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This article presents Islamic women's framing processes in their campaigns to address women's political underrepresentation in Iran and Turkey. It argues that while Turkish women justify their claims through international human rights discourses, Iranian women frame their demands in religious terms to find resonance with political elites. Women's strategic framing processes demonstrate the extent to which women's demands for equal representation are shaped by the political and discursive opportunity structures that arise out of their secular or theocratic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Male leaders have often used women's bodies and dress as a means to regulate their access to formal politics, including to national parliaments. Through an analysis of women's activism surrounding the expansion of headscarved women's access to the parliament during the 2011 parliamentary elections in Turkey, I argue that pious women's public protests against discriminatory actions of male leaders towards headscarved women's candidacy challenged the hegemonic symbolism surrounding the headscarf as articulated by both secularist and conservative religious forces. The consequent discourse shift offered a new perspective on women's sexuality in the public arena and brought secular and pious women's rights groups, who rarely saw eye to eye with one another, closer as they realised that imposed dress codes are vehicles for their exclusion from formal politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]