ABSTRACT
The female body is singled out as the core of social engineering and the manifestation of political ideology in any normative-driven society. The social management of the body (and all respective issues related to various forms of relationships and interactions) serves as the foci of urban experience – an interplay of social relations, urban forms and subjective positions within an urban context. Also, spatial arrangements enhance the reproduction and structures of gender and sexual relationships, and the articulation of identities. Socially normative lines of division and dominance of values are shaped and reinforced by urban environments, and individuals find spaces in city venues to perform or express such identities. To think about gender and sexuality in the city, then, is to think about the interaction of spatial practice, social difference and symbolic associations in urban contexts. Setting up gender and sexuality in the urban context is partly a question of putting bodies in space, which also indicates how embodied subjects are located within more general social structures and relationships. Gender and sexuality, after all, are not defined by the limits of the individual body, they involve social relations that extend across and are shaped by space (Tonkiss 2005: 92-4). Hence, the presence of the female body in the public domain and in the context of a heavily normative-laden society, such as the post-revolutionary Iran, could be contextualized through what Najmabadi (1991) calls “ideologisation and instrumentalization of the woman question” wherein the female body becomes the symbolic location of normative values and cultural practices.
