Iranian women’s perception of the veil, on the basis of symbolic interactionism

Hijab (Veil) and/or covering are a significant concern in all religions and cultures, whether considered as a natural-biological issue for protecting the body or as a cultural value, which represents mental and cognitive beliefs or local traditions. This concern grabs attention as a cognitive and symbolic subject matter as well. Thus, to obtain the perception and experience of young women about Hijab and Effaf, the present study applied a phenomenology and conducted semi-structural interviews with 13 young women form Isfahan University of Medical Science. These semi-structural interviews describes how young women percept and experience hijab and how they realize it in the symbolic mutual action framework. Out of the total analysis of 600 code descriptions, which was performed using a seven-stage colission method, 35 explanatory subclasses were extracted. After combining them, they included 12 codes of “Religious veiling”, “ideological-based experience”,”pudency-based decline policy”,”veil customary-making”, “veil fluidity”, “self-expressive identification”,”anti-authoritarianism “, “selective rethinking”, “veil objectification”, “Non-normative veils”, “forty-piece identities”, ” self-autonomous veil” as interpretative codes. Finally, by reducing these codes, the lived experience of veiled women Isfahan University of Medical Sciences was comprehended in five “political-religious normativity”, “deconstructive”, “arrogant”, “neoliberalist” and “identity-based object” explanatory codes.