In search of queer spaces in Tehran: Heterotopias, power geometries and bodily orientations in queer Iranian men’s lives

Abstract

This article is based on an ethnographic study that provides insights into queer Iranian men’s lives in Iran, and specifically in Tehran. It was conceived in response to concerns about accounts provided by gay internationalist framings of the queer Iranian subject as reducible to a meta-narrative of homophobic persecution at the hands of an Islamic repressive state. By employing Foucauldian analytic frameworks that attend to questions of heterotopic spatiality in conjunction with Massey’s notion of power geometries and Ahmed’s queer phenomenological perspective, we illuminate the complexity of queer Iranian men’s spatio-temporal modes of sociality and practices of doing sex. We draw primarily on interviews with eight gay- identifying men as vital sources of data that speak to the terms of the livability of a queer life under repressive conditions of Islamic jurisprudential governance in Iran.