Prostitution in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in Tehran, remained a mostly undiscussed topic in public discourse. This was despite the presence of thousands of prostitutes in Tehran’s prominent red-light district Shahr-e Now and a state feminist program that sought to portray itself as progressive and attentive to the plight of women. This paper explores how and why Iranians talked about prostitution to fill in the historiographic holes surrounding such a major institution in Tehran, as well as situate prostitution within the broader consumer culture of its day. For these purposes, this paper asks several questions. Why did silence on such an obvious phenomenon predominate? Why were certain commodified and sexualized forms and depictions of real or fictional women permissible for public consumption, while prostitution tended to be ignored? Previous works tend to focus on the health and daily life of prostitutes in relation to state regulation, without attention to the wider, long-term national context or the global trends in consumerism and the regulation of prostitution. My research utilizes a variety of sources, including contemporary government and academic studies, photographs, investigative journalist accounts, Kamran Shirdel’s suppressed documentary, semi-realistic short stories, and Iranian and American newspapers. Since the extensive presence of prostitution in Iran and its relationship to consumer culture was not consistently discussed openly in any one source, it is imperative to examine a plethora of cultural artifacts and written documents. I argue that Iranian discourses concerning prostitution and the commodification of women arose from the intersection of domestic and global political, cultural, and socio-economic trends in the context of a state-sponsored modernization program and growing consumer culture. Furthermore, a larger debate over modernity in Iran enveloped these issues. Above all, the state wanted to preserve its national prestige from the appearance backwardness, yet uncertainty existed within the government and society at large about what constituted modernity and backwardness. Certain forms of commodified women could be made acceptable for public consumption and viewing if they could be presented to the government as participating in an acceptable modernity according to the state’s few and vague principles, which often took cues from the West. The state and the educated, urban classes of Tehran knew that they wanted to be modern, but they were not always quite sure what exactly that might entail.

This paper focuses on new patterns of leisure and recreation developed by non-elite groups belonging to the Arab-Palestinian society in the Mandate era. The major Palestinian cities underwent a fast urbanization process and a profound cultural transformation which were embodied in the rapid emergence of modern leisure sites like cinemas, dance halls, beaches and sport clubs. Veteran institutions like cafes became much more diverse and sophisticated as they introduced radios and gramophones alongside a large variety of newspapers. The few studies available to date discussing leisure have referred to the middle and upper classes as the sole consumers of this new cultural inventory. This paper will shed light on the ways other social groups, mainly women, children and workers experienced and enjoyed the new leisure opportunities in the Palestinian major cities while focusing on Haifa as a main case study. Relying on a variety of sources including oral interviews, Arabic newspapers, archival material, photographs and memoirs, this paper will suggest that modern leisure and recreation constituted an integral part and a relevant component of the daily lives of ordinary Palestinians, as an interviewee recalled: "we also lived a little". Using leisure as an analytical category will enable us to uncover essential parts of people's everyday life and to examine their daily norms, habits and tastes. Finally, this paper will discuss the social implications of the increasing popular participation in the cultural public spheres and highlight gender, family and generational tensions which influenced and reshaped the local traditional order.

Women’s resistance movements in occupied Palestine often center on her presence in public spaces. With raised fists and iconic folk-wear Palestinian women embody the dynamic symbolism surrounding the ideas of “the mother of the nation.” At the end of the first and second intifadas, however, women returned by and large to the domestic sphere. While European and American feminist discourse has historically renounced domesticity, Palestinian women’s culture reclamation projects, often taking place in the kitchen, demonstrate the political potential of the hearth. Specifically, the explosion Palestinian cookbook over the last two decades, both within Palestine and among the diaspora, counter the idea that women’s resistance only operates on the streets. This paper examines the ideologies of domestic productions as a means of understanding the active resistance of everyday re-insistence of Palestinian identity. An analysis of cookbooks produced in the diaspora as well as within the occupied territories maps new landscape of resistance. The language of Palestinian food mirrors the dialogue of resistance and asserts tangible evidence of a separately diverse culture. This study asserts that the powerful food production methodologies and cuisine codification projects of Palestinian women indicate a strong resistance project. These energetic strategies of food reclamations and their assertions of identity, center on the female-dominated hearth and the potent mnemonic devices of familiar tastes that reinforce a collective cultural identity and tie Palestinian heritage directly to the cultivation and flavors of the land. Women challenge the hegemonic systems of the occupation by re-insisting a cultural heritage, flavor profile, and the legacy of Palestinian food. The language of Palestinian food utilized by women actively resists the grand narratives of an occupied space and exemplifies the hybridity of resistance and speaks to women’s roles. Palestinian women are effectively engaged in a kitchen-based identity project that seeks an international audience through the shared language of taste and defying notions of domestic political inertia.