AL JAZEERA ENGLISH: Many young men and women are now protesting by the only means left: using their bodies - whether by burning or exposing.
New York, NY - Reflecting the public gesture of the Egyptian blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, who posted naked pictures of herself late last year on her blog by way of a protest "against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy", a young Iranian actress now living in France, Golshifteh Farahani, has recently created a sensation in and out of her homeland, especially in the social networking cyber society, by posing half naked for Madame Le Figaro, and also appearing topless in a short black-and-white video clip. It's called "Corps et Ame [sic] [Corps et Âmes]/Bodies and Souls" and is produced by the prominent French fashion photographer and music video director Jean-Baptiste Mondino.
As with the case of Elmahdy and her compatriots, the nude picture and video clip of Farahani have sharply divided Iranians around the world; some celebrating her act as courageous, pathbreaking, dismantling ancient and sacrosanct taboos - and thus revolutionary, while others condemning her as opportunistic, obscene, immoral and damaging to the cause of liberty in Iran. The Islamic Republic has reportedly banned her from returning to her homeland.
Whence the outrage? In its widest sense, clothing is the civilising posture of humanity. No society, no community, no human gathering is devoid of one form of clothing or another as the formal decorum of becoming a full and public human being: it might be as little as a mere bamboo sheath around the groin or it might extend to fully covered veiling, without even the eyes visible to any intruding gaze. But clothing of one sort or another is definitive to all forms of civility.
Our manner of dressing ourselves is the most immediate habitat of our humanity - violently disrupted at times by tyrants who sought to give a different look to that humanity. When Reza Shah (who reigned in Iran from 1925 to 1941) banned the mode of "veiling" in Iran he had deemed unseemly to his vision of "modernity", there were women who remained home and never appeared in public until their dying day - because for them to appear in public without their habitual clothing was like forcing New Yorkers to go to work in their bikinis.
When Khomeini re-imposed that almost-forgotten manner of veiling decades later, generations of women had grown up entirely alien to that manner of veiling. Reza Shah and Khomeini - two tyrants interrupted by one weakling potentate - had fought their fateful battles over the site of our mothers' and daughters' bodies. » | Hamid Dabashi | Monday, January 23, 2012
