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Girls of Enghelab (Revolution) Street: Performing Dissidence
Abstract
A few days after what was called the “Dey Uprising” (the December 2017 Uprising), 31-year-old Vida Movahed, clad in black clothes with white shoes and her hair let loose, climbed an electrical power box on one of Tehran’s busiest streets, and put her white head cover on a stick and began to wave it like a peace flag. In the two weeks that followed, more than 30 young Iranian women climbed other similar pedestals, and put their headscarves on a stick to protest obligatory hijab. These events coincided with the President proclaiming that the Iranian military will no longer jail women because of their covering. Their white headscarves resembling a banner of peace, their silence a marker of non-violence, and their unadorned appearance a signal of innocence, all hint to this moment being a distinct kind of protest, one that resembles an artistic performance. While the history of Iranian feminism and women’s liberation movement dates to a hundred years ago, this moment of civil disobedience in protest to mandatory hijab has embodied a unique performative framework, one which I will be exploring in this paper. The performance is incomplete without actions and reactions from the passersby and is meant to evoke the participation of the audience (Thompson, 2012, p. 21), through physical presence, as well as virtual reflections on social media. Their awe, applause, or sarcastic remarks about the threat of incarceration is part of this performance. This act also begs the participation of the police and other security apparatuses. In other words, the ramifications of such performances in the Iranian society are what raise the stakes of this civil disobedience. This “symbolic gesture” served as an invitation to other citizens to transform this individualistic performance into a collective and social act of dissidence, for it serves as a “powerful and effective method for change” (18). Together, the audience and the statue-like figure with the waving hijab operate as “formative political intervention,” one that takes the shape of a “protest theater” with its relative spontaneity (Juris, 2014, p. 237-238). Along examining the sociopolitical aspects of this performance, I will be studying the socio-spatial and the historic performative feature of hijab on the bodies of women in the religion of Islam.
Discipline
Religious Studies/Theology
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
Iranian Studies