Museum of Innocence is Orhan Pamuk's first novel after receiving the 2006 Nobel prize. It seemingly describes a romance between a rich handsome guy and a painfully beautiful poor girl in Turkish society of the 1970s and 1980s. In questioning popular response to the novel, this paper engages in an alternative reading with relation to male narcissism.

Art is a powerful medium for expression and is one of many ways in which ideas travel in today's globalizing world. Ideas can be challenged or supported through representation and art. Equally critical is the understanding of how art markets and auctions, as well as exhibitions by private galleries or public museums, constitute a particular politics and economics of representation. This paper examines representations of femininity and sexuality as portrayed in contemporary art from the Middle East. Many Middle Eastern artists inevitably confront loaded imagery of the veil in portraying women, femininity, and sexuality, and thus dissecting the veil is an integral and inevitable component of any discussion on femininity and sexuality. The exhibitions discussed are Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art and Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East. Both exhibitions refer to and deal with the veil: the former attempts to de-Orientalize the veil and subvert accepted understandings of Middle Eastern feminine sexuality in a show at a charitable library and arts foundation, while the latter plays on the use of the word veil to sensationalize and sell the art to a presumably consuming audience within the context of a private commercial gallery. These exhibitions feature the works of many artists, including Zineb Sedira, Jananne Al Ani, and Shadi Ghadirian, whose works form the core of detailed visual analysis. Drawing on the scholarship of Joseph Massad, Reina Lewis, and Sarah Graham Brown, this paper discusses the differing ways these contemporary artists and exhibitions are portraying sexuality and femininity. To what extent are these artists bound to assumptions of how femininity and sexuality should be represented, and how do they defy or meet these expectationsn How do the pressure and economics of the international art market influence the works and popularity of these artists and exhibitionsn Additionally, multiple interpretations of the works and exhibitions are presented, with the understanding that viewers from different positionalities will bring varying analytical frameworks to their experiences of the works. These works of art have the power to perpetuate or destroy accepted conceptions as well as offer fertile ground for new ideas to circulate. The image remains a powerful influence on the public imagination and ideas about the Middle East.

Bra shops are a unique institution providing (private) female homosocial space within the public sphere in Iran. Traditionally, bra shops are a communal space where locally-manufactured bras are almost exclusively sold. Their unique position providing a homosocial space allows females the privilege of learning visually, much like public baths did in the past. Nudity in these homosocial spaces allows young women and girls to expand their visual inventory of body types which disallows, or at the very least complicates, notions of a single body shape as desirable for all females. However, the benefits of this homosocial space for women are being threatened by new, Western-style bra shops opening across Tehran. Operating within a neoliberal framework that directs women toward individual (rather than communal) dressing rooms, and that sells imported bras at significantly higher cost, these new bra shops promote an individualized, "modern" Western consumer model to young women. As a result of globalization, Western cultural norms, rooted in U.S. Christian Puritanism that mark the naked body both shameful and sexual and also promote narrow visions of an "ideal" female body, are exported to Iranians via satellite television and other mediums. The growing void of female homosocial spaces and the resulting inability to bond with and through communal nudity hinders young women's abilities to problematize these limiting ideas about female bodies and sexuality. This process of cultural imperialism makes the destruction of female homosocial spaces in Iran palatable for Iranians who have internalized Western notions of body-shame. This paper will utilize a feminist framework to examine the neoliberal economic policies practiced by Iran which encourage the growth of these new bra shops while simultaneously promoting the destruction of female homosociality in the public sphere. Using Afsaneh Najmabadi's formulations of female homosocial spaces historically, I demonstrate the current importance of traditional-style bra shops as communal spaces for women, and Lynn Hankinson Nelson's "Epistemological Communities" will provide a basis for my theorization of traditional bra shops as such. Despite contemporary rhetoric of resisting Western imperialism, the Iranian state actively pursues neoliberal economic policies in order to access and participate in Western markets. This paper will explore the irony of the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Iranian state when juxtaposed with its economic policies, and how cultural imperialism via globalization allows Iranian citizens to become compliant in the destruction of female homosocial spaces.