This article considers how state-mandated veiling and unveiling reinforce modern capitalism. State regulations regarding veiling incorporate the female body into the political economy of the commodity form. In addition to serving as an empty signifier to be filled with exchange value for the male observer, the veil operates as an ideological apparatus of the state. In showing through fieldwork conducted in Iran how the fault lines of political agency are inscribed into the veil, I argue that subverting its commodity function radically relativises its meaning. Because the veil is an empty signifier lacking intrinsic content, its meaning must be determined contingently. By combining a critique of secular discrimination against veiling with a critique of state-mandated veiling, I show how European and Iranian societies incorporate the veil into the capitalist world-system and use it to suppress women's agency.

Background: Pathologic complete response (pCR) after neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) in patients with breast cancer is associated with improved survival. Further assessment of the extent of residual disease, using the pathological anatomic American Joint Committee on Cancer staging method (ypStage) or the Residual Cancer Burden (RCB) method, have been shown to add prognostic information for patients with residual disease. Neo-Bioscore, an alternate system to classify response to NAC, includes clinical stage at diagnosis and biology and defines eight prognostic groups. The goal of this study was to compared three scoring systems (anatomic ypStage (7th ed), RCB Class and Neo-Bioscore) and assess whether RCB Class and Neo-Bioscore provide additional prognostic value in the context above anatomic ypStage, the most commonly used method for post-neoadjuvant residual disease assessment. Methods: Data from 5161 patients treated with NAC was pooled from 12 sites. Patients without clinical and pathological staging were excluded, as were patients with HER2+ breast cancer who did not receive neoadjuvant HER2-targeted therapy, leaving 3730 for analysis. PCR was defined as no residual invasive tumor in breast and nodes, i.e. RCB-0 or ypT0/Tis and ypN0. Patients with discordant pCR status by RCB Class vs ypStage (n=9) were excluded. Associations between each scoring system and event-free survival (EFS) were evaluated using the log rank test. EFS at 5 years was estimated using the Kaplan Meier method. Associations between Neo-Bioscore and EFS were assessed in the pCR group. For patients with residual disease, we assessed RCB and Neo-Bioscore within each ypStage. Analysis was performed overall and within subtype. Subgroups with <5 patients were excluded from the survival analyses. Results: ypAJCC staging, RCB class and Neo-Bioscore were all associated with EFS in the overall population and within each subtype (log rank p<0.0001). Of note, 13 patients with a Neo-Bioscore of 7 all recurred or died within 19 months of follow-up. Overall, 34% (1264/3721) of patients achieved a pCR. Their Neo-Bioscore ranges from 0-5, where 3% (37/1264) has a Neo-Bioscore of 5 despite achieving pCR. The Neo-Bioscore was not associated with EFS in case of a pCR, with EFS estimates at 5 years of 95%, 94%, 92%, 93%, 90% and 92% for Neo-Bioscores 0-5 respectively. As HR and HER2 status are components of the score, the range of Neo-Bioscore in the pCR group differs by subtype. However, similar to the overall analysis, the Neo-Bioscore was not prognostic within subtypes in case of pCR. Overall, among the patients who did not achieve pCR, both RCB class and Neo-Bioscore were associated with EFS within ypStages I, II and III. However, the ypStage within which RCB and Neo-Bioscore are prognostic is different for each subtype. RCB class was prognostic in ypStage I in both HR+ subtypes: patients with ypStage-I/RCB-I had significantly improved survival compared to patients with ypStage-I/RCB-II (5-year EFS: 100% vs 83% in HR+HER2- and 95% vs 77% in HR+HER2+). In contrast, for patients with triple negative breast cancer, RCB class was prognostic within ypStage II and III. Analysis by clinical stage and the components of the three systems that contribute most to prognosis will be presented. Conclusions: The degree of response to NAC adds important information to pCR versus residual disease. The Neo-Bioscore was not prognostic among patients with pCR, suggesting that clinical stage (including subtype and grade) adds little information in the setting of a pCR. In contrast, both RCB and Neo-Bioscore provide additional prognostic information to the conventional ypAJCC staging among non-pCR patients, suggesting that clinical stage, tumor biology as well as extent of residual disease all contribute to prognosis in the setting of residual disease after NAC. Citation Format: Marieke EM van der Noordaa, Christina Yau, Sonal Shad, Marie Osdoit, Tessa G Steenbruggen, Diane de Croze, Anne-Sophie Hamy, Marick Lae, Fabien Reyal, Maria Del Monte-Millán, Miguel Martin, Sara Lopez Tarruella, I-SPY 2 TRIAL Consortium, Judy C Boughey, Matthew Goetz, Tanya Hoskin, Rebecca Gould, Vincent Valero, Gabe Sonke, Maartje van Seijen, Jelle Wesseling, John Bartlett, Stephan Edge, Mi-Ok Kim, Jean Abraham, Carlos Caldas, Helena Earl, Elena Provenzano, Stephen-John Sammut, David Cameron, Ashley Graham, Peter Hall, Lorna MacKintosh, Fang Fan, Andrew K Godwin, Kelsey Schwensen, Priyanka Sharma, Angela DeMichele, Janet Dunn, Louise Hiller, Larry Hayward, Jeremy Thomas, Kimberley Cole, Lajos Pusztai, Laura van 't Veer, Fraser Symmans, Laura Esserman. Assessing prognosis after neoadjuvant therapy: A comparison between anatomic ypAJCC staging, residual cancer burden class and neo-bioscore [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2020 San Antonio Breast Cancer Virtual Symposium; 2020 Dec 8-11; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2021;81(4 Suppl):Abstract nr GS4-07.

The challenge posed by legal indeterminacy to legal legitimacy has generally been considered from points of view internal to the law and its application. But what becomes of legal legitimacy when the legal status of a given norm is itself a matter of contestation? This article, the first extended scholarly treatment of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)'s new definition of antisemitism, pursues this question by examining recent applications of the IHRA definition within the UK following its adoption by the British government in 2016. Instead of focusing on this definition's substantive content, I show how the document reaches beyond its self-described status as a "non-legally binding working definition" and comes to function as what I call a quasi-law, in which capacity it exercises the de facto authority of the law, without having acquired legal legitimacy. Broadly, this work elucidates the role of speech codes in restricting freedom of expression within liberal states.

Although he was one of the most cosmopolitan writers of the nineteenth-century Persianate world, the writings of the Azeri intellectual Mīrzā Fatḥ ʿAlī Ākhūndzāda (1812-1878) do not present the author, on a first reading, as a paragon of tolerance. Born in Nukha, a provincial town that was incorporated into the Russian empire when he was 16 but which at the time of his birth belonged to Qajar Iran, Ākhūndzāda, who was to become "the most significant representative of the Iranian Enlightenment," as well as "the most intriguing and important personality to participate in the nineteenth-century Iranian revival" dedicated much of his life to attacking the dominant institutions of his time. 1 Ākhūndzāda fleshed out his critique of religion in general and Islam specifically in his most ambitious work, the Letters from Prince Kamāl al-Dawla to the Prince Jalāl al-Dawla (1865), often referred to simply as the Maktūbāt (Letters). 2 These fictional letters purport to record an exchange between a Mughal prince based in Iran and a Qajar prince based in Egypt. The overriding theme of these letters is a vociferous critique of the foundations of Islamic learning as well as of the Arab contribution to Islamic civilization. Maktūbāt consists of three letters from the fictional Kamāl al-Dawla, one of the last scions of the Mughal dynasty, to the Qajar Prince Jalāl al-Dawla, who answers his friend's polemics at the end of the text. The text concludes with an appendix, also comprised of three letters, from "a friend of the writer Kamāl al-Dawla, to one of the writer's followers" (Maktūbāt, 202-228). Although Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721) is often proposed as a model for this epistolary text, Ākhūndzāda moves in a more eclectic direction. He is not content to simply apply European Enlightenment thought to nineteenth-century Persia. Maktūbāt focuses on the critique of Islam as a religion and a social practice. At the time of their composition, the letters of Kamāl al-Dawla included some of the most pointed critiques of Islamic thoughtand of theistic belief generallyever to have been composed in Persian. While the European influences on Maktūbāt have attracted significant scholarly attention, its eclectic non-European genealogies remain relatively obscure. 3 And yet Maktūbāt engages with multiple pre-European traditions of religious critique. The first of these, which Ākhūndzāda made the least explicit, is the Islamic endeavor to document religious diversity that dates back to al-Bīrūnī's Kitāb al-Hind (Book of India) and al-Sharastānī's Kitāb al-milal wa al-niḥal (Book of sects and creeds). A second influence, which he accentuated more forthrightly, is early modern Neo-Zoroastrianism, as well as the revival of pre-Islamic Iranian learning by itinerant Parsis (Indian Zoroastrians) during the nineteenth century. The Mughal tradition of religious debate set the stage for this second body of work, which attained florescence at the court of the

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