This paper examines tea consumption in Morocco during the last two decades of French colonial rule. It looks at notions of domesticity, consumption, and national identity in popular colonial publications. Although Chinese gunpowder green tea was widely available in major cities nearly a century before, tea became the national drink only during the French Protectorate period (1912-1956). French colonial authorities and colonists themselves clearly marked colonial difference on consumption lines--Moroccans drank tea, while Europeans drank coffee and alcohol--and they instituted policies based on this assumption. Consumption practices were also gendered. French writings depicted tea drinking as an inherently male activity. Periodicals, cookbooks, and advertisements invited French colonial women to consume the exotic by drinking tea and recreating “authentic” Moroccan tea rituals in their homes. French colonial officials believed tea was an inherently Moroccan drink and a necessity for social stability. Hubert Lyautey, the French Resident-General of Morocco from 1912 to 1925, implemented a “policy of tea and sugar” during World War I. During World War II, Moroccans received tea and sugar as two of only five rations supplied. Colonial periodicals like Maroc Presse and La Vigie Marocaine frequently discussed Moroccan tea rituals, placing tea drinking exclusively in spaces dominated by men. An array of newspaper and magazine articles as well as cookbooks and advertisements imagined tea as a Moroccan male sphere, but these publications targeted French colonial women. They taught them how to recreate authentic tea rituals in their homes and with friends, and thus invited French women to participate in the colonial project as consumers of the colonial exotic. How did various sources define the ideal tea drinker differently? Using Bourdieu's ideas about the social construction of taste as a starting point, I ask how these definitions relied on consumers’ internalization of social hierarchies. For French colonials, drinking tea involved consciously emphasizing the Moroccan-ness of tea. It meant replicating an elaborate tea ritual while divorcing it from its social and symbolic significance. I hope to revise two main ideas about tea in Morocco. First, I hope to include women--as purchasers and drinkers--into the story of tea in Morocco, which, until now, has primarily focused on the role of men. Second, I hope to demonstrate how tea became a national symbol through colonial practices of social and cultural distinction on the part of both the French colonials and the Moroccans under French rule.

The campaign of Tehran’s residents in the 1940s and 1950s to have prostitutes removed from their neighborhoods resulted in the literal walling off of Shahr-i-Now, Tehran’s red-light district, and over time contributed to the solidification of the official policy of regulating prostitution and containing female sex workers within the red-light district. Despite these efforts, all across Iran bodies continued to be bought and sold. However, over time, what was once a moderate and selective policy of regulation developed into a stringent policing of prostitutes within and outside of red-light districts, with a gradually more strict focus on medical surveillance and inspection. Regulation was part and parcel of a social ideology that deemed prostitution a necessary evil. It accepted heterosexual sex outside of marriage for men, but not for women, deemed women, girls, and at times young boys, vulnerable to the temptations of prostitution, and regarded the state responsible for making sex outside of marriage safe and healthy for men. Simultaneously, the predominant social view sympathized with female prostitutes who were commonly seen as forced or deceived into prostitution, which was part of the larger sexual ideology that depicted women as asexual and pure. Prostitution was a moral problem if and when it became visible, and it was the undesired visibility of prostitution that shaped the interaction of prostitutes with the larger community and the state. This presentation is an attempt to situate the women who sold their bodies in Iran between 1940s-1970s within their societies and to highlight their engagement with the state, their communities and the structural forces that shaped their behavior. Using archival documents, it takes a closer look at the gradual move to systematic regulation that culminated in Tehran’s Shahr-i Now. In addition, borrowing from insights of subaltern studies, it illustrates how collective actions and local politics shaped national policy over time in Iran. In the process, it hopes to reveal some sexual habits of the men who frequented prostitutes and exhibit some of the ways in which these women practiced forms of autonomy over their lives.

The social practice of opium use has existed in Iran for centuries. Sediqeh Dowlatabadi, an Iranian woman writer during the modern period, left behind a detailed record of the effects of opium use on women. This paper seeks to contextualize her information on women’s opium use in the larger historical narrative of Iranian consumption patterns of the mid-twentieth century thereby highlighting a forgotten episteme of history. Furthermore, the paper examines how Iranian women’s drug usage compares and contrasts with women in Afghanistan. Sediqeh Dowlatabadi was the first licensed female newspaper editor in Isfahan. In the third incarnation of her controversial journal, Zaban-e Zanan, (c.1944-1945) she gave a detailed explanation of the effects of opium. Her description included a clear picture about the negative effects of the drug including changes to the color of the skin, excessive sweating, etc. She focused specifically on its effects on female users. In her August 1944 article, “Morphine and Opium,” she explained that morphine use decreased the amount women lactated. In this article she championed the nation’s health by widely disseminating knowledge about addiction and its effects. Throughout the course of her civic career, women’s health was one of her main foci. Dowlatabadi also studied opium addiction in babies and its effect on their health and nutrition. As late as the 1940s, Dowlatabadi documented women quieting upset babies by administering opium, starting a negative cycle in society: from childhood, these children were indoctrinated in the drug culture of the country. Utilizing Dowlatabadi’s records, now stored in the International Institute of Social History, this paper reincorporates gender into the discussion of drug use in Iran during the mid-twentieth century. This paper benefits from such works as Rudi Matthee’s The Pursuit of Pleasure which explores social practices surrounding ingestion of opium and other drugs in early modern Iran. Another source which this paper relies on is Fariba Nawa’s Opium Nation, which examines the effect of the Afghani drug trade on women. Furthermore, gaining knowledge of Iranian women’s drug use in the mid-twentieth century contributes to the current discussion of women’s drug use of opium and other illicit substances complimenting such works as Siavash Jafari’s “Socio-Cultural Factors Associated with the Initiation of Opium Use in Darab, Iran.”

Divination from coffee grounds has long been part of women’s culture in Turkey, where women socialize around coffee cups in which they seek their fortunes. Over the last decade, coffee divination has been transformed into a commodified service, providing women with an opportunity to craft a livelihood from reading cups amidst limited employment chances, traditional gender roles, and a legal ban on commercial divination. Drawing on an extensive fieldwork, I analyze the precarious gendered fortunes emerging out of coffee cups in contemporary Turkey. Fortune-tellers were criminalized in early 20th century Turkey as part of an ambitious secularization project that outlawed various religious and spiritual practitioners, including breath healers, amulet writers, and sheikhs and disciples of Sufi orders. Turkish secularism prohibited fortune-tellers because they were held to embody a superstitious, backward, and traditional religious mentality, which was perceived as the primary obstacle against nationalization and modernization of the country. Despite criminalization, women have been reading fortunes, particularly coffee cups, in the privacy of the domestic sphere, sometimes for an income and more often for leisurely socialization. Recently, coffee divinations were pushed out to the public sphere as they were commodified in cafés. Informed by a fieldwork with fortune-tellers and their clients, I explore how divination employees and customers seek their gendered fortunes in coffee cups. By gendered fortunes, I refer both to the fortunes revealed in cups and to the livelihoods earned from reading cups. While commercial coffee divinations are feminized, devalued, and even criminalized, the commodification of cup readings provides precious, if also precarious, employment opportunities for women who read fortunes. This commodification also generates inequalities among women, who now gather together around the coffee cup as workers and consumers. Most curiously, commodified cup readings foster a novel form of intimacy that is freed from familial and communal pressures and democratized to make room for the articulation of marginalized gendered and sexual lives of those whose fortunes are revealed in coffee cups.

This paper compares the productive possibilities available to females when they engage with different kinds of bra shops in Tehran. I compare what I call "traditional bra shops," that is, those with communal dressing rooms where a bra is selected for patrons by a shop employee, with "westernized" bra shops," those with individual dressing rooms where females select their own bras to try on and purchase. Through the site of the traditional bra shop, this paper explores the role of neoliberalism in shaping female homosocial spaces in urban Tehran. Looking comparatively at westernized and traditional bra shops, I focus on their spatial layouts as well as their relationships to local and international bra manufacturers, and I consider the different kinds of knowledges which become available to females who engage with/produce these spaces. Engaging the different spatial layouts of shops, and their (communal or individual) dressing rooms in particular, I consider what bra shops can communicate to females about their physical bodies, (shifting) cultural values around nudity, as well as their sense of personal and communal space. This paper will utilize a feminist framework to examine the neoliberal economic policies practiced by Iran which encourage the growth of new westernized bra shops while simultaneously promoting the eradication of traditional bra shops in Tehran. Using Afsaneh Najmabadi’s formulations of female homosocial spaces historically, and Lynn Hankinson Nelson’s theorization of “epistemological communities,” I argue for the current importance of traditional bra shops as communal spaces for females to learn about bodies. Finally, Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, as well as more recent work on non-representational theory from geographers such as Stuart Elden and Nigel Thrift, guide my entire analysis of how space is (always being) produced, and how female interactions within the spatial formation of the bra shop are always producing its space. Specifically, I compare how different these different bra shops encourage different kinds of spatial practice within their sites, and what this ultimately communicates to females about how they may/should move their bodies through space.