Decolonial Feminism and Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom Movement

By Mahou

In 1936, Iranian women faced a startling decree: Reza Shah Pahlavi ordered them to remove their veils. This Kashf-e hijab law banned veiling in public, using women’s bodies as symbols of modernization. Police tore chadors from women’s heads on the streets. Many women, humiliated and afraid, simply stayed home. This wasn’t freedom—it was control disguised as progress.

Decades later, after the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic reversed course completely. Compulsory hijab became law. Once again, women’s choices were stripped away—this time in the name of Islamic values. Between forced unveiling and enforced veiling, one pattern remained unchanged: control over women’s bodies. The Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom) movement that erupted in 2022 represents the most powerful challenge yet to this pattern.

What links these moments—forced unveiling, enforced veiling, and now public resistance—is a long history of state power scripting womanhood from above. The movement’s core demand is neither Western nor Islamic—it is decolonial. It insists on a woman’s right to define herself, to be political without being politicized, and to live fully, not symbolically.

What Makes This Decolonial Feminism?

Decolonial feminism takes a different path from Western feminism. Instead of assuming gender justice means adopting Western ideals, it asks: How have colonial powers reshaped our bodies and relationships? As María Lugones reminds us, coloniality imposed binary gender categories to discipline racialized bodies. In Iran, those categories were mapped onto existing hierarchies to reshape womanhood itself.

For Iranian women, the veil has never been simply a piece of cloth. As anthropologist Homa Hoodfar has shown, it has been a “flexible cultural marker”—sometimes a tool of resistance, sometimes a way to navigate public spaces safely. Some women veiled to defy Reza Shah. Others removed it to defy the Islamic Republic. The real issue isn’t the veil itself but who has power over it.

Beyond a Slogan

Woman, Life, Freedom originated in Kurdish resistance before becoming the rallying cry of a national uprising after Jina (Mahsa) Amini’s death in custody in 2022. But this movement didn’t appear overnight. For years, women joined campaigns like White Wednesdays and My Stealthy Freedom, recording themselves walking unveiled despite serious risks. During the 2017 protests, women stood on utility boxes waving their veils on sticks, transforming symbols of control into flags of defiance.

This movement isn’t rejecting Islam—it’s rejecting state ownership of bodies and beliefs. As Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso argues, feminist resistance arises from the knowledge of bodies that have been racialized, disciplined, and defiant. These women aren’t simply opposing a dress code; they’re challenging an entire coloniality of being that attempts to define and confine them.

Moving Beyond Western Misconceptions

The West often portrays veiled Muslim women as victims needing rescue. But Iranian women don’t need saving. As Lila Abu-Lughod argues, we must ask not what liberation looks like to us, but what it means to them. The women leading Zan, Zendegi, Azadi aren’t seeking Western-style freedoms; they’re demanding the right to define freedom for themselves, to inhabit womanhood without surveillance or manipulation.

When Iranian women dance in public, remove their veils, or publicly mourn their dead, they reclaim their presence and truth. As Fatemeh Sadeghi notes, modesty under the Islamic Republic became not a personal virtue but a political test—a way to measure loyalty and suppress dissent. Every act of defiance challenges this politicization of women’s bodies.

Creating New Political Language

Iranian women aren’t just resisting—they’re creating new political and spiritual vocabularies. When a woman walks unveiled through Tehran, she’s not performing for Western audiences—she’s writing her own story, rooted in her history, pain, and defiance.

Similar movements exist elsewhere: Black mothers in Brazil turning grief into protest; Andean women who understand peace as collective healing. But Iranian women aren’t copying anyone’s playbook—they’re writing their own, shaped by their specific experiences, their land, their sorrows and joys.

Their voices have never been absent—they have lived in lullabies, in mourning, in resistance woven into the fabric of everyday life. What has shifted is not their presence, but the world’s ability to hear the power they’ve always carried. Iranian women are not translating themselves into foreign tongues; they are speaking in a language that predates empire and outlives oppression. Decolonial feminism doesn’t interpret for them—it listens.

They are not waiting to be rescued. They are not asking for permission. They are forging a new vocabulary of freedom—where life is sovereign, where womanhood is not a battleground but a birthplace. Liberation is not offered. It is remembered. Embodied. Breathed into being.
Again. And again.

Cover photography by @zuzalina