The Actresses’ Struggle for the Normal in the Islamic Republic of Iran

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Political Subjectivity (Table 11)

Abstract

Many accounts of resistance under authoritarianism assume that people either comply, withdraw, or openly confront power. Interviews with Iranian actresses complicate that picture. Based on fifteen in-depth interviews with actresses ages 25–72 (eleven living in Iran and four in exile), this study shows how coping under the Islamic Republic is organized less around single “acts” of resistance than around ongoing work to make life livable under arbitrary, high-stakes enforcement—especially after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022. I find three intertwined processes. First, actresses describe a rupture in what had previously felt “normal”: compulsory hijab and staged “private” intimacy became newly legible as artificial and violent, producing what I call a reconfiguration of normality. Second, because enforcement is unpredictable, coping shifts from risk calculation to relationship infrastructure—trust chains, secrecy practices, and underground collaboration—while the state actively undermines these networks by cultivating suspicion. Third, these dilemmas are distinctly gendered: visibility is both the condition of actresses’ work and a primary site of punishment, so withdrawal can become professional erasure, while return can feel like re-entering a false visual order. Together, the findings show how a theocratic state governs not only through coercion, but through the fragile production of “the normal,” making survival itself a continuous, morally charged negotiation.

Author

• Hanieh Lashkarbolouki, Louisiana State University