Bodies Revolt: A Reading of the Protest Art of Haircutting in Iran

In the early years of the French Revolution, most specifically in the Reign of Terror, depicting and performing statue mutilation was an iconography of political transgression. Inspired by and embodied in what the guillotine would do to the monarchs, this, as Nochlin (1995) believes, is truly modern in the revolutionary imagination, and “a castration image of unprecedented power and suggestiveness, is central to the Revolutionary discourse of destruction” (Nochlin, 1995: p. 11). The precipice of such revolt was the beheading of the king himself, and “the wresting of the head from the fleshly embodiment of the State constituted an irreversible enactment of the destruction of the old regime” (ibid). As such, in the recent wave of demonstrations in Iran, which is sparked by the unjust death of a 22-year-old girl named Mahsa Amini in custody by the morality police[1] , women and men around the world showed their solidarity with the Iranian protestors in a symbolic act not so different from that of the revolutionary French: cutting off their hair, or just some locks of hair. This act can be interpreted as allegiance to the fragmentation of royal bodies in the French revolution because, unlike the French kingdom in which the power is re-incarnated and embodied in the king himself, the elements of power and govern-mentality in the Iran political regime are positioned in the physique of its subjects. As an intermediary which links the discourse of power to the visible matter (the society), Hijab bears a critical position of contradiction. While the discourse of power- here the political Islamconsiders the veiling of women’s bodies as a virtue, the concrete matter- here the various groups of people who do not agree with the mandatory hijab- faces it as a contradiction which is not approved and valued by many yet must be obeyed by all. There are some social groups that value hijab as a sign of virtue and wear it willfully, there are some that believe so yet do not abide by the hijab, there are some other social groups that do not value hijab but are compelled to wear it, there are those who neither value nor abide to it, and the list of odds can go on. In such a situation, the power discourse sanctioned by the Politico-legal system only represents one of these positions (hijab being a moral and mandatory virtue), leaving out all other groups and marginalizing them. In other words, a discursive whole is trying to reduce the distinctive and opposite concrete, devouring all in itself to make the unique whole as total as possible. That is how the role of the morality police as a form of control can be explained. Thus, as soon as another life is taken by this means of control, the part of the subjects’ body that has been repressed and veiled (meaning hair, especially on the feminine body), is dismembered, fragmented, and disjoint of the rest of the body in a symbolic performance for seeking bodily autonomy. The image of cropped hair, as a former symbol of beauty that is now separated from the body, possesses a quality of abjection in the Iranian culture; if it is gifted to a person, it is usually a sign of grief and since the feminine hair possesses a great aesthetic value amongst Iranians, cropping it is interpreted as a great sacrifice. In such a perspective, the modern Iranian woman dismembers herself to be purified of the intermediary role imposed upon her body and does so with a display of rage and hatred as if the hair had never belonged to her. Moreover, hair-cutting (in Persian: guisue boran) is an old grieving ritual in Iranian ethnic cultures as well as Persian literature. In Shahnama by Ferdowsi, in the tale of Siyâvash (a symbol of innocence in Iranian literature), when he is beheaded by the order of Afrasiab (the Turanian tyrant), his wife and several other Iranian women cut their hair to display grief and protest. Among the Lur ethnic groups of Iran, grieving women of the nuclear family still crop their hair and place it on the tomb of the deceased to grow their hair back in remembrance of their loved one. This braid of hair is later identified by a wise elderly woman of the tribe and returned to its owner. Some women even keep the braid to later be buried with them as a sign of fidelity and loyalty. In addition, and in the more contemporary iconography of such acts, traditionalist Iranian families who believe that the rightful place of a woman is at home and her righteous deed is obeying the patriarchal authority of men in the family, call unruly girls (those who defy such rules) as “she whose hair is cut” (in Persian: guisue boridé). That is why, even in recent times, cropping off the hair for it to be sold is still frowned upon and considered of little difference from selling one’s body. All these grant a critical position to this act of hair-cutting in the recent Iranian demonstrations and place it in an alternation between the old and the new mode of thinking. By extension, Iranian women taking off their scarves and burning them on the streets can be read as another protest against mandatory veiling. This unprecedented act is also very modern, since it has no roots in any Iranian traditional values, and also is directly aiming at the means of oppression itself without any symbolic sacrifice. When the French king’s head is wrested from his body, the fragmentation of the old order became visible. As such, as soon as an unveiled woman (=the law-breaker) was punished by the [seemingly] legitimized exercise of power, the society started to dismember the body of power or held a mirror to its face to show it its fragmentations. Now is the time for bodily matter to attack the internal logos of the order of discourse. When one rebels against hijab as a part of the order of discourse, they are in fact attacking its core, which is veiling and covering the feminine body in general. Covering the feminine body, so intricately woven into the political history of the middle-east, means covering the forbidden. Thus, the demonstrations now taking place in Iran are an uprising against the prohibitions derived from a metaphysical idea that reduces women into forbidden objects. The mandatory hijab is what the order of discourse in Iran’s political regime is employing to forcefully unify the fragmented body of the society. A woman, the mere “body” in this binary opposition (where the man is the “head” as well as the “mind”), beheads the discourse of power by subverting its masculinity which imposes a place of inferiority to women by reducing their physique to sinful objects of seduction. Now, the recent protests, which were sparked by gender inequality, have extended to other marginalized groups, other fragments of the society whose voices were always silenced. Ethnic groups, lower social classes, sexualities, diaspora Iranians, and most significantly, workers have now emphasized their distinctions in a united uprising against the totality of the regime which has always denied them. These marginalized groups are now declaring their existence and autonomy as loud as possible through protests, mottos, performances, and artworks, and the more the Politico-legal system enforces means of control and repression against them, the further it is exposing its fragile core, inspiring more artists to create subversive and revolutionary pieces of art.