Iranian Women's Social Movement Through Social Media: Focusing on a Facebook Page "My Stealthy Freedom"

In this article I delve into the cultural meanings of the hijab and female social movement in urban Iranian society, focusing on a Facebook page named “My Stealthy Freedom”. In private sphere, Iranian women have cautiously started to demand the right to choose their hijab. Recently, “My Stealthy Freedom” became a hot issue among Iranian Facebook users. As a private movement, which was started by Masih Alinejad, a female journalist living in England, it is emulating a great sensation amongst the people in Iran. The hijab is not a mere Islamic garment, but a political symbol in itself, more political than it has ever been. The hijab is being used by the Islamic government to control the individual, but at the same time, it is also being used by Iranian women as a political metaphor of resistance against the regime and against the image and identity that has been imposed upon them (Zahedi 2007).
I discuss the hijab as a symbol of social conflict rather than a repression of the government. Based on eighteen Months of fieldwork in Teheran, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, I examine the Iranian women’s subjective choices and narratives regarding the hijab. Furthermore, I conduct an anthropological research on the web page “My stealthy Freedom”.
My research has three goals: (1) to capture the social meanings of “My Sealthy Freedom” in urban Iran and global circumstances, (2) to grasp the political meaning of the hijab regulations and (3) to demonstrate the potentiality of this SNS web page as a locus for social. I argue that the issue of hijab in Iranian society is no longer concerned exclusively with gender oppression, but reflects a more complex cultural and political edifice in modern Iran. By analyzing women’s narratives, I suggest that the Islamic government uses women’s hijab to control the individual, while at the same time, Iranian women use the hijab as a political metaphor of resistance against the ruling government. I further argue that what Iranian women sincerely want is more than just being free from the hijab regulation. What they really want is a broader, more inclusive and autonomous freedom in their daily lives. As the hijab attracts the political gaze and also becomes political medium, Iranian women become significant political actors.