The death of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, Jina (Mahsa) Amini, on 16 Spetember 2022 while in the custody of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s notorious ‘morality police’, led to nationwide mobilisations. Women were at the forefront of these protests, leading a movement that emphasised opposition to the production of space and place as gendered by the state apparatuses of the Islamic Republic. The state systematically and institutionally unmarks the female body in public space in order to make it as invisible as possible. In marking twenty years since the publication of Space Invaders by Nirmal Puwar, the concepts of invisibility, outsiderness, being ‘out of place’ and ‘space invaders’ are revisited in this article, within the political geographies of Iran. Furthering the concept, we also pair together space invaders/invading as political acts of intervention. Shedding light on the bodies ‘out of place’ within the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, we discuss how this mobilisation created a new generation of ‘space invaders’ who no longer negotiate with those in power, but exercise their right to choose what to wear when occupying public spaces. Through protest, activism, performances and other mundane acts of everyday resistance, space invaders negate the authority of the state apparatuses, defying conventions and boundaries and created new codes for a politically and culturally constructed version of 'woman' in Iran.
ORCID: 
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)