Heterosexualizing Tehran

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9, Tehran’s urban fabric has been reshaped to both reflect and produce the ideals of modern Islamic citizenship that various political actors including the central government, the municipality, and other regulatory authorities would like to see performed by Iranian citizens on urban space.

In this paper I examine how various political actors have articulated diverse and often contradictory visions of modern Islamic citizenship and Islamic public space through the production, transformation and regulation of Tehran’s urban space. Specifically, I focus on how Islamic ideologies and discourses around gender relations and women’s access to the public sphere have been articulated and contested across this urban fabric in the decades since the Islamic Revolution. I consider the Islamic Revolution’s conceptualization of Islamic morality and specifically the gendered notions of heterosexualized Islamic citizenship and public morality that were articulated spatially following the Revolution by examining urban spaces produced during or since the Tehran municipal urban interventions of the 1990’s.

Tehran since 1979 has been marked by a wholesale reconstitution and realignment of the public space along a gender binary model, such that most public institutions are segregated and the morality police regulate spaces that lack a physical architecture of gender dichotomization. Because this process produces Iranian citizens as heterosexuals and takes the pre-emption of heterosexual relations as a central goal of the organization of public space, it encourages homosocial behaviors and renders less noticeable homosexual behaviors. In the paper, I apply a spatial lens and examine how the urban realignment has affected differently gendered, classed, and sexualized Iranian bodies.