What makes the twentieth century performer of the minstrel mutribi scene—the heir to several centuries of Iranian performance history—“dissolute” and “unworthy” instead of an archetype of the national culture? Why do most historical accounts of Iranian theatre exclude the post-1950 Lalehzar theatrical scene when it became a venue for mutribs and their female dancing? What makes the majority of private sector films produced between 1950 and 1979 the objects of dismissal by being termed filmfarsi? And what made the cabaret/café scene of Pahlavi era a “spectacle of vice” and its female performer an emblem of social corruption? This paper looks for the reasons underlying the ideological, economic, and practical treatment of these key constituents of popular culture in twentieth century Iran, making them occupy a “negative space” in historical narratives and typecasting them as “others” against whom national and artistic subjects defined themselves: they were at times labeled “traditional” or “un-modern” in order to contrast and signify the “modern”, marginalized to highlight the mainstream, marked as “illiterate” and “low” to emphasize the “elite” and “high”, and were a measurement of “vice” in contrast to “virtue”. By making use of periodicals, literature pertaining to theatre, music, and cinema, and governmental documents and by tracing the (female) dancing body through various performance spaces, this paper explores the socio-political discourses surrounding the performing arts and popular culture and seeks to examine the emergence, re-configuration, and ideological and economic applications of 20th century cultural categories in defining and conditioning the aesthetics, semiotics, affects, and ethics of the onstage performer. This includes the impetuses behind the selection (and elimination) of cultural motifs from ancient symbolism, literature, folklore, mysticism, and religious rituals, as well as the use of European art forms in the construction of new virtuous and “national(ist)” performing bodies. The shifting dynamics of the body in public space, as they relate to urban transformations, the states’ top-bottom implementations in establishing various institutions, the competing conceptions of discipline and regulatory systems as pertaining to public space, and the bio-economy of the dancing body in relation to the income of the performance space, are other factors that I consider in this paper.

Scholarship focusing on Iranian early cinema has been largely preoccupied with films produced in the early 1930's and their qualification as forerunners in the coalescing of Iran's national film industry. Analysis of cinema in Iran preceding this period has been limited to the introduction of cinema by the royal court and its screening for only this audience. This analysis has been mostly concerned with the evaluation of these films in terms of Western cultural hegemony. This paper departs from the extent literature insofar as it links early Iranian cinema to processes of societal transformation constituting the ethos of Iranian modernity. More specifically, I argue that cinematic space—both in its concrete and imaginary forms—was a site where emergent social practices were not just represented on screen but actively produced in space. Drawing from documents pertaining to cinema across a variety of genres (newspaper articles, film reviews and journals, travelogues, poems, and memoirs) dating from 1900 to 1935, I demonstrate how cinema was associated with notions of “national progress” and “modernity,” and employed in the construction of a normative moral national subject. Cinemas and film screenings in urban Tehran, during this period, were conceived as moralizing vehicles addressing a national audience in the process of arriving into modernity. Their (re)arrangement in the urban space furthermore, at once reflected and reinforced social boundaries and the moral geography they constituted. Finally, this paper examines the concurrent revalorization of Tehran's cinematic spaces in the late 1920's and early 1930's as sites of immorality. This competing discourse attributed moral pollution and decay to not only cinematic content but the their sites as well.

While there have been a few isolated studies that touch upon urbanization, development of modern fiction, and contested configurations of public morality, there have been no serious scholarly work which puts the above mentioned concepts into conversation to one another. However, a careful historiographical study, allows one to witness a congenital intimacy between the unfolding of novel as a literary genre, rapid growth of urban sites, and constant reconfigurations of public morality in early 20th century Iran. Putting prostitution-as a mediating site- at the center of historical and literary inquiry this paper engages with contesting arrangements of concrete and metaphoric spaces of pleasure and pain and the slippery boundaries of moral space. During the Pahlavi period (1925-1979) Tehran became the site of rigorous urbanization, reformist will, and intense moral concern. Radical urban transformations during this time facilitated a public space that exhibited that which previously belonged to the private space, i.e. woman. Concurrently the category of woman became the emblematic and productive site of moralizing, reformist, and progressive will, as well as the failure of this will. This double sidedness of the category of woman gave birth to the emergence of the image of the prostitute as the “plague” of modernity. The gap between the two sides was maintained and reified through concrete compartmentalization of urban space of Tehran. In 1950s walls were erected around the red light district, first constructed in 1920s, making it a place of containment, to prevent prostitutes from leaking back into the city site. By this time, the red light district was referred to as the “District of Sorrow” (Mahhali`i Gham), perceived as the paradoxical space of pleasure and pain, and joy and sorrow. The modern(ist) urban space and novel as a literary form come to being at about the same time. Novels as modern fiction particularly portray the complexity of urban city life in exuberant prose. Delving into such novels, this paper argues that the double-side space of pleasure and pain eventually leaked back into the city, constantly (de)territorializing the moral public space. It takes as its point of departure, the concrete formation and failure of the “District of Sorrow” together with the cartography of prostitution in novels of the time as a window to the ways in which, the space of pleasure and pain is compartmentalized and mapped in relation to the constantly shifting space of morality.

This paper focuses on literary representations of tuberculosis without dismissing the socio-political implications of this particular disease. To this end, this paper begins with investigating the prevalent discourse connecting tuberculosis and “immoral habits” in late 19th century and how this attitude shifted and embraced a scientifically informed viewpoint with the advent of modern medicine. Sakhtsar Sanatorium, the first sanatorium opened in 1935 in Iran, is significant in my paper in that as a curative space it not only institutionalized tuberculosis but also thwarted tubercular “industry” which had promoted traveling to seek out a cure. An epidemic afflicted anybody regardless of their social class, tuberculosis called for certain measures. For instance, a healthy environment with fresh air and sun was believed to be curative. Hence, traveling to well-ventilated mountainous regions away from the hustle and bustle of a city was prescribed for those suffering from tuberculosis. What is interesting is prescriptions were gender-neutral in the sense that women as well as men were prescribed a potentially curative journey. I argue that these journeys allowed women to be outside their usual surroundings for a breath of “fresh air”, both in a literal and metaphorical sense. In my paper, I particularly pay attention to how women stretch/transgress “prescribed” gender roles through “prescribed” journeys. Do these journeys really empower women or disempower them by confining them to another sort of enclosed space such as a sanatorium? Considering the fact that the novels written in early 20th century Iran are saturated with female characters suffering from tuberculosis, can we talk about “gendering of consumption” in Iran? By analyzing a series of novels such as Tehran-e Makhuf (1922) (The Horrible Tehran) by Morteza Moshfegh Kazemi; Tafrihat-e Shab (1933) (Nocturnal Pleasures), Dar Talash-i Ma'ash (1932) (In Quest of a Living), Ashrafi Makhluqat (1934) (The Noblest of Creatures) by Mohammad Mas’ud; Homa (1928), Ziba (1930) by Mohammad Hejazi, I examine the socio-political implications of prescribed journeys and how they are utilized as an effective plot device.