Bad feminist or Bad-Hejabi? Moving outside the Hejab debate

This article will attempt to effect an intervention in the general thinking about the veil as an unequivocal symbol of either female oppression or of female emancipation. Since it is axiomatic to my argument that the veil cannot be discussed as signifying only one state of being, I will address uses of veiling, of unveiling, and of alternative ways of wearing the hejab around two historical moments in twentieth-century Iran. In 1936, the ruling monarch Reza Shah Pahlavi legislated the Unveiling Act which prohibited women from appearing veiled in public. In 1983, revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini implemented the Veiling Act prohibiting women from appearing unveiled in public.

By working around these two historical moments, I will show how the implications of these two pieces of legislation, which claimed to initiate revolutionary nationalist positions by two very different leaders, had remarkably similar effects on the body of the Iranian woman. In both instances, legal discourse proffered the Iranian woman's body as an embodiment of the nation as either secular, modern and westernized, or alternatively, as Islamic, modern and anti-imperialist.

My argument rests on the premise that the complicity of western and dominant Iranian feminist discourse with that of imperialism has worked in tandem with patriarchal nationalist discourse to occlude the agential subject position of the Iranian woman. The intersection of these discourses elide the increasingly urgent category of the bad-hejab (inappropriately veiled) women. The figure of the bad-hejabi forces the terms of the debate to move beyond the reductive veiling/unveiling binary and situates the hejab as the site of a continuous contestation of the categories of gender and class in contemporary Iran.