Over Forty Years of Resisting Compulsory Veiling

Abstract

Abstract While text-based and cyberspace campaigns against compulsory veiling in Iran have received much attention, Iranian diasporic creative writers have also engaged in this resistance through their writings, but they have remained almost unacknowledged. This article argues that diasporic literary narratives have functioned as part of what has led to today’s online platforms and cyberactivism. The article approaches these literary narratives as forms of counterdiscourse, rearticulating alternative narratives about women’s movements against compulsory veiling. Produced in diaspora, these transnational feminist works raise questions of authenticity and legitimacy. However, these authors emerge as activists from their position abroad, pushing back against the limits placed by the state on women’s bodies; in posing these challenges, they contribute to dissent from the mainstream narrative and to a rearticulation of the movement even as their works are viewed as marginal.