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Let the Prostitute Walk: Wronged Bodies, Queer De-mapping and the Liminal Spaces of Possibility, Iran, Early 20th Century
Abstract by Niloofar Rasooli On Session III-15  (Queer Pasts and Futures)

On Tuesday, November 12 at 11:30 am

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
A border or spatial boundary was not an entity binding the feet of a prostitute wandering around in early 20th-century Iran. Long before the rhetoric of modernized urban lines was introduced by force to Iran, the spatial settlements of the city and the national borders of the country would collapse if one followed in the footsteps of a prostitute. Her body was the signifier of the mysterious and wronged spaces, the ruins and the leftovers, with their edges, their impossibilities, and the possibilities of transgressing or reclaiming them. It is unsettling enough to imagine a history for the figure of the prostitute in the historiography of the built environment, feminism, and politics in Iran, all of which have disregarded her as erased, forbidden, wronged, disciplined, punished, and displaced—a figure not worthy of a story or theory but of numbers depicting the density of the crime in Iran. Yet, the figure of the prostitute can challenge the ways the notions of spatial and national boundary and border are perceived or constructed, opening the way to de-map the spatial configurations that regularly marginalize the narratives of those living another life but are still in between the lines of patriarchy, orientalism, imperialism, coloniality, war, and state violence. In this paper, I collect the very few fragments remaining on sex workers, mostly in criminal records published in newspapers, official documentation, or city reports, to craft a queer map of spaces at odds with the regularities of the time over gender, sexuality, labor, and the border system. With a critical look into how the word "prostitute" is turned into a disciplining and punishing category in contemporary Iran against women political oppositionists, I relate the out-of-placeness of the figure of the prostitute in history to that of the disobedient women in contemporary Iran, deeply understanding how bodies can hegemonically be wronged, put in place, defined, ruled, murdered, and where the liminal spaces of resistance to this system of sovereignty exist or can be imagined.
Discipline
Geography
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
None