Torches in the Dark: Embodied Acts of UTopian Hope in Iranian Women's Protests
Amir Akbarpour Shiraz
|
AMIR AKBARPOUR SHIRAZ is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Georgia whose work fuses philosophical inquiry with experimental performance practice. His research began with case studies such as street art and graffiti, using them to rethink how performance operates as an event and a mode of political expression. Trained as a theatre director at the University of Tehran’s College of Fine Arts, he now centers his work on a fundamental question: Who is the performer, and what kinds of interventions can a performer bring into the world? Amir’s current research examines how aesthetic acts—including the protest performances of women in contemporary social movements—shape political participation and collective identity, exploring the ways performance generates new forms of memory, perception, and shared imagination.
|
Abstract
This article examines three emblematic, body-centered protest actions in Iran’s women-led movements—standing on an electrical box, cutting hair, and burning the hijab—as performative gestures of utopian hope that transform urban and bodily spaces into stages of political imagination. In the face of Iran’s suffocating repression and economic crisis, these are not just brief acts of protest. They are gestures that insist on imagining a future still beyond reach—gestures that, through repetition, silence, and the raw presence of the body, pierce the darkness with fleeting yet defiant light.
Drawing on theories of performance, spatial politics, and embodied archives (Butler, Rancière, Taylor), the article argues that these actions resist stabilized representation by positioning themselves in a liminal zone between visibility and invisibility, permanence and transience. Through the accumulation of “political mass,” these performances disrupt the gravitational pull of dominant power structures, opening new configurations of the sensible. The article contends that hope, in these performances, is not articulated through slogans or visionary promises, but emerges through fragile gestures, dangerous silences, and ephemeral rituals enacted by oppressed bodies—an embodied hope that pulls the spectator out of passive observation and into a shared process of transformation.
This article examines three emblematic, body-centered protest actions in Iran’s women-led movements—standing on an electrical box, cutting hair, and burning the hijab—as performative gestures of utopian hope that transform urban and bodily spaces into stages of political imagination. In the face of Iran’s suffocating repression and economic crisis, these are not just brief acts of protest. They are gestures that insist on imagining a future still beyond reach—gestures that, through repetition, silence, and the raw presence of the body, pierce the darkness with fleeting yet defiant light.
Drawing on theories of performance, spatial politics, and embodied archives (Butler, Rancière, Taylor), the article argues that these actions resist stabilized representation by positioning themselves in a liminal zone between visibility and invisibility, permanence and transience. Through the accumulation of “political mass,” these performances disrupt the gravitational pull of dominant power structures, opening new configurations of the sensible. The article contends that hope, in these performances, is not articulated through slogans or visionary promises, but emerges through fragile gestures, dangerous silences, and ephemeral rituals enacted by oppressed bodies—an embodied hope that pulls the spectator out of passive observation and into a shared process of transformation.
| etudesdec2025shiraz.pdf |
