Abstract
Both popular and academic discussions of female homosociality in Iran generally fall into two opposing camps: liberal feminist cries to end what is often called “segregation,” or Islamic feminist stances highlighting how women actively use Islam as a tool to achieve their political goals in Iran. Frequently these conversations focus on the most visible forms of legally-mandated homosociality, such as public buses or security lines, but what do spaces which offer a different sense of privacy in public offer women in Iran? This paper will explore the affective circulations of pleasure and its social and political possibilities through a comparative analysis of communal dressing rooms and public baths - both female homosocial spaces with communal nudity. Drawing on research done in Iran 2010 – 2013, this paper will explore what a transnational feminist lens offers in an analysis of these homosocial spaces. While liberal and Islamic feminists focus heavily on policy, religion and their interrelations in Iran, a transnational feminist perspective examining female homosocial space will flesh out how everyday women experience the banality of homosociality, and what the political potential of this could be. This paper questions how we may read pleasure and its political possibilities in the everyday, and what the usefulness of the banality of female homosocial nudity is in these spaces.
The transnational feminist work of both Minoo Moallem and Chandra Mohanty will provide the framework for my analysis of female homosociality. Henri Lefebvre’s method of "rhythmanalysis" (tracing patterns and movements through/in a space that are constantly producing the space as well as those within it) will be employed to analyze these female homosocial spaces and understand what engagement with them may offer. Affect work by Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi will guide my tracing of affect in these spaces and the centering of the physical body as a site to read the impacts of these spaces. Using Afsaneh Najmabadi’s formulations of historical female homosocial spaces, and Lynn Nelson’s theorization of “epistemological communities,” I will argue for the current importance of female homosocial spaces with communal nudity as sites where one may experience and enjoy the everyday/banal aspects of pleasure.
Examining public baths and communal dressing rooms in bra shops, this paper interrogates the possibilities of everyday interactions in homosocial space within a transnational feminist framework. Engaging the different spatial layouts of baths and dressing rooms, I consider what these spaces offer women who engage them.
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