Thirty-two years after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, clothing restrictions in advertisement fell in line with compulsory hejab ordinances. Though the first two years of the revolution offered some flexibility on what parts of the female form were appropriate to display, no longer would the depiction of women's bodies be tolerated so as to promote their attractiveness and thus entice desire from the onlooker. In recent years, the promotion of attractive bodies has turned into a government-regulated display of purposefully disfigured mannequins lining the storefronts in Tehran. Through the ubiquity of images of this dismembered form, what manifests is a normalizing, ideological project in which a woman’s body is automatically deprived of its “scandal.” Recent scholarship has attempted to describe this process of scandalization as a possible outcome of the construction of femininity, sisterhood, and morality in post-revolutionary Iran (Moallem, 2005; Najmabadi, 2005). Often, in discussion of gender, sex and body as they relate to Iran, scholars have grappled over how Islamic fundamentalism and globalization factor into the portrait of the decadent, female body, in which Islamist revolutionary ideals supposedly merged to form a binary logic of female and male subjectivities onto the Iranian populace (Najmabadi, 2005). There is even rapid debate among scholars over the dilemmas of citizenship and whether or not intimate relations and intimacy participate in its elaboration (Mahdavi, 2007). Yet, lost within this discourse is concrete, sociological work on how women imagine and experience their “taboo” bodies. Do Iranian women even perceive of their bodies as scandalous? Moreover, how is the “scandalous” body spoken about and experienced in contemporary Iran? What literature and even sources of inspiration—economic, religious, and/or secular— do Iranian women consult to construct body image and beauty ideals? This paper endeavors to explore the conclusions and arguments that Iranian women living inside Iran have come to articulate and imagine their bodies. Through interviews; reviewing government policies on beauty and body; and analyzing print advertisements and journals, this paper hopes to contribute valuable ethnographic literature on how the "taboo" body comes to be appropriated and challenged into everyday life—from Iranian women’s perspectives. The paper hopes to provide a new matrix into some of the political, legal, medical, technological, cultural, religious, and consumerist values and practices that participate in both idealizing and fracturing the Iranian woman and her body.

Inflicting torture on the bodies of political prisoners by authoritarian, and in some cases, democratic governments for extracting information and confessions has been the subject of various scholarly works (Scarry 1987,Taylor 1997, Rejali 2007 ). Tortured bodies are the manifestation of what Georgio Agamben defines and elaborates as bare lives in Homo Sacer. He posits these bodies as vulnerable to any types of violence and deprived of any juridical protection, as an inviolable body. But what might be added to Agamben’s formulation here is how sexualized, bare lives can be constructed by the discourse of violence. How does sexuality and subjecthood transform for those whose citizenship and admittance into the community are jeopardized as a result of being the victims of such atrocities? My main objective in this paper is to explore how the sexual tortures perpetuated in Iran’s prisons, especially since the 2009 presidential election can be understood and analyzed in relation to evolving notions of sexuality and gender in Iran. While this study focuses on the 2009 post-election conflicts, it does not locate its analysis of the transformation of the notion of the “proper”sexual conducts and gender performance within this historical framework alone. Rather, through archival and ethnographic research , my analysis also draws upon the state’s manipulation of Islamic ideology for a remaking of gender and sexuality in the post-revolutionary state. The paper begins by examining how the perpetrators that represented the ruling power produced/reproduced the notions of proper and righteous womanhood and manhood and their relationship, especially through the concepts of femininity and masculinity. Next, incorporating victims’ narrations of their sexual torture, I will discuss how a new relationship between citizens and the state has been created as the consequence of systematic violence, in which the citizens' understanding of their subjecthood and rights are no longer based on the religious-sexual moralities advocated by the government. Finally, this paper argues that the thirty years of violence and disciplinary methods perpetuated on Iranian citizens' bodies resulted in a construction of subjectivity different from what the Iranian government had imagined.

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.