A common image of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that started last September in Iran portrays women taking off their veils and burning them. In France, newspapers have celebrated the “waking-up” of Iranian women, as if taking off one’s veil was an intuitive gesture of political awakening and liberation. It is obviously not the case. Iranian women have been awake for a long time; feminist movements have been the most powerful part of Iranian civil society since the mid-2000s. The dividing line in these feminist movements does not lie between veiled and non-veiled women. It is between those who agree with mandatory requirements and institutionalized segregation and those who do not.

Taking off the veil started as a spontaneous collective action expressing outrage at the funerals of Mahsa Zhina Amini, which turned into a radical anti-regime demonstration in Saqqez on September 17, 2022. This reminds us of the importance collective emotions in theories of action: feminist theories offer critical insights for understanding these revolts (Athanasiou 2017; Butler 2004; Butler and Athanasiou 2013; Loraux 1998) beyond the demand for gender equality. But taking off the veil is more than spontaneous; it is also very precise. It is a political act that indicates, with the greatest economy of means, that one goes up to the battlements to defy the established order. This political act is different than the hidden subversions and skillful circumventions deployed by Iranians for decades: this act is carried out frontally, and in public. When women burn their veils and men applaud them, men do not applaud to support women in their struggle. Their applause marks how women also act for the men, who have no veils to burn. The gesture of taking off the veil is strategic: it announces a radical shift and gives its exact coordinates.

Taking off the veil disarticulates the pact between society and state that has held since the 1979 Revolution. It does so in four ways. First, it revives a posture with a complicated history in Iranian politics: that of antagonism, frontal opposition or “agonistic” position (Athanasiou 2017). Second, this frontal opposition is assumed with joy and creativity: there is not only rage but also elation. Crucially, these feelings imply, and perform, an absence of fear. Third, this gesture produces a “we.” Women take off their veils and people around them honk, applaud, and shout that they are “women of honor” (bâ sharaf). The sounds circulate their gesture in a collective re-appropriation. Finally—and the essential point that makes this gesture such a challenge—taking off the veil crosses a "red line" (khate ghermez).

Over the past thirty years, Iranian citizenship has been shaped by a dialectic of bypassing and respecting the red lines. Red lines are not to be discussed; there are things not to be said or done if one does not want serious problems. These red lines map out the public space, which can widen or shrink. They are not inscribed on a map or listed anywhere at all: they are part of an obvious, implicit social knowledge, internalized by Iranians. Learning and constantly updating the scope of these red lines is an early form of socialization. While some red lines are shifting or negotiable, others are immutable: they are the foundation on which the Iranian discourse of power has been built. The Supreme Leader (the function and the person) is one of those immutable red lines, as is the compulsory veil. Over the decades, public space has been drawn and redrawn in shifting arrays of lines and borders. The process has redefined the relations between state and society, authority and the methods of social control.

These internalized red lines have produced multiple forms of individual, collective, and institutional self-censorship—in academic or cultural fields for certain, but also in political activism and the world of NGOs. Iranian civil society and public life from the 1990s onwards have accepted the realities of censorship and played with those realities to strategically open up avenues of expression or change. Such an approach implied working from within and respecting the red lines to avoid jeopardizing a fragile but dynamic economy of resistance. With every step, actors in civil society and public life accessed the possibilities of continuing to act (work, speak, move) and asked: “Will this action/subject create a problem that will stop me, or will it allow me to continue?”

The consequences of this strategy were twofold. On the one hand, this was resistance of a different kind. It consisted of disabling the effects of power by deserting the front lines of power to work for change within the legal and political system whose premises were (at least strategically) accepted. In cases where state apparatus and discourse are imposed by the use of force, there is no one to confront them: people might have moved on in search of possible margins of change in everyday life. But on the other hand, according to this practice, the limits of what can and cannot be discussed end up being internalized. Moreover, if no one tests limits, they do not move: they do not shift and they do not tremble. Those limits become calcified as a set of forbidden topics never reported on. The red lines have led Iranian society to progressively metabolize the boundaries sedimented through state coercion and ideology. In this process, what were initially experienced as sensitive subjects or dangerous acts became morally, socially, and emotionally devalued subjects with which people did not want to be associated and with which they would not engage. Thus, strategic acknowledgement of these boundaries led to their internalization; civil society became the guardian of the state’s red lines. The Islamic Republic, in short, built an extremely repressive power by manufacturing acceptance. The distinction between obedience and adherence (Arendt 2003) is of importance here, and it seems that there has been a constant shift from one term to the other in Iranian society.

In this context, removing one’s veil, or writing against the state on the walls, is a clear indication that one is rejecting the social pact—not quietly deserting it, but resoundingly defying it—regardless of how the situation might evolve in a future that no one can predict. New moral economies of dissent are reconfiguring the space of meaning in which all further developments will henceforth be received and understood. Crossing the red lines in the clearest of ways also imply that protestors have broken out of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that have organized the social pact since 1979—since before most of the protestors were born. Perhaps this is the most important consequence of what we are witnessing in terms of possible consequences.

That which has been consumed by the fires is already immeasurable, since it is simply a political subjectivation, a form of political participation and citizenship, the terms of a government that have been emptied. But like the snake molt, this movement did not start a few months ago. So that where we see, stunned, a shed of dead skin, the snake, with new skin, already traces its road.