Authority in Attire: The Politics of Moral Order in Iran

with Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

This presentation considers the continuing controversies around state-sanctioned unveiling and reveiling in Iran. I will focus on how clothing became a way to exert authority and define identity. Fashion became a revealing political statement because of its public visibility and because the Iranian state had relied on attire to promote a culture of urbanity and sociability. I analyse the prominence of clothing as public expressions of state authority, religious power, social order, and moral purity. This essay departs from previous studies of the unveiling/veiling movement by expanding the analytical framework beyond ideology and assessing such directives as contests over social control and everyday life. In this way, both veiling and unveiling, at different moments, came to function as registers of ethically superior citizenship, each casting the other as its antithesis and transforming bodies into oppositional sites of moral order (Image courtesy: The Guardian).

About the speaker:

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation (Princeton, 1999); Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (Oxford, 2011); Heroes to Hostages: America and Iran, 1800-1988 (Cambridge, 2023); and a novel, Martyrdom Street (Syracuse, 2010). Her research concerns nation formation and identity politics, including race, ethnicity, and gender.