creates a space for creative work rather than a problem to be overcome.

As Taylor articulated, the political power of memes lies in spreading uncontrolled reproduction and thus interrupting government discourse. No one can own memes but they are available to everyone (116). Just as one cannot predict the response to Vida Movahhed's iconic protest photo circulating on the internet, but everyone's body can be a body of resistance. "Traumatic memes capturing the affective and political dimension of disappearance circulate throughout the world to make violence and loss visible" (Taylor 114). The circulation of the photographs and the visibility conveyed by more women taking to the streets transcends violence against individuals to resistance against state practices.

The Embodied Vulnerable Body and its Political Implications


Circulation of Vida Movahhed's photo has taken the movement from the Internet to the streets, at great personal risk to those who are brave enough to participate. As Bulter puts it, "all public assembly is haunted by the police and the prison" (20). Humans' dependence on infrastructure exposes their specific vulnerabilities (Bulter 19). Public assemblies utilize infrastructure that is physically necessary and supportive as a foundation. Recognizing vulnerability therefore means accepting it as a form of social relation. From this perspective, vulnerability is not weakness but a broad interdependence. In this dependence, can the encountered and responsive space created by protest create a “we” within the space of shared vulnerable intersubjectivity? Can this “we” create a political space that gives protest a political dimension?

Almost everyone at the protest is saying it's not just about the hijab (Ganjeh 106). So what is the deeper meaning behind the hijab? The hijab has been weaponized since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and it represents the constant vision demanded by totalitarian systems. It is an "authoritarian fantasy" (Lavender and Peetz 3). The hijab implies control, so the freedom to choose not to wear it is a direct challenge to the regime.

Iranian women's protests against the compulsory hijab are radical but non-violent. All they need to do is remove their headscarves and walk down the street. Refusing to wear a hijab in front of the morality police makes women in Iran vulnerable to attack. As Butler says willful exposure to danger is important to nonviolent civil disobedience (20). Removing the hijab disrupts common norms. The performativity of the protests continued when the police intervened and attacked women who did not wear the hijab. According to Butler, the performativity of protest is in the assembly (82). The politics of performativity does not emerge in advance, but is produced in the assembly (Butler 79). To illustrate this point, Butler cites Arendt's notion of space of appearance. The political possibilities of the assembly are disrupting universal norms and creating an alternative rather than reproducing oppressive power relations (Bulter 39). Not wearing a hijab undermines those institutions and practices that inflict violence on women. As Iranian women who do not wear hijabs on the street have indicated, police officers who initially yelled at them to wear hijabs are slowly getting used to it and do not even warn women when they see them without hijabs (Sepehir Far). Institutions that depend on the reproduction of injustice are disrupted by the nonviolent behavior of Iranian women who do not wear the hijab.

While Bulter cites Arendt's concepts in making the point about the political nature of assemblies, what distinguishes it from Arendt is Butler's emphasis on human instability. Butler points to human vulnerability and interdependence, interdependence between people, and interdependence between people and the environment. Vulnerability is practiced in protest performances, and "we" is produced in assemblies. In this view, the so-called vulnerable people's agency and modes of resistance will not be underestimated. Support for local Iranian women thus lies in seeing them not as victims of prolonged disenfranchisement but as resisters for freedom.


Bibliography

Bulter, Judith. 2016. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.” In From Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, 12–27. Duke University Press.

Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Ganjeh, Azadeh. 2022. "The Power of Unwanted Presence", Performance Research, 27:3-4, 105-111, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2022.2155410

Kohli, Anisha. 2022. “Here's What Has Happened in Iran Since the Death of Mahsa Amini.” Access December 9, 2023. https://time.com/6220853/iran-protests-mahsa-amini-what-to-know/

Lavender, Andy and Peetz, Julia. 2022. "On Protest", Performance Research, 27:3-4, 1-12, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2022.2155388

Taylor, Diana. 2020. "Traumatic Memes." In ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence. Duke University Press, 2020.  https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv14t48hf.

Vick, Karl. 2022. “Here's What Has Happened in Iran Since the Death of Mahsa.” Access December 9, 2023. https://time.com/6218181/iran-protests-nasrin-sotoudeh-human-rights/
 

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