Urban Space and the Cultural Construction of Modern Subjectivities: Tehran’s Women in Novels

Abstract

Exploring Tehran’s urban modernity through the Iranian novel, this paper argues that the identities of modern urban space and modern female subjectivities are constructed in an intertwined relation. Focusing on two novels that depict life in Tehran in the early twentieth century, I investigate the idea of the street as a new urban space, and wandering on the street as a new urban practice, particularly as understood by the novels’ female characters. The portrayal of the “modern woman” through her practices of using urban space, her visibility on the street - or the lack of it - and her relationship to the consumption of commodities presents two contrasting modes of Iranian modernity, one intellectual, the other concerned with the liberation of the body. I suggest that these novels both identify and help to create versions of “desirable” and “undesirable” modernity that remain relevant in the Iran of today.