During the Qajar period (1800-1900) prostitutes were mostly neither stoned nor hanged. If, identified, they were thrown out of the city (nafi-balad). During Pahlavi reign (1920s) however, in line with modernization agendas, modern arrangement of spaces, and government-sponsored institutionalization, a red zone area called Shahr-e-naw (“The new city”), where prostitutes were segregated, was established. Burning down this district after the revolution resulted in the spread of prostitutes all around the city. As a result, in Tehran, today, a city run by a religious government, prostitutes are now in every street, on every corner, at every crossroad. They have become more visible than ever. As Butler (1990) has pointed out, to be politically present in Western liberal framework is tightly linked to the question of visibility. Adopting a Foucauldian understanding of modernity, the present paper will explore the ways in which spatiality and visibility played themselves out in the realm of identity politics, constructing, arresting, and policing the image of the stigmatized/ victimized prostitute. It will further argue that the significant shift, which happened during Pahlavi’s time, in terms of the arrangement of space, contributed to the emergence of representative identity politics. Along with institutionalization of prostitution during Pahlavi’s reign, the image of the prostitute as “a body in need of rescue” was constituted and fixed. Parallel to the production of this victimized image, prostitution was spatially stigmatized. In other words, not only the body of the prostitute became stigmatized and unfortunate, but also, the space of prostitution became the stigmatized section of the city. As Phelan (1993) points out, the conceptualization of power, in progressive activism is enmeshed with the idea of visibility. Prostitutes today, in Iran, are visually hyper-visible but representationally rendered invisible; they inhabit a state of (in)visibility. Juxtaposing the policed and segregated visibility of prostitutes during Pahlavi’s period, with the visual hyper-visibility of prostitutes in Iran today, the present paper, uncouples visibility and power. In doing so, it will attempt to figure whether visual visibility can be understood in terms other than representational visibility.