Gender, space and counter-conduct: Iranian women’s heterotopic imaginations in Ramita Navai’s City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran

Abstract

Thus far, studies on the politics of gendered identities and spatial (in)justice in the Islamic Republic of Iran have mainly focused on the negative role of spatialization in the formation and perpetuation of a heteropatriarchal normativity. Little attention has been paid to the dialectical relationship between space and power as well as to the possibilities of women’s agency in challenging, contesting and reconstructing gendered spaces. This article aims to illustrate the multifaceted-ness of women’s spatial experiences by foregrounding two points: the permeability of the hegemonic spaces and the fluidity of the women’s identity as being both objects and subjects of conduct. Ramita Navai’s topographical life writing City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran offers unique insights into women’s everyday navigations of space in the capital city of Iran. It is argued that the central and historic street of Vali Asr is depicted as heterotopia or the locus of incompatible—i.e. multiple, heterogeneous and inherently paradoxical—spaces. While the oppressive power wants the street and the city as a closed system, female citizens use various strategies of refusal such as creation of secret gatherings, annihilation of the self and production of counter-memories and counter-histories to open up the spaces and reimagine an other form of subjectivity. It is concluded that the existing socio-spatial dialectic allows the possibility of interpreting gendered spaces in Tehran as social processes of symbolic encoding, decoding and recoding.

Keywords:

• Heterotopia
• Iran
• power
• resistance
• space
• women

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to three anonymous reviewers from the journal of Gender, Place and Culture for their valuable comments and suggestions that helped to improve the quality of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of a research that is supported by the grant (208902) for Iran and Japan related research project from The Sumitomo Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Moussa Pourya Asl

Moussa Pourya Asl is a Senior Lecturer in literary studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia, where he also obtained his PhD (English Literature) from School of Humanities. His primary research area is in diasporic literature and gender and cultural studies, and he has published several articles in the above-mentioned areas in Asian Ethnicity, American Studies in Scandinavia, Cogent: Arts & Humanities, Gema Online, and 3L.