[This article is part of the Jadaliyya Iran Page's dossier, "Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom." Click here to read the dossier's introduction and browse the rest of the dossier.]
Feminist debates about Iran increasingly feel stuck, positioned between binary poles: a desperate plea for foreign intervention, on the one hand, versus a pragmatic insistence that change must come gradually within the system, on the other. What appears as disagreement is often experienced as betrayal; what might once have been a strategic question becomes a moral one. Iran’s current crisis foregrounds a familiar asymmetry: while voices on the pro-monarchist right are at their loudest in this moment, especially in diasporic media, progressive and left voices often appear muted or cautious. Why does it feel so difficult to articulate positions beyond these familiar poles? What role do affect, and specifically the affective potentials of mediated images, play in shaping this impasse?
I approach this question through what I see as one of the most persistent and politically generative vocabularies mobilised by Iranian feminist politics over the past decade: the language of personal autonomy. I show how the capacity of this language to condense the experience of structural violence into legible individual acts makes it a powerful resource for feminist mobilisation, while simultaneously making it available for neoliberal, nationalist and/or imperial appropriation.
Precisely because personal autonomy is mobilised as an image - one saturated with affect - it is repeatedly pulled into battles over authenticity, over which voices are heard as genuine, which are to be dismissed as compromised. I trace how autonomy became central to mediated feminist politics in Iran, how it was repeatedly reworked and reclaimed, and why its political limits became more visible in the aftermath of the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) uprising of 2022–23. The purpose of this genealogy is not to rehearse familiar histories for their own sake, but to clarify why the language of autonomy continues to organise feminist claims in the present, even as it increasingly struggles to sustain solidarities capable of holding difference and disagreement. Recognizing that feminist autonomy discourse can readily be instrumentalized to serve the ‘regime change’ agendas of political actors with far greater media and political resources, I suggest, nonetheless, that left critique needs to move beyond a response of suspicion, however legitimate and necessary it may be at times, and pause to reflect on the affective possibilities of solidarity that autonomy repertoires continue to offer.
Personal autonomy did not always have the central place in Iranian feminist politics that it has had in recent years. While the ever-present threat of repression forced feminist activism to focus on forms of agency that could be pursued within the system, the most consequential violence was embedded in the system’s structural foundations, most visibly in the compulsory hijab.
In the late 1990s and 2000s, grassroots feminist activism in Iran was based around campaigns for reforms in the areas of family law, health, and employment, most inspiringly in the One Million Signatures Campaign of 2006-9. These efforts were shaped by pragmatic assessments of what could be achieved under restrictive and authoritarian conditions. Reformist feminism, for understandable reasons, had avoided confronting the question of the compulsory hijab, a central pillar of the Islamic Republic’s ideology and the most obvious daily reminder of the state’s attack on women’s bodily autonomy. The hijab legislation continues to be enforced by the ‘morality police’, with women arrested for ‘improper hijab’ liable to detention, fines, lashes, and (extralegal) assault. Knowing that a campaign around the hijab would be considered a direct attack on the state, feminist activists directed their efforts toward securing radical reforms to women’s legal status. The repression of feminist and reformist networks following their involvement in the 2009 Green Movement marked a decisive rupture in this strategy. With organised activism on the ground now blocked or severely constrained, the hope that the system could be reformed from within was significantly weakened.
It was in this context that feminist mobilisation increasingly shifted toward online campaigning, and opposition to compulsory hijab moved to the fore, not because the violence of the forced hijab had suddenly been recognised - decentralised practices of ‘bad hijab’ had become increasingly prevalent among Iranian women since the 1990s - but because repertoires of personal autonomy offered a mode of feminist claim-making in online and hybrid environments that could survive the dismantling of organisational infrastructures.
My Stealthy Freedom (MSF), which became the most visible such campaign inside Iran from 2014, emerged from this conjuncture. As feminists inside and outside Iran pointed out, the anti–forced hijab campaigns drew on the vernaculars of social media: individualised address, trust in influencers or gatekeepers, and an emphasis on affective connection over sustained peer-to-peer organising. MSF staged bodily autonomy through readily shareable images of defiance: women removing their scarves in landscapes and everyday spaces in ways that invited not only circulation, but emulation.
Through individual everyday acts such as unveiling beyond the gaze of the morality police, or briefly appearing unveiled in public space, women could protest against coercion without relying on formal networks that were now heavily surveilled or had disintegrated. At the same time, this very form of action rendered feminist mobilisation politically suspect. Because autonomy claims circulated primarily through mediated individual acts, they were easily read as disconnected from collective struggle, and therefore became vulnerable to accusations of being performative, oriented to external actors, or politically irresponsible, concerns that surfaced repeatedly in criticisms of campaigns such as MSF, particularly in relation to their circulation through diasporic and Western media channels.
The suspicion shared by many ordinary Iranians, as well as academics and activists, was that these campaigns, coupled with the media interventions of their founder and administrator, the diasporic Voice of America journalist Masih Alinejad, could be folded into orientalist narratives of the oppressed Eastern woman in need of rescue by the freedom-loving West. This anxiety sharpened in periods shaped by sanctions politics and the threat of foreign military escalation. Transnational cyberspace, it was argued, had become a site of imperial cybergovernmentality where Iranian subjects’ desires for freedom could be aligned with Western neoliberal narratives of the self. Nevertheless, it remained unclear how much space this left for Iranian feminist agency, or to what extent the feminist staging of personal autonomy would become a neoliberal cliché.
The central analytic point is not about whether MSF was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feminism, whether it was resistant or complicit. My investment here is in tracing how personal autonomy, once articulated as a popular feminist vocabulary, became contested political terrain rather than the property of any single actor; it became available for re-styling and re-attachment to different political imaginaries.
Subsequent feminist mobilisations against compulsory hijab sought to distance themselves from campaigns that were widely perceived as compromised by imperial entanglement, yet they did not abandon autonomy as a political claim. The Girls of Enghelab (Revolution) Street protests in 2017–18, and the virality of the images of their actions, revealed that personal autonomy repertoires were far from becoming clichés for protesters inside Iran. If anything, the Girls’ actions showed how the staging of personal autonomy could be amplified and expanded, precisely because it spoke to women’s everyday experiences of structural violence.
The Girls’ protests, usually staged alone or in pairs, entailed holding or waving a hijab on a stick while standing on a utility box or other street platforms, actively inviting arrest by the morality police. In the much-circulated images of their protests, the Girls mediate an unsmiling, stoic intransigence that made the joyful repertoires of existing campaigns seem cautious and evasive by comparison. Even at the time, the Girls of Enghelab Street were often regarded by Iranian social media users as re-appropriating a protest cause and a bodily language previously associated with foreign-inspired mobilisations.
The Girls no longer staged their personal autonomy in the gaps in the state’s panoptic order, as MSF had done, with its images of snatched moments on mountains or by the sea; instead, they engaged in static protests in well-frequented urban spaces, in acts of direct confrontation with the state. This shift did not resolve the problem of appropriation; it re-inscribed autonomy within a different affective economy, one that emphasised stoicism and sacrifice over joy, intimacy and trust. Importantly, this differentiation was demarcated through affective performance, not by abandoning autonomy itself.
Attempts to disassociate autonomy claims from particular mediating figures - seen in the attempt of Narges Hosseini, one of the Girls of Enghelab Street, to distance her protest from campaigns initiated by Alinejad - did not prevent those figures from continuing to circulate within transnational media environments. Masih Alinejad’s efforts to speak on behalf of anti-forced hijab protesters - including her notorious 2019 meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - illustrate how autonomy claims can be re-routed through established media and political infrastructures, regardless of activists’ intentions. The persistence of autonomy as a circulating vocabulary, even as activists sought to refuse its earlier articulations, underscores the difficulty of policing meaning under conditions of mediated visibility. As a trope of protest performance, autonomy’s power lies in its capacity to appear immediately legible; its political vulnerability derives from this same capacity.
The WLF uprising of 2022–23 did not displace the vocabulary of personal autonomy; rather, it amplified it. Triggered by the death in custody of Jina (Mahsa) Amini after her arrest for improper hijab, the uprising transformed earlier scenes of individual refusal into moments of collective solidarity, with widely circulated images of women unveiling atop cars, bins, and utility boxes while surrounded by supportive crowds. During the protests, an iconic image of Vida Movahed, the first Girl of Enghelab Street, resurfaced with renewed intensity in viral memes that juxtaposed her lone act with the collective actions of WLF protesters, as if to underscore the movement’s anchorage in the claim to bodily autonomy. The point is not simply that a symbol of protest returned, but that a repertoire of personal autonomy continued to organise political attachment.
Since the WLF uprising, right-wing, pro-Pahlavi politics have gained renewed visibility within diasporic media spaces, presenting the vision of a restored Pahlavi monarchy as a coherent alternative to the Islamic Republic. This formation draws on a nationalist logic of legitimacy that prioritises unity, homogeneity and the recovery of an authentic Iranian essence, while treating internal difference, whether grounded in ethnic belonging, feminism or leftist politics, as destabilising threats. In this framework, political credibility is claimed not through the transformation of social relations, but through the promise of restoring a wounded national sovereignty.
It is in this context that feminist autonomy becomes politically available to monarchist narratives. In the early days of the WLF uprising, feminist slogans and images were rapidly taken up and reframed by pro-Pahlavi figures, including Reza Pahlavi’s public adoption of the slogan ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’ (Woman, Life, Freedom), as markers of national unity rather than as demands for structural transformation. Within pro-Pahlavi narratives, women’s bodily suffering is often mobilised not as a feminist political claim, but as a symbol of national loss. Images of unveiled women, and slogans such as ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’, are folded into a story in which the primary injury is framed as the humiliation of the Iranian nation rather than the persistence of gendered power and patriarchal violence. In this move, the violated woman does not stand for herself, or for a collective feminist struggle, but comes to represent an injured feminised mihan (homeland) in need of patriarchal protection. Thus while monarchists opportunistically took up the cry of ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ at various points during the WLF revolt, they showed a consistent attachment to the slogan: 'Man, Homeland, Prosperity' (MHP). Far from being a complement to WLF, as the MHP slogan was initially framed, over time its deployment worked to marginalise WLF as a feminist rallying cry. Finally, during the January 2026 protests, the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ was dropped from Reza Pahlavi’s website.
Beyond a critique of monarchist politics, my point here concerns the way in which a nationalist logic of legitimacy can appropriate feminist vocabularies in ways that preserve existing hierarchies rather than challenging them. It is here that the limits of autonomy became most visible. WLF opened the possibility of a feminist politics grounded in interdependence rather than singular acts of refusal, yet this possibility proved fragile. One reason lies in the persistence of national narratives that treat unity as an unquestioned good, while leaving majoritarian hierarchies intact. Even as the Kurdish genealogy of the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ was acknowledged, much diasporic discourse remained attached to a secular liberal imaginary of a unified Iranian nation in which gender and ethnic diversity appear as decorative rather than structural.
Under such conditions, the feminist language of personal autonomy risks functioning as a unifying affect that obscures uneven distributions of vulnerability. In this frame, Jina (Mahsa) Amini becomes a national symbol, while the political implications of her ethnicised exposure, as a Kurdish woman, to violence and dispossession are only partially confronted. Autonomy circulates as a marker of authenticity, but without the solidaristic infrastructures inside Iran required to sustain its claims across different political spaces and forms of belonging. Even at the height of the WLF uprising, women activists in Iran were unable, given the level of state repression, to move beyond local solidarity initiatives to form sustainable national networks with a mass impact.
Iranian feminist politics finds itself at an impasse not because the claim to autonomy has failed, but because autonomy alone cannot sustain the forms of solidarity required to navigate this terrain. The problem is not autonomy’s association with individualism, but its capacity to be absorbed into political frames - whether imperial, liberal or nationalist - that posit a homogenised subject of liberation while deferring questions of internal hierarchy and uneven exposure to violence.
The key to an approach that neither instrumentalizes nor dismisses feminist autonomy lies in a recognition of the centrality of the violent, patriarchal dividing practices that are at the foundation of the state. Against a common condition of structural violence, feminist protest asserts solidarity: the interdependence of precarious bodies, inciting not only individual emulation, but the emergence of a collective feminist subjectivity. These repertoires cannot be reduced to neoliberal feminist performances of self-empowerment, nor can they be permanently co-opted by imperialism.
Seen through this lens, there is a persistent quality of misrecognition in some feminist and left responses to the iconic figure of the unveiled feminist protester. She is ascribed a certain fixity of meaning, as though individual bodily autonomy equates to individualism, which invariably means a turning away from grassroots solidarity. Wary of aligning with neoliberal framings, academic and activist critique at times underestimates how central bodily autonomy has been to feminist campaigns in Iran and how autonomy can operate as a collective, world-building claim rather than a retreat into the self. The presumption is that this figure's theatricality, evinced by the highly visual and premeditated nature of her performance, signifies inauthenticity.
This misrecognition echoes a common response by segments of the broader left to the Dey 1404 uprising, amid the highly visible manoeuvres of the right-wing opposition: a response that can be summarized as 'regime change theatre' (Haghighi 2026). Such sceptical spectatorship dismisses the agency of protesters and minimizes the violence of the state's response under the weight of imperial threat; in seeing everywhere the hand of US imperialism and its allies, it struggles to reckon with the complex field of feminist mobilization that cannot be reduced either to ideologically pure resistance or to imperial manipulation. Anti-imperialist vigilance, in such a framing, can become a refusal of solidarity, a foreclosure of the difficult work of maintaining a responsivity to what is actually happening without finding refuge in familiar frameworks.
If feminist politics is to move beyond the present impasse, autonomy must be re-attached to projects capable of holding disagreement without collapsing it into betrayal, and of recognising multiple, intersecting injuries without hierarchically ordering them. In the absence of such re-attachment, repertoires of autonomy will continue to generate recognition and mobilisation, even as their affective power deepens polarisation.