The protests, which erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman who was pulled off the streets in Tehran by the morality police and sent to a “re-education centre” for lessons on modesty, has seen Iranian women take to the streets in swelling numbers. In a video shared by French actor Juliette Binoche, she and her female colleagues from the industry, such as Marion Cotillard, Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert and Charlotte Gainsbourg, can be seen doing what women from across Iran have been doing for the last two weeks. One by one, the women snip off locks of their hair, and a gesture of defiance against the attempt to control women’s bodies crosses over from the Persian Gulf to continental Europe and becomes one of solidarity.
The protests, which erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman who was pulled off the streets in Tehran by the morality police and sent to a “re-education centre” for lessons on modesty, has seen Iranian women take to the streets in swelling numbers. With their anger against laws that have long held them back breaking through the decades-long barrier of fear, women and girls are chanting anti-government slogans, taking off their headscarves and burning them, singing protest songs and standing firm in the face of state violence. Among the most poignant forms taken by the protests is the cutting of hair, an age-old act of mourning and anger, that is finding a new, radical resonance: In chopping off a traditional symbol of beauty and femininity that they are are forced to cover up, the women and girls of Iran are reasserting their right over their own bodies.
Women elsewhere too have been moved to cut off their hair in solidarity, including a Swedish MP who did so in the EU assembly. There is, of course, always the danger that a gesture with deep roots of anger and pain in one part of the world, becomes mere protest theatre elsewhere. As underlined by the choice of song in Binoche’s video — the Farsi version of Italian protest song ‘Bella Ciao’, performed by sisters Samin and Behin Bolouri — this is a fight whose heaviest cost will be borne by the women and girls of Iran. Their courage in taking on the might of the state must not be upstaged.