LOS ANGELES — Standing before her bathroom mirror, Elnaz Rahimpour fluffed her curly hair before braiding the tendrils into four pieces.
She reached for the scissors and cut each dark lock with tears in her eyes, as an old Iranian resistance anthem streamed over the video she posted to Instagram — her own gesture of protest in solidarity with the movement that has coursed through Iran in the weeks since a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died at a Tehran hospital after reportedly being brutalized by the country’s morality police.
Amid protests across Iran, many women in the country have adopted the political symbolism of cutting their hair — at once a statement against oppression and the rules of compulsory hijab for women, and an act of defiance in honor of Amini, who was arrested for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s modesty laws.
“So many others of my friends are still there dealing with this,” said Rahimpour, 29, a student at Marshall University in West Virginia. “I wanted to show how horrible it is to kill someone because of something as simple as hair…. Only because of her hair, Mahsa died. To me, it just felt like the right thing to do.”
The protests that erupted across Iran on Sept. 16 have been led by women encompassing broad cross-sections of Iranian society — and quickly tapped into wider discontent over women’s rights and government corruption. The Norway-based nonprofit Iran Human Rights estimates that at least 154 people have been killed during the protests. Hundreds more have been arrested in violent crackdowns.
Videos of protests in Iran show women — most of them young — waving their hijabs in the air, some of them throwing their head scarves into bonfires; others defiantly leave their hair uncovered as they pour into crowds that chant “zan, zendegi, azadi” — “woman, life, freedom,” a rallying cry of the movement — or call for “Death to the dictator!”
Young schoolgirls and high school students have also grown into a force in the movement. Videos posted on Twitter showed students heckling a paramilitary officer while taking off their head scarves, and several images shared across social media appear to show girls at school protesting in front of classroom chalkboards with their hair flowing down their backs.
Yet it is the symbolism of hair-cutting that has persisted not only in Iran, but also around the world.
Videos circulating on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram show a woman cutting her hair over her brother’s coffin during his funeral, slamming her locks on top of the flowers that cover his casket. Video captions assert that her brother was killed while protesting.
A photo circulating on Twitter and Instagram appeared to show a young woman, her head shaved, standing beside her mother’s grave while holding the hair she’d cut in her hand.
In Los Angeles, an Iranian American protester sat on the steps to City Hall and snipped her hair, crying out, “For Iran!” In Istanbul, media coverage showed an Iranian woman cutting off her ponytail during a demonstration outside the Iranian Consulate.
To some, the practice evokes rituals described in ancient Persian poetry and literature in which women cut their hair in mourning or protest. In “Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings,” the poet Ferdowsi refers to the hero Siavash’s wife cutting “her musky tresses” and binding them to her waist to protest his death. For others, it is a demonstration of power that shows that women cannot be controlled by the hair on their head.
Scholars following the current protests in Iran say that the movement is distinct because it has unified Iranians across socioeconomic lines, geographic regions, ethnicity and gender under the banner of women’s rights and the need for systemic governmental change.
“It’s about compulsory hijab, it’s about the subjugation of women’s bodies by the state, by the Islamic Republic. There are slogans against the oppression of the Islamic Republic, so this brings together all the previous protests against autocracy and despotism in Iran,” said Mohammad Ali Kadivar, an assistant professor of sociology and international studies at Boston College.
“This protest started with the death of a Sunni, Kurdish woman, which brings together again the intersection of women’s issues, and also ethnic minorities,” he added, referring to the Shiite Muslim-majority population of Iran.
