Incarcerating Gender in Captive Spaces: Mahsa Ramezanpour

“Incarcerating Gender in Captive Spaces” Mahsa Ramezanpour Fourth Year, Diploma 11 Mark Cousins

In the growing darkness, Bahram was walking restlessly on the portico. He ceased for a moment to relate with some of the reality relating to the events of that afternoon which would have been regarded horrendous and perhaps unrighteous. But, he did not have any other choice. The Arab Army defeated the immortals and would seize the city by tonight. They would put men to death, enslave and sell the women and their children in the public square. He pondered how he could not be able endue such humiliation.

Parvin was the gem of his life. She implored her father to protect her probity from being disgraced by the Arab invaders. She voluntarily confined herself into a closet, and he was the one that erected the wall. 1

As Hedayat envisaged his story; how the father - Bahram, contemplated on constructing a ‘fort’ in order to protect his daughter from the intruder. Note that, the story firstly can be read as an embodiment of the gender structure which has been in regulation by the patriarchal social order, which refers to a social organization marked by the supremacy that the father is the focal authority of the family, where wives and children are dependences. And secondly, as a containment of female sexuality, an embodiment that is both conceptual and spatial. The aspirations that lead to female containment are originally derived from the pretension to contain female sexuality which than resulted in the concept of veiling. As a matter of fact, the concept of veiling has been in existence throughout history and it varies in different religion, culture, geographical contexts, which are often portrayed through bodily veiling and architectural veiling. In this regard, the attempt here is to look at the definition of ‘the veil’ before and after Islam in Iran. The veil in Islam or the hijab is a significant Islamic dogma, and yet there are new forms of female confinement emerging in Iran, which has transformed into new spatial typologies both domestically and socially. It is crucial to explore the interrelationships between “gender and space”, and amplify the continual effects (both personally and politically) of the ‘gender-structure’ to the ‘spatial-organization’ of the built environment or its political power. And lastly, to look at how in contemporary Iran - the majority of Iranian women are revolting to the containment of female sexuality; resulting into an aesthetic culture that encourages excessive modifications to their bodies, specifically to their faces in search for a new identity.

The first veil ever introduced goes back to 1790 BC when the ruler of Babylon implemented the law of female dressing as a Hammurabi Code. This law stated that a veil must be worn by aristocratic women but forbade prostitutes from wearing it. Hence this law was to regulate sexual consumerism, through dividing the female population into ‘consumable commodities and inaccessible goods’. 2 In the Achaemenid times, 6th century BC, the notion of veiling was not exclusive to

1 Hedayat, Sadeq, Parvin Dokhter-e Sasan (Parvin, Sasan’s daughter), Bombay, 1930 2 Mernissi, Fatima, Beyond the Veil: Male-female Dynamics in a Muslim Society, Schenkman Publishing Company, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975, P.11

women; it was practiced also by the Persian kings, as well as Queens.3 Then veiling was a form of social construct used to create a boundary between the sovereign and the people in order to escape the public gaze while instigating an element of mystery. The fact that women of royalty were carried in curtained carriages gave rise to a motif in Persian narrative literature, where the epic of Vis and Ramin are the most celebrated examples. In a Zoroastrian legal text dating back to 4th Century BC; Cador, a loose female garment together with the Sari was draped as a headwear, to be worn by the Zoroastrian women on solemn occasions.4 The Arab conquest of Iran in 651 CE 5 led to the eventual decline of the Zoroastrian religion and Islam was adapted by many, and became the dominant religion in Iran. The veil in Arabic culture is the hijab and literally means “a curtain” or “screen”, which is used in the Quran to refer to a partition.

It was mainly for setting up a threshold in order to protect or separate the female body from the public. Though the concept of a veil started off as a compulsory piece of female garment to the Islamic doctrine, yet it was only in the second Islamic century that the veil became a punishable law. In medieval Islam, numerous laws were developed in urging more strictness in veiling and asserting against the right of women to take part in activities outside their home. Here, the very act of dressing the female body is integral to the containment of female sexuality. The female body was considered a symbol of desire; therefore it had to be shielded and excluded through a mode of dressing and at the same time confining their exposure within the limits of their homes. The underlying fact here is that desire is an irresistible fetish and has been described as “itself a woman that masters men.”6 Subsequently it could lead to the demise of the male dominance to be complying with the needs of these feminine characteristics.

Hence, containing such traits has become men’s preoccupation. In the years of the Safavid Dynasty, the notion of containing the female body led to emergence of very hierarchical and intricate housing typologies. A typology that is genderbased and emphasizing visual privacy on a domestic scale; therefore manifesting total interiority. In Safavid Iran, along with other parts of the Islamic world; the exterior of all buildings—whether mosques, madrasa, caravanserai, palaces, mansions, or garden retreats — were nearly windowless. The interior, the part hidden from the outside world, was the place where architectural forms were elaborated and celebrated. In this sense Islamic architecture was, in the words of the art historian Ernst Grube, a “hidden architecture.”7 (See Fig1)

3

http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/cador-­‐a-­‐loose-­‐female-­‐garment-­‐covering-­‐the-­‐body-­‐sometimes-­‐ also-­‐the-­‐face -­‐ pt2 4 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/cador-­‐a-­‐loose-­‐female-­‐garment-­‐covering-­‐the-­‐body-­‐sometimes-­‐ also-­‐the-­‐face -­‐ pt2 5 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/arab-­‐ii

6 Wigley, Mark, ‘Untitled: The Housing of Gender’ in Sexuality and Space, Ed. Beatriz

Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, 1992, P.343

7

Ernst J.Grube, “ What is Islamic Architecture?” in George Michell, ed., Architecture of Islamic World: Its History and Social Meaning (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) P.10-14

Figure 1: Interior facades and Section, Haj Mahia House, Shiraz

And it is important to note the direct relationship between the way women are architecturally shielded within their homes, and the way they veil themselves in public. The house is spatially divided into two distinct areas, the birooni, and the anedrooni8. Birooni which literally means ‘outside’ refers to those quarters that were situated close to the main entrance, and where public rooms are reserved exclusively for men. Anedrooni, means ‘inside’, denotes to the private-quarters preserved for the female and young members of the family. (See Fig 2&3)

8

Edwards, Brian, Courtyard Housing: Past, Present &Future, Taylor &Francis Group, Newyork, 2006, P.26

Figure 2:Rectangular vestibules and access patterns, Salehi House, Shiraz

Figure 3: Access patterns, Forugh-al-Molk House, Shiraz

Similar to the veil, the house can be considered as another tool to control female containment as well as setting up a gender hierarchy. This is very apparent in Iranian courtyard houses, which are commonly referred to as ‘Introvert’ architecture. Fundamentally, the courtyard house segregates public life from private life by a blank wall punctured by an entry hallway which was the only part of any traditional Iranian dwelling that was made available to the public eye. (See Fig4)

Figure 4: The Contrast between outside and inside of house, Yazd

This characteristic led to a totally inward looking building with absolutely no visual penetrations into the interior. The premise of this form of spatial organization is that it has no openings to the exterior, and all rooms, windows and doorways open into the central courtyard. Most of these dwellings were built more than one floor. The lifting of bedrooms away for the living spaces at the courtyard level assisted in breaking the sightlines from the courtyard to the upper more private quarters of the homes. In addition, since a lot of time is spent in the rooms upstairs for privacy purposes, especially for women; it provided for more discreet viewing from inside out, and at the same time facilitating for discreet interior surveillance of the occupants within the residence. (See Fig5) This form of interior architecture clearly confined the women in a sequence of spaces that were both fully compartmentalized and interiorized at the greatest distance from the exterior while men were the only ones to be exposed to the outside world.

“Traditionally, only necessity could justify a woman’s presence outside the home, and no respect was ever attached to poverty and necessity. Respectable women were not seen on the street.”9 This spatial dogma established a strict social divide distinguishing the private from the public, a hierarchical society strictly based on gender structure. To the extent that in traditional Iranian houses, there used to

9 Mernissi, Fatima, Beyond the Veil: Male-female Dynamics in a Muslim Society, Schenkman Publishing Company, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975, P.143

be two types of bolts on a door. One for women and one for men, based on the produced sound the people inside the house, would know who should open the door, a man or a woman. (See Fig6) Â

Figure 5: A view from inside out, Naranjeshtan Ghavam, Shiraz

 Â

Figure 6: Two Door Bolts, Yazd, Iran

Diplomatic missions from Iran to the western civilization began with the Qajar reign which brought about political and social modernization to Iran during the period stretching from 1800 to 1925. This upheaval naturally engendered a transformation towards the social and belief systems as well as architecture.

However in Pahlavi era, the containment of female sexuality shifted and transformed into yet another new form. Reza Shah banned the use of the chador and all other forms of the hijab in 1936, as something incompatible with his

ambition for the modernization of Iran. According to Mir-Hosseini as cited by ElGuindi, "the police were arresting women who wore the veil and forcibly removing it." Even though, the new ruling seemed progressive at that time; it caused many women to confine themselves voluntarily in their house, in fear of being assaulted by the police force. However, the rules for veiling got more relaxed by Reza Shah's abdication in 1941. Through the modernization of Iran, Tehran’s brothel district, Shahr-e-No was founded. It was a gated city with guards who watched over the prostitutes and their clients. The city comprised of two main streets, with seventy shops and three hundred and sixty houses, as well as two theatres and one medical clinic. The average population of women who lived there was about 1500.10 As Kaveh Golestan– a photojournalist who documented the city describes in his own findings: “Similar to prison cells, the individual rows of rooms are cramped and interwoven like a honeycomb. The Shahr-e No (“New City”) citadel has walled in Tehran’s prostitutes.

Two parallel roads join together, leading to an iron entry gate beyond which a maze of filthy alleyways can be seen. These alleyways branch out and expand to form the redlight district of Tehran. First-time visitors to the citadel expecting glamorous surroundings are instead greeted by an area that more resembles a waste ground or public toilet. A rotten stench flows through the streets, making it hard to breathe”.

Here in Shahr-e No, where the bodily veiling may have disappeared, but was clearly replaced by another form social veiling which took a step further to the imprisonment of female sexuality in an urban scale. Each woman lived and worked in one room, which is furnished by a bed and bared to the basics. (See Fig7 &8) What is painfully evident here is the confinement of female sexuality and social hierarchy that kept this subordinate gender at almost subhuman living conditions. Just like the veil, and the house, Shahr-e-No can be regarded as yet another mechanism for controlling sexuality, bodily behavior, and establishing gender constraints. In addition, one striking fact that is constantly reoccurring in these photographs is that these women use their hands or chador to screen themselves to avoid the risk of identification and secondly to avoid any observer’s gaze. (See Fig9 &10) However during the Islamic revolution in 1979, Shahr-e-No was demolished and the women fled to the streets.

10 Zand Moghadam, Mahmoud, Shahr-e-No, Bokarthus publication, Sweden, 2012, P.37

Figure 7: Shahr-e-No,Kaveh Golestan, 1975-1977

Figure 8: Shahr-e-No,Kaveh Golestan, 1975-1977

Figure 9: Shahr-e-No,Kaveh Golestan, 1975-1977

Figure 10: Shahr-e-No,Kaveh Golestan, 1975-1977

The political upheavals of 1979 created a rupture between the social and religious values with regards to ‘veiling’ before and after the revolution. New viewpoints relating to the revitalization of religious values emerged. Women were forced to cover their bodies and their hair and only were allowed to show their faces. This instigated a trend amongst the contemporary Iranian women to wear a type of overcoat commonly known by a French word, manteaux. As the Islamic Republic government continued to impose further restrictions about the practice of veiling in the Islamic society, Iranian women were obliged to cover their entire bodies as well as their hair revealing only their faces in public. As the face became the only exposed part of the veiled body, Iranian women tried painstakingly to portray the best images of themselves in society. They tried to hide the flaws of the skin, highlighted facial features as well as the exaggeration of the eyes and the lips.

Iranian women who were in many ways oppressed to not to publicly exhibit any form of vanity, inevitably turned to the excessive use of makeup. Here the primary role is to add ‘material’ that makes-up for any previous omissions (the body and face) or deficiency. The irony here is that makeup is systematically another form of veiling; it behaves as a mask that hides the flesh (skin) of the face. It is merely an act of self-reconstruction, an articulated form of disguising; a form of opposition towards the authorities controlling their identity. This is naturally a rebellious but passive resistance that suffices the womanly need to express femininity and sexuality without getting into trouble with the governing authorities which is predominantly male. Of course, one could raise an argument that applied makeup is at the form of exposing one’s inner-self. If one makes the assumption that the revealing of the inner-self is an act of unveiling, than there are two contradictory ideas emerging here. In the context of this outcry, chastity and the curtain are conflicting paradigms. One wishes to expose and the other wants to conceal; ‘in another sense it can be seen as contradicting messages of the celebration versus the containment of femininity’.11 How is this hypocrisy allowed to reside side by side in the daily lives of Iranian women and the governing bodies who preach pious proclamations in the name of their religion?

The truth is that the law that prevails for women to wear the hijab at all times is a physical veiling, whereas vanity that fueled by popular culture which is believed to unveil the feminine containment is a subliminal one. So permitting fashion as a form of popular culture also plays a major factor in sustaining that hypocritical balance between utilitarianism and narcissism. This has resulted with Iranian women obsessively trying to reconstruct their image as to how they wish to be perceived in society. To extremities that they model themselves with a westernized facade—attaining the Hollywood ‘Barbie doll face’ aesthetic while living their lives in an Islamic society. (See Fig 11)

11 AlBader,Hessa, Stone Faces and Transparent Veils. P.96

Figure 11: Iranian girl with cosmetic surgery, as well as wearing contact lenses.

This perpetual pursuit for a new identity as a result of compulsory veiling, has led an entire country of women in two generations to identify themselves with a lifelong obsession for excessive use of make up and cosmetic surgery. In-lieu of this fact, Iran today is ranked as the one of the countries that has the highest cosmetic constructive procedures amongst its women population. What is alarming here is in their pursuit for the perfect identity, there is a sort of a generic ‘celebratory beauty’ that seems to be emerging amongst the Iranian women across the country. Sadly, one can only conclude that a country that once boasted the most beautiful women are today seeking applied science to unveil their true identities by surrendering to a generic westernized identity.

Even though the confinement of female sexuality was constantly reincarnated throughout history, both in a bodily fashion and architecturally; the emergence of the new technologies and sciences will question the same occurrences in the virtual realm. In our technological era, transparency is a digital sound-bite in the world of virtualities. Transparency has always affected the way people behave and perceive space. Transparency as a social construct has led to open-plan interiors and breaking down boundaries from within the exterior envelope. The World Wide Web is an ungovernable domain and hence exists as an entity with noholds-barred, when its numerous digital social networks are in operation. Can cyber-feminism forever set free (unveil) the struggles of this dictatorial feminist containment practiced in Islamic societies. If it is - ‘see all’ and ‘know all’ technologies in play on a global scale where then intellectual space will exist beyond all forms of sexuality. The state authorities will have access to all virtual data, than ironically ‘privacy’ will become the most sought-after commodity. So rather than searching new ways of being identified, the virtual female will perhaps be seeking to be more discreet and invisible.

One can most certainly assume that as the human race rapidly adapts to the ways of the cyborg, veils may present themselves in a whole new material; nonmaterially. Firewalls will become universal veils and this time they will become non-gender-based because the virtual realm will slowly and surely abolish all gender-based spaces.

It will be a time for universal space for all genders.

‘His (Her) passion and his (her) profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.’12

12 Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life, Phaidon Press. P.9

Bibliography:

Hedayat, Sadeq, Parvin Dokhter-e Sasan (Parvin, Sasan’s daughter), Bombay, 1930 Mernissi, Fatima, Beyond the Veil: Male-female Dynamics in a Muslim Society, Schenkman Publishing Company, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975, P.11 Wigley, Mark, ‘Untitled: The Housing of Gender’ in Sexuality and Space, Ed. Beatriz Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, 1992, P.343 Ernst J.Grube, “ What is Islamic Architecture?” in George Michell, ed., Architecture of Islamic World: Its History and Social Meaning (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) P.10-14 Edwards, Brian, Courtyard Housing: Past, Present &Future, Taylor &Francis Group, Newyork, 2006, P.26 Zand Moghadam, Mahmoud, Shahr-e-No, Bokarthus publication, Sweden, 2012, P.37 Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life, Phaidon Press. P.9

Thesis: Memarian, Gholam Hossein, A Typology of Housing In Iran, PHD Thesis, Manchester, 1998 AlBader,Hessa, Stone Faces and Transparent Veils,P.96

Website: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/cador-a-loose-female-garment-coveringthe-body-sometimes-also-the-face - pt2 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/cador-a-loose-female-garment-coveringthe-body-sometimes-also-the-face - pt2 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/arab-ii