For several days now, a video has been circulating online. In it, a jihadist stands in front of the camera holding up a severed braid, claiming it belongs to a woman guerrilla killed in Syria. The image is brief, but its intent is unmistakable. It is not only the killing that is being displayed, but the attempt to turn a woman’s body into a trophy, a sign of domination, a severed bond.

In response, women in different parts of the world began braiding their hair in front of cameras. Quietly, without spectacle. Watching these images, I was reminded of another moment, three years earlier, when women in Iran cut their hair in public after the death of Mahsa Amini. These gestures did not belong to the same event, nor even to the same political terrain. Yet they were immediately understood as related. Both spoke a language older than slogans and sharper than speeches: the language of the female body under power.

Hair is where fundamentalist Islam most visibly asserts control over women. It is regulated, covered, displayed, desecrated, or taken as a trophy, not because of theology alone, but because it marks ownership. To govern women’s hair is to govern their presence in public, their sexuality, and their obedience. Violence against women in such systems often begins here, at the level of appearance, long before imprisonment or physical punishment.

Iranian women and Kurdish women represent two of the most sustained forms of resistance to this logic today, not because they fight it in the same way, but because they confront it at its core. In Iran, women cut their hair as rupture and mourning, refusing a state that claims moral authority over their bodies. In Rojava, women braid their hair and take up arms in defiance, not as symbolic performance, but as an integrated political practice that combines bodily autonomy with collective self-defense, asserting agency where fundamentalist violence seeks both physical annihilation and social erasure. United by the slogan Woman, Life, Freedom, Jin, Jiyan, Azadi, these movements show that resistance is not first articulated in ideology, but in the body itself.

Hair becomes politically charged only where power seeks to discipline the female body. It occupies a liminal position between private and public, intimate and visible. For this reason, it becomes an ideal site of control. Regulation, covering, unveiling, cutting, or desecration are not contradictions. They are variations of the same claim: the female body exists under supervision.

Resistance emerges precisely at this point. When women alter their hair on their own terms, whether by cutting it or braiding it, they interrupt the visual order on which authority depends. These acts are not merely expressive. They destabilize systems that rely on predictability and compliance.

In Kurdish society, the braid carries meanings far beyond appearance. It signifies continuity, kinship, and maternal lineage. To swear on a mother’s braid is to swear on life itself. This is why cutting a woman guerrilla’s braid and displaying it as a trophy carries such concentrated violence. It is not only a message of death, but an attempt at symbolic annihilation: an effort to sever lineage, humiliate womanhood, and reduce resistance to spectacle.

The response, women braiding their hair in solidarity, should not be mistaken for retreat into symbolism. It is an act of reconstruction. To braid is to reassert connection where severance is intended. Yet stopping here would distort Kurdish women’s reality. In places like Rojava, women braid their hair and take up arms as part of the same struggle. The braid does not replace armed resistance, nor does armed resistance erase cultural meaning. The two function together, grounding political action in embodied continuity.

Iranian women confront a different terrain. For decades, control over women’s hair has been a central pillar of the Islamic Republic’s authority. Mandatory veiling operates as a continuous performance of obedience enforced through surveillance and punishment. Hair becomes a daily site where loyalty is tested and dissent made visible.

Cutting hair during the protests of 2022 marked a decisive rupture. It was neither trend nor spectacle. It was grief, anger, and refusal at once. An irreversible act that rejected restoration.

Unlike Kurdish contexts, Iranian women resist inside a consolidated state apparatus. There is no territorial autonomy, no parallel governance, no space for collective self-defense. The body itself becomes the primary terrain of political action. By cutting their hair, women withdrew consent from a system that claims authority over their appearance, movement, and voice.

The global resonance of this gesture revealed its clarity. Women outside Iran cut their hair not to imitate Iranian women, but because the act was immediately legible. Control over women’s hair is a widely recognized mechanism of domination, and its rejection requires no translation.

“Woman, Life, Freedom”, Jin, Jiyan, Azadi, does not function as a conventional slogan. It names a threshold. In both Iranian and Kurdish contexts, it becomes meaningful only when enacted. Woman is not identity, but struggle. Life is defended or withdrawn through bodily acts. Freedom appears not as guarantee, but as fragile practice under threat.

Although Iranian and Kurdish women confront the same fundamentalist logic, their conditions differ profoundly. Iranian women resist permanence, a centralized system that seeks to exhaust dissent over time. Kurdish women resist annihilation, violence aimed at immediate eradication. Neither position offers safety. Neither can be idealized.

What unites these struggles is not method, but opponent. Fundamentalist power depends on the disciplined female body. Whether through law or militant violence, it relies on rendering women predictable and governable. Iranian and Kurdish women disrupt this logic under radically unequal conditions.

Their marginalization is not accidental. It reflects a broader shift in global politics, one in which stability is increasingly valued over justice, and authoritarian continuity is treated as preferable to emancipatory uncertainty. Iranian women are isolated through a combination of internal repression and external containment: the state criminalizes dissent, while international actors reduce their struggle to a human rights issue disconnected from real political pressure. Sanctions punish the population more than the regime, and diplomatic caution ensures that women’s resistance never becomes a priority.

Kurdish women face a different form of abandonment. They are embraced when militarily useful, celebrated as symbols of courage during moments of strategic alignment, and quietly sidelined once geopolitical interests change. Their bodies become images of empowerment, while their political demands remain unsupported. What is offered instead of lasting commitment is temporary recognition.

Different mechanisms produce the same outcome. Women bear the cost of moral clarity in a system organized around power. Their resistance is made visible, but not protected. It is admired, but not sustained. Visibility replaces solidarity. Symbolic praise substitutes for material support. In both cases, women-led movements are allowed to exist only as long as they do not disrupt the larger architecture of state interests.

What emerges from both contexts is not simply resilience, but exposure. Iranian and Kurdish women have made visible the most vulnerable point of fundamentalist power: its dependence on women’s compliance. Yet this exposure has not been met with protection. Instead, it has been absorbed into a global order that treats women’s resistance as morally moving but politically expendable.

Their struggles are circulated as images, condensed into hashtags, and acknowledged through statements of concern. Meanwhile, the structures that endanger them remain intact. The message is implicit but consistent: courage may be admired, but it will not be defended.

This is the space in which these movements now exist, suspended between visibility and abandonment, between symbolic recognition and material neglect.

A braid can be cut, but lineage does not disappear with it. Hair can be destroyed, but refusal cannot be confiscated. When women reclaim their bodies on their own terms, through armed defense or quiet public defiance, they expose how fragile domination really is.

These movements do not offer resolution. They offer clarity. Fundamentalist systems are sustained not only by weapons and laws, but by the everyday regulation of women’s lives. When women withdraw their bodies from this economy of control, something essential breaks. Not loudly or immediately but irreversibly.