In January 31, 1979, twelve days before the grand return of Khomeini to Tehran, anonymous mass revolutionaries raged to the streets and burned down the red light district of Tehran—first constructed in 1920s during Pahlavi period. The message was clear: In Khomeini’s Islamic Iran, there will be no place for prostitution. In the following six months, as the Islamic Republic regime was consolidating, the red light district was evacuated, its inhabitants were hanged publicly or scattered on the surface of Tehran. Today the government denies the very existence of sex work. Refusing to recognize sex workers, the state renders them representationally invisible.
Since before the revolution, prostitution—as a moral-political category—has been pivotal to the relation between reconfigurations of the state and formation of public space. A careful study of modern history of Iran attests to the fact that both, the body of “prostitute” and the space of “prostitution” have been productive sites of femininity as well as citizenship. In this paper I put the erasure of the red light district—being at once discursive and concrete—at the center of inquiry to engage with contesting configurations of public space, in relation to spatial governance and politics of visibility. I will argue that the rise of women’s emancipation movement—both state sponsored and otherwise—tied to the emergence of identity politics during the Pahlavi period has a congenital intimacy with the formation of the red light district—as tight space (Deuluze, 1988)—and the emergence of the category of "street woman" as urban prostitute.
While before the revolution, the Pahlavi government regulated and monitored sex workers in the state sponsored red light district, after the revolution, the state eliminated their bodies as well as any marked place for sex work. In other words, while before the revolution the state regimented, regulated, and constructed bodies of sex workers in the panopticon of the red light district, after the revolution the category of the urban prostitute was both physically and discursively erased. I will specifically look at the ways in which gendered bodies are situated and understood in relation to these two radically different spatially informed modes of power: the productive and the eliminating.
