Abstract
This paper compares the productive possibilities available to females when they engage with different kinds of bra shops in Tehran. I compare what I call "traditional bra shops," that is, those with communal dressing rooms where a bra is selected for patrons by a shop employee, with "westernized" bra shops," those with individual dressing rooms where females select their own bras to try on and purchase. Through the site of the traditional bra shop, this paper explores the role of neoliberalism in shaping female homosocial spaces in urban Tehran. Looking comparatively at westernized and traditional bra shops, I focus on their spatial layouts as well as their relationships to local and international bra manufacturers, and I consider the different kinds of knowledges which become available to females who engage with/produce these spaces. Engaging the different spatial layouts of shops, and their (communal or individual) dressing rooms in particular, I consider what bra shops can communicate to females about their physical bodies, (shifting) cultural values around nudity, as well as their sense of personal and communal space.
This paper will utilize a feminist framework to examine the neoliberal economic policies practiced by Iran which encourage the growth of new westernized bra shops while simultaneously promoting the eradication of traditional bra shops in Tehran. Using Afsaneh Najmabadi’s formulations of female homosocial spaces historically, and Lynn Hankinson Nelson’s theorization of “epistemological communities,” I argue for the current importance of traditional bra shops as communal spaces for females to learn about bodies. Finally, Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, as well as more recent work on non-representational theory from geographers such as Stuart Elden and Nigel Thrift, guide my entire analysis of how space is (always being) produced, and how female interactions within the spatial formation of the bra shop are always producing its space. Specifically, I compare how different these different bra shops encourage different kinds of spatial practice within their sites, and what this ultimately communicates to females about how they may/should move their bodies through space.
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