Bad feminist or Bad-Hejabi?

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 t...