‘Westoxication’ and resistance: the politics of dance in Iran #dancingisnotacrime

This study proposes an alternative analytical framework for the interpretation of the arrest of an Iranian teenage female social media star by regime authorities in May 2018. I argue that the regime’s reaction to the youngster’s dancing was a product of a complicated historical dialectic with the West, rather than an objection to dance as a performative category. While the Iranian regime may have inherited the predominantly negative perceptions of the solo female dancing body from the Pahlavi era, dancing is not a crime in post-revolutionary Iran. However, dance is ‘meaning in motion’, and it can be inscribed and re-inscribed with political, cultural and social markers – depending on the motives of the spectator. This paper argues that it was the meaning ascribed to the teen’s dancing by hardline authorities that led to her arrest, and not the act of dancing itself. By historicising and framing the arrest within the discourse of ‘Westoxication’, this study interprets the arrest as a form of state-centric cultural resistance. The site of cultural contestation, the youngster’s dancing body, became the discursive and ideological terrain on which the regime repudiated Western cultural norms in defence of its own post-revolutionary standards of decency and cultural authenticity.