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.

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