According to Jacques Rancière, art and aesthetics are inextricably intertwined with politics. In this conception, a work of art, through disrupting the dominant sensory order and redistributing the sensible, creates the possibility of unsettling established orders and discourses that present themselves as reality. From this perspective, politics is realized not through the seizure of power but through the reconfiguration of the sensible world and the creation of new forms of experience—a process that, by disturbing the existing distribution of the sensible, enables the emergence of subjects and new horizons of emancipation.



Bahram Beyzaie’s play Nadbeh seeks to represent the condition of women within a context in which gender has become a central concern. In this respect, the text attempts to offer a political narrative with a claim to female emancipation. However, Beyzaie’s approach to femininity and gender, through the erasure of gender-specific characteristics and the deprivation of corporeality from the central female character, reduces her to a transcendental and sacred concept. In this process, the female character becomes detached from her concrete and historical position and is ultimately identified with abstract notions, including that of the homeland. Such an absence of corporeality restricts the character’s emergence as a subject and places her under the dominance of abstract and predetermined concepts.



This study argues that, within the symbolic logic of the play, the female body, deprived of gender, is transformed into an empty signifier capable of absorbing and accumulating diverse meanings and discourses, including religious, literary, mystical, and mythological ones. From the standpoint of Rancière’s aesthetic critique, this ideological accumulation does not lead to a redistribution of the sensible; rather, it reproduces the representational order and reinforces the existing reality. Consequently, instead of opening a horizon for the emergence of subjectivity and the possibility of emancipation, it reaffirms and stabilizes dominant discursive hierarchies.



Accordingly, by focusing on the relationship between myth, metaphor, and the body in the play’s central character, the present study seeks to analyze and critique the mechanisms through which the “symbolic body” is constituted and to examine its implications within the framework of Rancière’s aesthetic regime.