‘I’m the Common Pain; Dance with Me’: Fractality, Affect, and Embodiment in Circulation of Resistance

This article focuses on the function of dance in women’s struggles in post-revolutionary Iran, conceptualizing it as a fractal, affective form of resistance. In a context where the state regulates and polices spaces and bodies, women’s public dancing reclaims presence and agency through bodily gestures that disrupt the dominant ideological and patriarchal moral orders. Building on social scientific theories of affect and fractality, I conceptualize the dancing body as a political site that resists power recursively and rhythmically, refuses erasure, and enacts alternative modes of collective being. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement is an example par excellence of how dance, as resistance through bodily gestures imbued with emotion, was recursively adapted and rearticulated across various spaces and times: on streets and screens, inside and outside Iran. Through case studies including the digital circulation of Khodanur Lojei’s reenacted gestures and Gen Z women’s audacious acts of public dance, exemplified through the Ekbatan girls in their viral group performance, I show how resistance is carried in and through the body, not only during moments of mass mobilization, but across dispersed, everyday acts. I discuss how dance operates as an insurgent archive: it materializes grief, transmits intergenerational histories, and reanimates suppressed desires for freedom and the possibility of a different future.