Most studies of the state in feminist scholarship on the Middle East, and indeed much of the developing world, chronicle women’s activism during different eras of political development, the state’s use of gender for its political projects, and women’s approaches for confronting oppressive regimes and traditions (Hale, 1996; Kandiyoti, 1991; Karam, 1998; Sedghi, 2007). These investigations fall short of interrogating the state’s character beyond highlighting its structural heterogeneity, and women’s agency in resisting its forces. Furthermore, explorations oftentimes direct our attention to women organised through feminist or women’s rights movements, located within formal sites of the political, and employing normative measures for transforming the state such as policy reconfigurations. Outside of legal-rights paradigms and discourses of “resistance,” we have limited methodological approaches and analytical tools for understanding how women can remake institutional structures (Abu-Lughod, 1990, 2010; Kantola, 2006). Through archival and ethnographic research this paper re-historicises and juxtaposes the everyday experiences of Leftists, secular and Islamists from 1980-88 in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the process, it offers distinct feminist approaches for studying the state. Theoretically, this paper grounds analyses in the nexus between nationalism, gender, and sexuality during this politically violent time in Iranian history. Shortly following the 1979 revolution, the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) and massive executions of Leftist political prisoners were simultaneously imposed on the Iranian people. By examining the affective realms of violence, and relying significantly on queer scholarship, this paper highlights the ways in which emotions and the body can be used by individuals and collectives to govern local and international sites. Through its illustration of how the physical and the sentiments which circulate through it can be utilised to construct the state’s character, this study also challenges claims that nationalism at a time of intense political violence undermines the nations’ ability to destabilise patriarchal gender and sexual norms. Ultimately, it will be argued that the relationship between the state, gender, and sexuality holds no constant position, and must be studied with this perspective to reveal evolving approaches for women and men’s engagement with the nation-state. On an empirical level, this paper provides a fresh point of view on Iranian political history by studying distinct social groups and comparing the effects their different governing strategies have had on constructing the Islamic Republic during its most formative years.