Relatively understudied but prevalently deployed in the cultural discourse of contemporary Iran, the term "degenerate" (mubtazal) has historically been used to devalue and dismiss a range of arts, most of which belong to the realm of popular culture. While in the leftist discourse the term contrasted with the valorized politically conscious "committed" (muti‘ahhid), in other contexts degenerate connoted a lack of artistic quality and tastelessness. When applied specifically to performing bodies (performance in its broad sense), the term has incarnated certain types of corporeal qualities, gender performativity, and affect. The term was especially prevalent in the art discourse of the Tudeh Party, Iran’s major Marxist organization, which during its heyday in the 1940s was heavily invested in culture and arts as the media of politics. Engaging major literary and artistic figures of the era, the cultural ventures of the party involved producing a number of publications on the topic and a range of performative forms, including theater, music, and choreographed political demonstrations, which have greatly shaped Iranian cultural thought and performative politics to this day. Focusing on the gendered and corporeal aspects of the term degenerate and its binary oppositions committed and/or artistic, this paper aims to historicize and unpack these terms in the Tudeh Party’s discourse on arts and public performative politics, such as performing and visual arts, political demonstrations and meetings, celebrations, speeches, political behavior, and anthems. My primary sources for this study include memoirs of members of the Tudeh Party and its documents and periodicals as well as those belonging to the embassy and consulate of the Soviet Union and organizations with strong ties to it, such as VOKS. An in-depth analysis of these notions and the moral and aesthetic qualities they entail is critically important to understanding contemporary Iranian arts, cultural criticism, and public political performance.

After the Soviet occupation of Poland in September 1939, hundreds of thousands of Polish refugees spent more than a year in exile in Siberia before being relocated to Iran in 1941 by Allied forces. While many of the men joined Anders’ Army (the Polish volunteer army that fought under British command) to support the Allies, women remained in Iran and encouraged the development of Iran's nascent urban middle class culture. Those women engaged in diverse and broad range of business opportunities. They established dolls factory, beauty parlor, became personal fashion consultants, and more. Their visibility in wartime Iran was crucial, and to a large extent their role in the development of war economy in Iran was pivotal. By examining the ways these Polish refugees negotiated their status, this paper analyzes Polish interactions with and integration into Iranian society. This paper argues that these migrants and refugees integrated into Iranian society and established cultural institutions, which in turn helped encourage Iran’s nascent urban middle class. Together with hundreds of thousands of Allied Armies personnel they transformed the urban society into a more ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse community and made a significant impact on the self-perception of Iran as a cosmopolitan society. This positioned minorities in the center of the nation-building process, away form the marginal position they had possessed before the war years.

This paper examines a distinctly gendered space which, I will argue was a central location for negotiations between tradition and modernity in late 19th century Iran - namely, the Golestan harem, during Nasser al-Din Shah’s reign (1848 to 1896). The concept of a harem denotes a certain specific arrangement of domestic space that has been common to a wide variety of Islamicate societies across many centuries and with great variations. As such, it is not limited to any single architectural or class-defined elaboration of that concept. I aim to engage with the Golestan harem as the site of a unique familial formation that at once reflects certain Islamic traditions, and yet takes shape and even expands at the height of Persian engagement with the processes of urban modernization. Under Nasser al-Din’s reign the Golestan harem, located in what was at the time, the very core of Tehran, grew both physically and in terms of the number of its residents as compared to the harem of his predecessor Mohamad Shah Qajar who reigned from 1834-1848. This expansion presents an interesting contradiction since this is a period that is generally understood as the emergence of modernity in Iran and since in both European accounts, and Persian nationalist accounts, the harem as an institution is thought to be an outdated and traditional form of kinship that represents Islamic backwardness. As such, its simultaneous expansion in the face of greater contact with Europe and Western modernity then presents us with an interesting paradox that I hope to explore. This paper will focus on the spatial dimensions of Nasser al-Din Shah’s harem, and the ways in which different bodies, ideologies and commodities were distributed within it. I hope to offer new insight about the physical and material organization of this social institution and the ways in which it was controlled, lived in, and subverted.

Shahrinaw is amongst well-known neighborhoods of Tehran during the Pahlavi period (1925-1979) with proliferating rumors, stories, and legends around it. Formed in 1921, and shut down after the revolution in the spring of 1979, Sharinaw’s history neatly maps the Pahlavi period, contributing to articulation of a certain regressive political temporality of the 20th century Iran; One, which assumes a radical break between the progressive Pahlavi period and the subsequent regressive Islamic regime. To this end, the space of Shahrinaw, coupled with Farmānfarānian’s famous social work program in the district, launched in 1970s, is by and large addressed within the limits of reformist literature. Shahrinaw then is remembered as the home to vulnerable bodies and a place in need of rescue. Using government documents such as correspondences regarding early attempts to displace sex-workers to Shahrinaw in 1921; petitions against residency of sex-workers in Tehran dating back as early as 1914; hospital documents related to regulations of sex-workers with venereal diseases in 1930s; and government documents on concerns with the space of Shahrinaw dating back as early as 1924, this presentation attempts to revisit Shahrinaw’s history, uncoupling it from the reformist legacy attributed to the Pahlavi period. In doing so, it will attempt to go beyond dual frameworks of progressive/regressive historiographical temporality of modern Iran, attending instead to the not-so-coherent formation of the heteroglot affective moral landscape of Tehran, and constant redistribution of spaces of intimacy and danger, in the period of relatively fast urbanization. This presentation will specifically explore the mechanisms and spatial measures the state took to organize Shahrinaw as a public space, yet private—as it was gated in 1930s—to regulate what was deemed as the necessary evil: sex-work, in a city with growing population and increasing temporary residency in the aftermath of WWI. It will further engage with the role the space of Shahrinaw played in negotiating competing conceptions of moral subject citizens, and moral action.