CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Rashidbeigi, Samin |
|---|---|
| Title | Shahr-e Now, Tehran's Red-light District (1909-1979): the State, "the Prostitute," the Soldier, and the Feminist |
| Summary | This thesis deals with the history of Shahr-e Now, Tehran’s red-light district from 1909 until the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The district, as large as two football pitches, functioned as a sex market for almost seventy years with around 1,500 prostitutes living and working there. Shahr-e Now’s existence as “Tehran’s red-light district before the 1979 Revolution” has been only briefly mentioned in a number of scholarly works; however, the district has not been analyzed as a gendered and politically relevant urban construction in the context of modern Iranian history. This thesis uses the archival documents collected from The National Archive of Iran and The Document Center of Iran’s Parliament to explain Shahr-e Now’s long-lasting functioning in front of the public eye—despite the fundamental tension with Islamic morale. This thesis argues, firstly, that Shahr-e Now was initiated by state officials, and preserved during the Pahlavi period (1925–1979), mainly for the sake of the military population in Tehran. Using the vast literature on the rise of the modern army in Iran as part of the Pahlavi Dynasty’s establishment, this thesis explains that the increasing number of soldiers in Tehran was the main reason why the Pahlavi regime enabled/allowed the creation of Shahr-e Now; the state-regulated prostitution in Shahr-e Now served to provide the military with “clean women.” Moreover, this thesis suggests that the system of regulation within SN was pretty much similar to systems of regulation enforced by other modern(izing) nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The other major finding of this thesis is that state feminists in Iran, such as the women organized in Kanoun-e Banovan [the Ladies’ Center] in 1935, and in Sazman-e Zanan-e Iran [Iranian Women’s Organization] in 1966, implicitly accepted and backed the state-regulation of prostitution in Shahr-e Now. |
| Supervisor | de Haan, Francisca |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/rashidbeigi_samin.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University