From Sidewalk to Global Feed: Women’s Video Activism and the Politics of the Body in Iran

• In Event: Body Politics, State Power, and Resistance

Abstract

This paper examines how the female body in the Islamic Republic of Iran becomes a key terrain of state politics, and how women produce resistance through everyday, media-based tactics. Focusing on viral smartphone videos of street confrontations between women and hijab enforcers, it asks whether these clips merely document symbolic violence or become political action—especially once they cross borders and circulate globally.

Drawing on Lefebvre’s production of space and Foucauldian accounts of surveillance and discipline, I use the paired concepts of the “ideological body–city” and the “resistant body–city.” I show how compulsory hijab law, patrols, plainclothes forces, urban CCTV, and the mobilization of “enjoining the good” produce a panoptic street in which women’s bodies are continually assessable and punishable. Here, body politics extends beyond dress to the governance of movement, presence, and visibility in public space, linking state power, urban order, and embodiment.

Through qualitative content analysis of 25 viral videos (2021–2023), the paper identifies three recurring patterns: (1)articulating bodily autonomy as an urban right; (2) boundary-making and public shaming of enforcers by exposing them to an imagined mass audience, turning surveillance into sousveillance; and (3) delegitimating compulsory hijab law by framing it as an unjustified basis for regulating the street.

From a transnational perspective, I argue that virality makes “the street” a multi-scalar arena: a local encounter in a metro station or on a sidewalk becomes an event as it spreads across platforms, drawing in diaspora publics, global media, and solidarity networks. The smartphone camera thus functions as resistance against state body politics and as a technology of transnational connection that reverses the observer/observed relation, redefines a “right to the body” within a “right to the city,” and links everyday defiance to the global politics of visibility and contested narratives of order.

Author

• Soodeh Mansouri, University of Illinois