The Body in Revolt: Coquetry, Interpretation, and Power in Iran

By AmirAli Maleki

Edited by: Ingrid Burke Friedman | JURIST Editorial Director

While sitting in a cafe recently, a companion nodded toward a woman at a nearby table and asked me: “Who comes to a café wearing skin-tight leggings and carrying an aggressively feminine fake Gucci bag? It doesn’t match, does it, Malek? There’s something aesthetically incoherent about the whole composition — something excessive, almost irritating: the athletic exposure of the body, the exaggerated femininity of the bag, the imitation of luxury, the deliberate visibility of curves that, to my taste, didn’t need to be made quite so visible. I don’t like it. Do you agree?”

I agreed, but only within the narrow and ultimately harmless jurisdiction of fashion, because the moment aesthetic judgment crosses into social judgment, and the moment social judgment crosses into the Iranian legal and political world, the apparently simple question of whether a woman’s clothes are tasteful becomes entangled with a much more difficult question: what exactly are we judging when we judge the appearance of an Iranian woman whose body has, for decades, been interpreted by law before it has been permitted to interpret itself?

This question cannot be separated from the legal structure in which the Iranian female subject has historically been situated. Article 1117 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran permits a husband, under specified conditions, to prevent his wife from pursuing an occupation deemed incompatible with family interests or the dignity of the spouses, while Article 1043 subjects the first marriage of a virgin woman, even when she has reached adulthood, to the consent of her father or paternal grandfather, subject to legal exceptions and judicial procedures.

It would be legally imprecise to say that these provisions literally define a woman as property, because Iranian private law does not formally classify women as objects of ownership. Yet law does not need to use the vocabulary of property in order to produce a proprietary structure of power. When another person is granted a privileged legal position in relation to an adult woman’s work, marriage, movement, appearance, or intimate life, the result is a juridical imagination in which female autonomy is repeatedly interrupted by authorization. The woman appears as a legal subject, but a subject whose subjectivity is never entirely left alone. Around her stand the husband, the father, the paternal grandfather, the judge, the police officer, the legislator, the cleric, and finally the state itself, each claiming, in different degrees and through different legal mechanisms, a right to interpret what she may do with the life that is supposedly hers.

This is why the body of the Iranian woman cannot be understood as a merely private body. The state itself destroyed the possibility of such innocence long ago. By regulating hair, clothing, sexual conduct, marriage, public appearance, and forms of gendered behavior, political power transformed the female body into a juridical surface upon which authority continuously wrote itself. The body became a kind of legal manuscript. Every prohibition added a sentence to it; every compulsory form of concealment became a commentary upon it; every intervention by police, family, court, school, university, or bureaucracy reinforced the proposition that this body was not simply a biological fact but a political territory. And once power turns the body into political territory, it cannot later complain when the body begins to behave politically.

The extraordinary development after the protests of 1401 (ed: the Persian year 1401, which corresponded with March 21, 2022 to March 20, 2023 on the Gregorian calendar), globally articulated through the words “Woman, Life, Freedom,” was therefore not that the female body suddenly became political. It was that a body already politicized from above began to produce politics from below. The distinction is fundamental. For decades, the state interpreted the body. After 1401, the body increasingly began to interpret the state.

This transformation can be approached through Georg Simmel, although Simmel must also be read against the historical limits of his own philosophy of gender. In his reflections on masculine and feminine culture, Simmel describes what he calls objective culture as a world historically produced in overwhelmingly masculine forms: institutions, professions, science, law, art, economic production, and the externalized structures through which human activity becomes independent of the individual who created it.

Man, within this schema, projects himself outward and encounters his own existence in the objects, institutions, and forms he produces. Woman, by contrast, appears in Simmel’s controversial account as a more internally unified being, less divided between subjective existence and external objectification, and therefore closer to a condition of “being” than to the masculine movement of “becoming.” Whatever philosophical insight this distinction may contain, it also reflects a historical structure of exclusion. If women were prevented from entering the institutions through which objective culture was produced, then the supposed inwardness of woman could never be understood as a purely metaphysical fact. It was also the social consequence of a world whose doors were closed.

Contemporary Iran is important precisely because those doors are being forced open, often without the permission of the legal order that continues to guard them. Iranian women write, study, manage, teach, create businesses, produce art, dance, film themselves, translate, organize, enter professions, construct digital identities, occupy cafés and universities, and participate in the production of precisely that objective culture from which traditional structures attempted to exclude them.

The Iranian woman is therefore no longer merely an object situated inside a masculine objective world; she increasingly externalizes herself into that world and modifies its forms. Yet this externalization occurs under a political system that continues to insist upon an older interpretation of her. The result is not simply a conflict between tradition and modernity, nor between religion and secularism, but a conflict between two modes of objectification: the state seeks to objectify woman as a legally and morally intelligible gendered subject, while the woman increasingly seeks to objectify herself through her own work, image, style, language, body, profession, and presence.

It is within this conflict that fashion acquires a meaning greater than fashion. The visible hair, the tight clothing, the deliberately stylized body, the exaggerated femininity, the cosmetics, the mixture of athletic clothing with luxury symbols, the imitation of global brands, the display of skin, the cultivation of sexual attractiveness, and even the apparently absurd combination of leggings with a fake Gucci bag may certainly be interpreted through consumerism, class aspiration, imitation, aesthetic insecurity, conspicuous consumption, or the global standardization of desire.

None of these interpretations should be denied. Yet in a society where power has invested enormous legal and ideological energy in regulating precisely the visibility of the female body, bodily display necessarily enters a field already saturated with political meaning. The woman may not intend to make a political statement, but political meaning is not produced by intention alone. A social act acquires significance through the field in which it occurs. To wear a bikini in one social context and to reveal one’s hair in another may involve radically different quantities of political meaning, not because hair is inherently revolutionary, but because power has already decided to make it significant.

This is where I propose the concept of social coquetry. Simmel’s analysis of coquetry begins with an apparently interpersonal and erotic form: the oscillation between giving and withholding, nearness and distance, possession and impossibility. The coquette does not simply say yes and does not simply say no; her social power lies precisely in suspending the answer, in making availability visible while simultaneously refusing its completion. Coquetry is therefore not reducible to sexual seduction. It is a form structured through ambiguity, and ambiguity itself becomes a source of power because the other is forced to remain within the movement of interpretation. The coquette governs not by providing a final meaning but by preventing meaning from closing.

What happens, however, when this structure escapes the interpersonal relation and enters the political field? What happens when the “other” before whom the body appears is not merely a potential lover but a legal order that demands certainty? Authoritarian systems depend upon classification. They need the proper woman to be recognizable as the proper woman, the proper man as the proper man, the obedient citizen as the obedient citizen, and the deviant as the deviant. Their power is not merely coercive; it is interpretive. They govern by stabilizing categories and assigning bodies to them. The Iranian female body, however, increasingly introduces ambiguity into precisely this system of classification. She appears publicly in forms that the state has declared unacceptable, yet she continues to work, study, shop, drink coffee, drive, laugh, fall in love, and participate in ordinary life. She is simultaneously prohibited and normal, legally problematic and socially ordinary, officially deviant and increasingly culturally familiar. The state says that this body is a violation; everyday life says that this body is simply there.

Social coquetry emerges from this oscillation. The woman gives visibility and withholds submission. She enters the public field but refuses to enter it entirely through the state’s preferred image of femininity. She does not necessarily confront authority through a manifesto, an organization, or even an explicitly political statement; she confronts it through a controlled excess of presence. She shows what she has been ordered to hide, but the significance of this showing does not lie merely in exposure. It lies in the fact that the state can no longer determine the final meaning of what is exposed. Is the uncovered hair political resistance, fashion, carelessness, generational change, sexual expression, ordinary comfort, or simply the absence of obedience? The state wants an answer because power requires classification, but the body refuses to provide a single one. In this sense, social coquetry is not the sexualization of politics but the introduction of interpretive instability into political power through the social appearance of the body.

This is also why social coquetry should not be confused with the claim that Iranian women consciously seduce the state or deliberately transform sexuality into an organized political strategy. Such a claim would be absurd and reductive. The concept describes a social form, not an individual intention. A woman may dress in a particular way simply because she likes it; another may consciously reject compulsory modesty; another may imitate a global fashion; another may seek erotic attention; another may seek none at all. Yet these radically different intentions enter the same historically structured field, and within that field their bodies become signs that exceed private intention. The political order has already sexualized the question of visibility by deciding which parts of the body may appear and under what conditions. Consequently, the woman who reclaims visibility enters a political relation even when politics was not her original purpose. She does not politicize her body from nothing. She inherits a body that power has already made political.

Here the idea of social coquetry leads toward a second and perhaps more fundamental concept: sexual hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, in its classical and modern forms, concerns interpretation, but the hermeneutic tradition gradually moved beyond the technical interpretation of texts toward the more radical proposition that human existence itself is interpretive. We do not first encounter a neutral world and then add meanings to it. We always encounter a world that has already been interpreted, historically mediated, linguistically organized, and structured by inherited horizons. This is especially important in the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, for whom understanding is never an act performed by a detached consciousness standing outside history. We understand from within history. We approach the world through prejudgments, traditions, concepts, and horizons that precede us, and genuine understanding occurs not through the complete elimination of these horizons but through their encounter and transformation.

The Iranian female body enters public life within precisely such a historically constituted horizon. No body appears naked of interpretation, even when naked. Before an Iranian woman enters the street, her body has already been interpreted through religious jurisprudence, state law, family morality, patriarchal custom, modern consumer culture, global fashion, sexual desire, revolutionary history, and the memory of repression. She does not enter an empty space. She enters a field in which the meaning of her hair, legs, waist, voice, movement, and gaze has already been contested. The state approaches her from one horizon: the body as an object requiring moral and legal regulation. She approaches the state from another emerging horizon: the body as a site of personal autonomy, pleasure, self-production, social presence, and civil freedom. What occurs between them is therefore not merely a confrontation between police and citizen. It is a conflict of horizons.

Yet here I want to push the hermeneutic argument beyond the ordinary language of understanding. Gadamer’s famous notion of a “fusion of horizons” describes the event in which understanding transforms the horizons involved in interpretation, but authoritarian power does not willingly enter such a fusion. It attempts instead to preserve its own horizon as the only legitimate horizon. It does not wish to understand the body differently; it wishes the body to remain understandable only through the categories already authorized by law and ideology. Sexual hermeneutics begins precisely at the point where the body interrupts this monopoly. The body becomes an interpretive event because its appearance forces the inherited horizon to confront something it can no longer fully absorb. The woman without compulsory hijab is not merely “seen” by the state. She produces a crisis in the state’s way of seeing.

This is the deeper meaning of the phrase sexual hermeneutics. It does not mean that the body is a text in the simplistic sense that every item of clothing has a fixed political translation. It means almost the opposite. The body becomes hermeneutic because its meaning cannot be closed. It exists within an ongoing struggle over interpretation. The state says: obscenity. The woman may say: comfort. The market says: beauty. The religious authority says: sin. The observer says: sexuality. The activist says: resistance. The woman herself may say nothing at all. Meaning circulates among these horizons, and the body becomes the place where they collide.

But there is an additional reversal. The body is not only interpreted; it interprets. By appearing in a form prohibited or disfavored by the political order, it reveals something about that order. A law is often understood most clearly at the point of its anxiety. We discover what power is by discovering what it cannot tolerate. Thus the visible female body becomes a hermeneutic instrument through which the structure of authority is disclosed. A few strands of hair reveal the enormous machinery required to regulate them. A woman dancing reveals the political fear attached to joy. A tight dress reveals the juridical anxiety surrounding sexuality. The body does not need to write a philosophical critique of the state because the state, through its reaction to the body, interprets itself.

This is why sexual hermeneutics is necessarily political. The body asks power a question merely by appearing differently: what exactly are you defending when you defend the compulsory interpretation of me? And every answer exposes another layer of the political structure. If the state responds with punishment, it reveals coercion. If it tolerates the violation while preserving the law, it reveals the growing distance between legality and social reality. If it retreats, it acknowledges that the horizon of society has moved. The body therefore becomes both the object and the medium of interpretation. It is read by power, but through the act of being read it also makes power readable.

The Iranian woman, in this sense, has entered a struggle over interpretive sovereignty. The central question is no longer merely who controls the body physically, but who possesses the authority to determine what the body means. For decades, the official answer was distributed among institutions that spoke on the woman’s behalf: law, religion, family, police, and state. The transformation now taking place is the gradual seizure of interpretation by the person who inhabits the body.

This is why bodily autonomy is far more radical than a debate about clothing. The claim “I decide what I wear” contains within it a much larger jurisprudential proposition: I am the primary interpreter of the person that I am. And once that proposition enters public life, it does not remain confined to clothing. If I possess interpretive sovereignty over my hair, why not over my labor? If over my clothing, why not over my marriage? If over my appearance, why not over my sexuality, movement, profession, belief, and future? Bodily autonomy is politically dangerous to paternalistic legal systems because autonomy expands.

One self-interpreted decision produces the possibility of another. The body becomes the first jurisdiction from which a larger theory of civil personhood can emerge.

This is why the woman in the café matters, even if she does not know that she matters. Her leggings may be ugly. Her bag may be fake. Her fashion may be derivative, consumerist, excessive, or aesthetically incoherent. None of this cancels the larger social form into which her appearance enters. For a body that has been subjected to compulsory interpretation, even the right to be tasteless becomes politically significant. Freedom cannot mean that women are finally permitted to dress only in ways intellectuals consider elegant, progressive, tasteful, or properly emancipatory. That would merely replace one tribunal with another. The deeper freedom is the freedom to produce meanings that others may dislike.

And perhaps this is where the body begins to exceed the woman herself. It becomes transpersonal. What appears to be an individual act enters a collective field of interpretation, changes what becomes socially familiar, expands the boundaries of the visible, and gradually alters the horizon within which the next body will appear. One woman walks uncovered and appears exceptional; thousands do so and the exception begins to transform the rule. A practice becomes visible, visibility becomes familiarity, familiarity becomes expectation, and expectation eventually confronts law. Long before legal reform occurs, the hermeneutic world in which law operates may already have changed. The state may preserve the sentence. But society may no longer read it in the same way. And when the meaning of the law changes before the wording of the law does, the body becomes one of the places where a future legal order finally begins to appear.

But the movement from bodily visibility to legal transformation is neither simple nor necessarily emancipatory. There is a temptation, especially when observing societies under repression, to romanticize every act that appears to violate the dominant order. Once compulsory concealment has been recognized as a form of political control, every form of exposure can begin to look like liberation; once the state has transformed modesty into obligation, immodesty can appear automatically revolutionary. Yet this inversion merely reproduces the same intellectual mistake in the opposite direction. The body is not free simply because it moves from one compulsory image to another, and a woman does not necessarily become autonomous merely because the market rather than the state provides the vocabulary through which she constructs herself.

She may reject compulsory veiling and simultaneously become dependent upon compulsory visibility; she may escape the disciplinary gaze of the morality police while entering the equally demanding gaze of consumer culture; she may refuse the state’s definition of the proper woman while exhausting herself in the production of another standardized femininity composed of cosmetic procedures, branded objects, fashionable bodies, digital images, and globally circulating forms of desirability. The problem, therefore, is not to decide whether contemporary bodily display in Iran is either resistance or consumption, either emancipation or commodification. Its sociological importance lies precisely in the fact that it can be all of these at once.

Simmel’s sociology of fashion is indispensable here because fashion, for him, is built upon one of the fundamental contradictions of modern individuality: the desire to belong and the desire to distinguish oneself. The individual adopts a form already shared by others in order to express what she experiences as her own uniqueness. Fashion therefore promises individuality through imitation. It allows us to say “this is me” in a language that has necessarily been learned from elsewhere. This contradiction becomes particularly intense in contemporary Iran, where the desire for individual appearance has developed within a society that has spent decades politically regulating appearance itself. The woman who radically alters her clothing, body, hair, face, or style may experience the act as a movement toward herself, and in an important sense it may indeed be one; yet the forms through which this self is expressed are frequently supplied by global markets, digital platforms, beauty industries, class competition, and standardized images of sexual attractiveness. What appears as radical individuality can therefore contain an illusion of individualization. The individual escapes one uniform only to discover another, rejects one compulsory aesthetic while unknowingly entering a second system of repetition, and announces her uniqueness through objects and bodily forms reproduced by thousands of others.

Yet the existence of this illusion does not make the process politically meaningless. On the contrary, it reveals something essential about freedom itself: historically significant forms of liberation rarely emerge in pure forms. Human beings do not first solve the contradictions of capitalism, patriarchy, sexuality, class, consumerism, and mass culture and only then begin to resist political domination. They resist from within the materials available to them. The Iranian woman who uses fashion to construct herself does not stand outside the market, just as the Iranian man who uses digital technology to escape censorship does not stand outside global capitalism.

The relevant question is therefore not whether the form is pure, but what the form does within a specific structure of power. A pair of leggings remains a commodity, but under a regime that has attempted to determine the acceptable visibility of the female body, the commodity can acquire a political surplus of meaning. A cosmetic practice can reproduce global standards of beauty and simultaneously participate in the rejection of a state-imposed visual order. A sexually attractive appearance can be both an object within the economy of desire and an interruption of a juridical system built upon the compulsory management of desire. Contradiction does not invalidate the phenomenon. Contradiction is the phenomenon.

This is why what might be called the conspicuous consumption of the body must be distinguished from ordinary conspicuous consumption without being separated from it entirely. The body in contemporary Iran is increasingly consumed, displayed, modified, photographed, stylized, and circulated, and there would be little intellectual value in pretending that these practices are untouched by class competition or commercial desire. The fake Gucci bag is important precisely because it reveals the strange economy of symbolic participation: one does not need to possess luxury in order to consume its sign. Yet the body itself operates differently from the bag. The bag can be purchased, copied, discarded, or replaced, whereas the body is the irreducible location from which the person enters the social world. When the body itself becomes conspicuous after decades of enforced concealment, conspicuousness acquires a historical dimension. What looks like excess may partly be the return of something that was prohibited from appearing. A society that compulsorily suppresses bodily visibility should not expect the return of the body to be quiet, balanced, tasteful, or philosophically disciplined. The repressed does not necessarily return in good taste.

Indeed, there is a deeper dialectic at work here. The Islamic Republic sought to reduce the sexual visibility of the female body by regulating it, but the extraordinary concentration of legal, religious, and political attention upon that body intensified its symbolic significance. The state attempted to desexualize public space through compulsory regulation and, in doing so, made sexuality one of the most politically charged dimensions of public life. This is one of the recurring paradoxes of repression: power often enlarges the symbolic importance of the very object it attempts to diminish. If hair becomes the subject of law, hair becomes capable of violating law. If clothing becomes an instrument of political order, clothing becomes available as an instrument of political disorder. If sexuality becomes a matter of state anxiety, sexuality acquires the capacity to expose the state’s anxieties. The political power of the body is therefore not external to repression; it is partly produced by repression itself.

Social coquetry becomes more intelligible within this paradox. In ordinary coquetry, as Simmel understands it, power emerges from the refusal to resolve the relation completely. The coquette produces an interpretive tension because the other can neither securely possess nor completely abandon the possibility of possession. Social coquetry transfers this structure from the erotic relation between individuals to the relation between the body and the social order. The Iranian woman who enters public space outside the officially prescribed visual form does not necessarily offer the state a direct political proposition that can be accepted or rejected. She creates, instead, a condition of suspended authority. The state sees the violation but cannot always eliminate it; society sees the violation but increasingly experiences it as ordinary; the law continues to prohibit while everyday life continues to normalize. The body thus remains simultaneously inside and outside the legal order. It is present but not incorporated, visible but not fully recognized, prohibited but not absent. This is the political structure of the flirtation: power is continuously confronted with a social reality it cannot fully possess.

The “coquetry” in social coquetry must therefore not be reduced to feminine seduction, because its deeper structure is the production of distance within proximity. The woman is physically present within the political order while withdrawing the interpretive obedience that order demands from her. She walks on the same street, attends the same university, works within the same economy, and lives within the territorial jurisdiction of the same state, but her body no longer completely reproduces the official image through which the state wishes to recognize her. She remains near while becoming symbolically distant. She belongs to society while withholding conformity. In this sense, social coquetry becomes a form of negative participation: I am here, but not entirely as you have defined me. I remain within your field of vision, but I refuse to guarantee that what you see will mean what you command it to mean.

This withholding of meaning is precisely where social coquetry meets sexual hermeneutics. If hermeneutics concerns the conditions under which understanding becomes possible, then political domination can also be understood as an attempt to control those conditions in advance. The authoritarian state does not merely prohibit actions; it produces an interpretive framework within which actions are supposed to become intelligible. It defines the uncovered woman as immoral, the dissident as dangerous, the unauthorized gathering as a security problem, the unconventional sexuality as pathology or crime, and the politically uncontrolled body as disorder. Power, in other words, does not simply punish reality after reality appears. It attempts to provide the vocabulary through which reality will be perceived.

From a Gadamerian perspective, however, no interpretive horizon is absolutely closed. Every horizon is historical, and because it is historical it is capable of transformation through encounter. Understanding occurs because the horizon of the interpreter is confronted by something that cannot simply be reduced to what was already known. The object of interpretation addresses us; it makes a claim upon us; it may force our prejudgments into visibility.

This is particularly important for understanding the political force of the body in Iran. The uncovered woman does not merely stand before the legal order as an object waiting to be classified. Her presence addresses the order. She asks, without necessarily speaking, whether the categories through which she is being interpreted remain adequate to the social world in which she now exists. When millions of women and men cease to experience a legally prohibited form of appearance as morally deviant, the law confronts a hermeneutic crisis: its vocabulary remains formally intact while the horizon that once made that vocabulary socially persuasive begins to disappear.

The crisis is therefore deeper than noncompliance.

A law can survive a certain quantity of violation without losing legitimacy, but it encounters a more fundamental problem when society ceases to interpret the prohibited act through the moral categories presupposed by the prohibition. At that point, the state and society no longer merely disagree about obedience; they increasingly inhabit different horizons of meaning. The state says that the uncovered body signifies moral disorder, while a growing part of society sees an ordinary woman buying coffee. The state sees transgression; the street sees life. The state sees a threat to public morality; the social world increasingly sees a person. What has changed here is not only behavior. The object itself has undergone a transformation in meaning.

This is why sexual hermeneutics cannot be reduced to the idea that the body “communicates a message.” Such a formulation remains too close to a simple theory of signs, as though the woman sends a political message through clothing and the observer merely decodes it. Hermeneutics begins where decoding becomes insufficient. Meaning is not hidden inside the body like a letter inside an envelope. It emerges through the encounter between the body and historically situated interpreters. The same visible hair can become sin, beauty, normality, resistance, sexuality, fashion, danger, or nothing particularly important, depending upon the horizon from which it is encountered. The body is therefore not a stable text with one correct interpretation. It is an event of interpretation.

Gadamer’s notion of Wirkungsgeschichte, or historically effected consciousness, becomes especially useful here. We never encounter the present independently of the histories that have formed our capacity to understand it. The Iranian female body visible in public after 1401 cannot be interpreted as though 45 years of compulsory veiling, resistance, punishment, protest, and gendered political conflict had never occurred. The history of regulation is present within the act of seeing. A strand of hair carries no inherent revolutionary essence, but within a historically effected consciousness shaped by decades of compulsory concealment, its appearance can accumulate meanings unavailable in another context. The body carries history not because history is biologically inscribed upon skin, but because the encounter with that body is already mediated by the memory of what has been done to bodies like it.

Sexual hermeneutics therefore names a struggle in which sexuality, bodily visibility, and gendered appearance become sites through which historical meaning is produced and contested. The sexual dimension is not present merely because the body is attractive or because desire is involved. It is present because political power has historically organized the body through a sexualized distinction between what may be visible and what must be concealed, which desires may be legitimate and which must be prohibited, which gender performances may enter public space and which must be disciplined. The body becomes sexually hermeneutic when these inherited classifications are no longer passively received but are exposed to reinterpretation through lived practice. A woman does not need to write against the law. Her life can create an interpretation of the law by demonstrating that the human reality governed by the law has exceeded the law’s categories.

At this point, however, we must move beyond Gadamer in one important respect. The fusion of horizons cannot be imagined too peacefully when one horizon possesses police, prisons, courts, surveillance systems, and coercive law. The encounter between the state’s interpretation of the body and the body’s interpretation of itself is not an equal philosophical conversation. Interpretation takes place within relations of force. One horizon can arrest the other. One interpretation can become a criminal sentence. One meaning can be enforced with violence. Sexual hermeneutics must therefore be a hermeneutics of conflict as much as a hermeneutics of understanding. The question is not merely how horizons meet, but who possesses the institutional power to impose an interpretation as law.

And yet coercive power cannot permanently guarantee hermeneutic power. A state may retain the ability to punish a body while losing the ability to persuade society that the body deserves punishment. This distinction is decisive. The police may still arrest, the court may still sentence, the statute may still remain formally valid, yet the social meaning of the act may have already escaped the legal interpretation imposed upon it. At that point, law retains force while losing semantic authority. It can still command, but it can no longer completely determine what its command means to those who receive it.

The Iranian female body becomes politically consequential precisely at this point of separation between coercive authority and interpretive authority. By continuing to appear, it participates in the normalization of a rival interpretation of social reality. What was once exceptional becomes visible; what becomes visible becomes familiar; what becomes familiar becomes ordinary; and what becomes ordinary increasingly places the law in the position of appearing extraordinary. This is perhaps one of the most important inversions occurring in contemporary Iran. The state once sought to make the uncovered woman appear abnormal. Increasingly, it is the extraordinary machinery required to suppress her that risks appearing abnormal.

The body therefore changes the horizon not only through spectacular protest but through repetition. A revolution of interpretation may occur through ordinary life. The woman who repeatedly enters the café, the university, the workplace, the street, or the shop in a form the legal order does not fully recognize participates in the slow production of a new normality. She may never describe herself as an activist. She may be interested in fashion rather than politics. Yet the cumulative effect of thousands of such appearances can alter the background assumptions through which society interprets the visible. This is the political force of the ordinary: it does not always overthrow the law directly; sometimes it simply continues living until the law begins to look unreal.

The body in this process becomes transpersonal. It remains the body of a particular woman, with her own desires, tastes, contradictions, and intentions, but its social effects exceed her. Her visibility alters the conditions under which another woman becomes visible. One body changes the interpretive environment of the next. The first violation appears shocking, the hundredth controversial, the thousandth familiar, and eventually the legal system discovers that it is attempting to prohibit a reality that has already become socially intelligible. The personal body thus enters objective culture. It becomes part of the production of shared forms.

Here we return to Simmel, but the direction of his gendered distinction has begun to reverse. The woman who was supposedly characterized by inward unity increasingly externalizes herself into the social world, not only through professional production, writing, art, management, and intellectual activity, but through the body itself. The body becomes an objectification of subjective freedom. It becomes one of the forms through which the inner claim to autonomy enters objective culture. The woman does not abandon “being” for “becoming”; rather, the distinction itself becomes unstable. Her being becomes socially productive. Her presence produces forms. Her body becomes part of the construction of the external world.

This transformation also affects men. A gender order never governs one gender in isolation. The same system that produces a restricted model of femininity also produces a restricted model of masculinity, even if it distributes power unequally between them. Iranian men may possess significant legal privileges over women in areas of family law and social authority, but patriarchal privilege should not be confused with complete autonomy. The state offers men a position within a hierarchy while simultaneously demanding that they inhabit recognizable forms of masculinity: the proper husband, the proper father, the proper son, the ideologically legible citizen. Patriarchal systems do not simply liberate men and oppress women. They grant some men authority over women while preserving a larger authority over both. This is why the transformation of the female body can move the male body as well. When women refuse the identities assigned to them, men are forced to confront the identities assigned to themselves. The meaning of marriage changes, the meaning of jealousy changes, the meaning of protection changes, the meaning of sexuality changes, and ultimately the meaning of masculinity itself becomes unstable. The woman who claims interpretive sovereignty over her body indirectly asks the man whether he possesses interpretive sovereignty over his own. The struggle therefore expands from the emancipation of women toward a broader conflict over the political production of gendered human beings.

The deepest problem for authoritarian power is therefore not nudity, sexuality, fashion, or even disobedience considered separately. It is the emergence of self-interpretation. A political system capable of tolerating only one authorized image of woman and one authorized image of man must fear the moment in which human beings begin to interpret themselves through languages the state did not provide. The body is especially dangerous because it precedes political theory. One can censor a book, close an organization, arrest a leader, or prohibit a slogan, but the body remains the unavoidable medium through which every person continues to appear in the world. When that medium itself becomes unstable, the struggle becomes extraordinarily difficult to contain.

This is why social coquetry and sexual hermeneutics belong together. Social coquetry describes the form through which the body withholds final submission to the meanings imposed upon it; sexual hermeneutics describes the interpretive struggle produced by that withholding. The first creates ambiguity. The second transforms ambiguity into a conflict over meaning. The socially coquettish body says: I am present, but I will not become entirely available to your definition. The sexually hermeneutic body adds: and through my refusal to become fully definable, I will force your own definitions to reveal themselves. The result is a peculiar form of civil struggle. It may have no central organization and no unified doctrine. It may be entangled with consumerism, narcissism, class inequality, aesthetic imitation, and the global market. It may contain contradictions that no political manifesto would willingly admit. Yet it remains socially consequential because it relocates the struggle for rights into the most elementary territory available to the human being: the body through which one exists at all.

This is why the legal question ultimately returns. The struggle over clothing is never merely about clothing when the law itself has made clothing a question of authority. The struggle over bodily visibility is never merely about sexuality when sexuality has been legally organized through unequal structures of permission and prohibition. The woman who claims the right to interpret her own body is therefore making, whether consciously or not, a claim about legal personhood. She is asserting that adulthood must mean something more than biological maturity accompanied by continuing structures of authorization; that citizenship must mean something more than formal membership in a state that retains the power to prescribe the visual form of one’s existence; and that civil rights must begin with the proposition that the person is not merely the object of law but a participant in the production of the meanings through which law becomes legitimate.

So we may return, finally, to the woman in the café. The leggings may still be too tight for my taste. The fake Gucci bag may remain aesthetically ridiculous. I may still believe that nothing in the outfit matches. But perhaps this is precisely where criticism must learn its limits. I can criticize the fashion without forgetting the history of the body wearing it. I can dislike the aesthetic form without demanding the disappearance of the person who chose it. And above all, I can recognize that the freedom to appear badly, excessively, sexually, commercially, inconsistently, or without my approval is still part of the freedom to appear. Perhaps, then, the apparent incoherence of the outfit is less important than the larger incoherence surrounding it: a legal order that continues to speak in one language while society increasingly lives in another. The woman’s body stands between these languages. It is interpreted by both and belongs completely to neither. It carries the memory of repression while experimenting with forms not yet fully stabilized. It consumes and resists, imitates and invents, seduces and refuses, appears and withholds. It is not the pure body of revolution, because no such body exists. It is something more sociologically interesting: a living body caught in the production of a new horizon.

And perhaps this is what authoritarian systems understand too late. A body can be disciplined, but discipline itself becomes part of the body’s history. A body can be concealed, but concealment changes the meaning of future visibility. A body can be interpreted by law, but law cannot guarantee that its interpretation will remain socially persuasive forever. Eventually the object of interpretation begins to answer. Eventually the body becomes a participant in the hermeneutic event. Eventually the person who was told what she meant begins producing meanings of her own. At that moment, the struggle is no longer simply between modesty and immodesty, religion and secularism, tradition and modernity, or even state and citizen. It becomes a struggle over the authority to interpret human existence itself. Who may say what this body means? Who may determine the limits of its appearance? Who may translate sexuality into law? Who possesses the final word over the person? The authoritarian state answers: power. Sexual hermeneutics answers: there is no final word. And social coquetry is the body’s way of keeping the conversation open.

AmirAli Maleki is JURIST’s Senior Editor for Commentary. He is also a researcher specializing in international law and the philosophy of law, and the Editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the fields of political philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and hermeneutics. He is the recipient of JURIST’s 2026 David M. Crane Rule of Law award.

Opinions expressed in JURIST Commentary are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JURIST's editors, staff, donors or the University of Pittsburgh.