Statement of contribution

This study offers a central original contribution by bridging the theoretical frameworks of flânerie and the gendered gaze with Persian literary studies, thereby uncovering a critical and understudied dimension of Goli Taraghi’s fiction. The article applies concepts developed in Western urban and film theory—such as the flâneuse and female spectatorship—to a close analysis of Taraghi’s writings. This cross-disciplinary approach fundamentally recasts her young heroines as proto-flâneuses who creatively appropriate the streets, cinemas, and consumer spaces of mid-20th-century Tehran. In doing so, the article reveals how modern urban space, sensory experience, and consumer culture—elements previously overlooked in scholarship—function as essential mechanisms in Taraghi’s characters’ journeys of exploration, observation, and desire. This analysis demonstrates that a form of female visual and spatial agency, akin to the flâneuse, did indeed surface within Iran’s gendered social constraints, offering a new perspective on narratives of modernity in Iranian fiction.

As such, the study also contributes to broader debates on state-driven modernity and gender in Iran by using Taraghi’s fiction as a case study of how official modernization policies and modern ideals of womanhood were interpreted and negotiated by young female subjects. The readings of “The Grandma’s Home” and “The Flowers of Shiraz” demonstrate that the Pahlavi-era push for a modern, cosmopolitan society afforded Iranian women and girls new venues for freedom—from public parks to dance classes—even as these opportunities remained circumscribed by class and social norms that define women as essentially belonging to domestic spaces. The article argues that Taraghi’s young heroines’ flânerie subtly challenges the very archetype of the “modern Iranian woman” promoted by the Pahlavi state and upheld by modern classes in Iran. Their embodied flânerie reveals the paradoxical nature of state-led modernization: the consumer streets, cinemas, and dance classes intended to produce a domesticated, apolitical, modern female subject instead became laboratories for cultivating curiosity, desire, and political awareness, thereby inherently destabilizing the state’s intended social order and revealing the inherent contradictions within its gendered policies.

Taken together, these contributions not only fill a significant gap in Taraghi scholarship but also enrich the discourse on Iranian women’s challenges and acts of negotiations in modern Iranian history, demonstrating how even subtle acts of flânerie and urban exploration can signify meaningful forms of female resistance against norms, definitions, and expectations, collectively challenging and gradually unsettling patriarchal and state-imposed gender structures. Furthermore, the study not only applies an existing urban-modernity framework to Taraghi’s narratives but also expands it, illustrating how female flânerie in Tehran challenges and enriches the theoretical model of the flaneuse by revealing the intricate lived dimensions of female urban experience, particularly through embodied sensory engagement, asserting bodily presence, and navigating the complex interplay of being both the object and subject of the urban gaze.

Literature review

Modern urban flânerie—the act of strolling and observing city life—has long been associated with the figure of the flâneur epitomized by Charles Baudelaire’s depictions of 19th-century Paris. Walter Benjamin later cast the flâneur as a symbol of modernity, a detached male observer who makes the city his domain. The flâneur, as an urban stroller or idler, observes city life with enchanted curiosity, exploring and classifying the subjects of his gaze. By doing so, he constructs a montage of the modern city—an imaginary map that helps him situate and define himself amid the plethora of disjointed urban stimuli—and by internalizing the city, reshapes it in a personal manner.Footnote ⁷

Strictly intertwined with the power of the gaze and the ability to roam leisurely within the city, the flâneur is traditionally considered male. As such, feminist scholars have problematized this archetype by asking: where are the women in these modern streets? Janet Wolff famously argued that the classic flâneur was an implicitly male figure, and that a true flâneuse (female flâneur) was largely “invisible” in the literature of modernity.Footnote ⁸ Respectable women of the 19th century seldom wandered alone in public without drawing scrutiny or risking being labeled as prostitutes, effectively barring them from the carefree roaming enjoyed by men. Rita Felski and others have further shown that narratives of modernity often excluded women’s experiences or confined them to private/domestic realms. Felski’s work The Gender of Modernity emphasizes that women’s encounter with modern urban life was fundamentally shaped by different constraints and opportunities than men’s.

Nevertheless, scholars have identified historical instances of the flâneuse in alternative guises. For example, Anke Gleber and Anne Friedberg point out that as modern cities developed new consumer spaces (arcades, department stores), they opened a niche for a female urban observer—a flâneuse—whose gendered gaze became part of modern urban culture.Footnote ⁹ Deborah L. Parsons also explores how women in literature (from authors such as Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and others) navigated cities on their own terms. Parsons documents alternate forms of female flânerie in these stories—for example, women entering public spaces as shoppers, tourists, or errand-goers rather than idle strollers.Footnote ¹⁰ In other words, women could cautiously enter the public sphere by adopting socially sanctioned roles (such as the respectable shopper), thereby subtly neutralizing the old limits on who could stroll and watch the city.

As such, consumer culture and spectatorship were a crucial avenue for women’s tentative entry into urban public life. Scholars such as Miriam Hansen, Anne Friedberg, and Rita Felski have examined how the rise of consumerism and commodity culture in modern metropolises provided women with an opportunity—an “excuse” to break free from domestic confines, venture into public spaces, and experience environments traditionally defined and dominated by men.Footnote ¹¹ With the growth of consumerism, upper- and middle-class urban women increasingly entered public spaces linked to consumption, while mass-produced goods began to infiltrate the private sphere of the home, further blurring the distinction between public and private life and making the public presence of private businesses more acceptable.Footnote ¹² Friedberg contends that “at the base of modernity,” with new forms of experience, production, and consumption in capitalist societies, “the social underpinnings of gender began to shift. Women were empowered with new forms of social mobility as shoppers, as tourists, as cinema-goers.”Footnote ¹³

This development blurred the boundary between private and public life, as the goods and spectacles of the city beckoned female onlookers out of domestic seclusion. Friedberg and others observe that by the turn of the 20th century, the flâneuse found footing in spaces such as arcades and department stores, even if she had to remain purposeful (shopping, not idling) to be acceptable. Alongside shopping, cinema emerged as a novel public venue that somewhat loosened gender norms. Film scholar Hansen has argued that in the early 20th century, the rise of popular cinema created an alternative public sphere for groups traditionally constrained in public life, especially women. Unlike many formal public venues of the time, conventional gender surveillance relaxed in the movie theater, welcoming women as consumers and spectators and allowing them to participate in modern forms of leisure tied to their evolving social roles. In this new milieu, women could engage in forms of self-expression, experience, and social activity that conventional norms often restricted elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁴ Crucially, the cinema was often one of the few public places a woman could enter; even if constituting a breach of expectations of respectability, it was tolerated as it evolved into a very popular and common activity over a few decades.Footnote ¹⁵ Within the anonymous crowds of the picture house, female patrons thus enjoyed a novel kind of collective experience: they could gather with others and even feel a sense of community, yet retain their independence as individuals.Footnote ¹⁶ In other words, the cinema offered women a paradoxical blend of togetherness and autonomy—it was a public arena in which they could mingle in society on relatively equal footing while momentarily escaping the scrutinizing gaze of that same society.Footnote ¹⁷

Such settings also gave rise to the phenomenon of the female spectator and the possibility of a female gaze. In classical film theory, Laura Mulvey famously critiqued how mainstream cinema positions woman as the passive object of a male gaze, reinforcing a gendered power dynamic in looking.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet the presence of women in the audience complicates this dynamic: as later scholars such as Hansen and Anne Friedberg suggest, women in modern urban settings were not only being looked at, they were also looking—engaging in acts of visual consumption and spectatorship that allowed them a form of agency in experience. The concept of a gendered gaze thus becomes two-fold: women in the city are often conscious of being observed (by men) but simultaneously cultivate their own ways of observing the city and the spectacle of modern life. This theoretical lens of the flâneuse—a woman who is at once spectator and spectacle—is especially pertinent to Taraghi’s stories of mid-century Tehran, where young women navigated exactly this double position.

Turning to Pahlavi-era Iran, we find a complex interplay between state-driven modernization, consumer culture, and women’s visibility in urban spaces. Under Reza Shah (r. 1925–1941) and Mohammad Reza Shah (r. 1941–1979), Iran pursued aggressive Western-style modernization centered in cities, including Tehran. Reforms such as the 1936 ban on veiling, expansion of girls’ education, and encouragement of Western fashions were intended to transform women into symbols of a modern nation.Footnote ¹⁹ This era also saw Tehran’s landscape reshaped with European-style boulevards (e.g., Lalezar Street) and new public venues—parks, cafés, cinemas, theaters, and department stores—which created unprecedented opportunities for women of the middle and upper classes to appear in public and engage in the promoted consumerist lifestyle, cultivating the new, modern ideal for Iranian woman.

It is important to recognize that, as Minoo Moallem notes, the Pahlavi regime’s vision of progress relied on stark binaries: “The Pahlavi regime was based on the ideology of modernization and Westernization,” defining itself through “endless dichotomies revolving around the modern in contrast to the traditional.”Footnote ²⁰ Within this social and political climate, women’s bodies became national signifiers and discourses of an Iranian modernity fixated on defining and “modernizing” women.Footnote ²¹ One historical survey notes that, for Iran’s secular reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the “traditional woman” symbolized backwardness—mired in superstition and ignorance, “an additional mouth to feed and not the loyal companion” that renewalist men desired to help rebuild the nation.Footnote ²² The modern Iranian woman, by contrast, was imagined as everything the traditional woman was not: educated, enlightened, and molded to support the nation’s progress. Both Pahlavi shahs embraced this project of refashioning women through changes in dress, education, and public behavior.Footnote ²³ Reza Shah’s forcible unveiling decree of 1936, for example, was emblematic of this top-down approach to womanhood. Yet these state-driven reforms were themselves deeply patriarchal, designed not to grant women autonomy from traditional gender roles or male guardianship, but rather to project an image of Iran as a modernized nation. Parvin Paidar emphasizes that unveiling was not a peripheral reform but “the most far-reaching aspect of state modernisation with regard to gender relations.” Reza Shah’s insistence that veiled women be barred from schools, offices, and public places functioned to recast female visibility as a marker of modern Iran, and unveiling was framed as a passage from barbarism to civilization.Footnote ²⁴ In other words, the Pahlavi modernization program expected women to become ostensibly “modern” (unveiled, educated, fashionably attired, somewhat secular-minded) while still upholding conservative virtues of family honor and loyalty, remaining essentially confined to and defined in domestic spaces, with men continuing to dominate the social order. The goal was never to dismantle the longstanding hierarchy of gender relations, but rather to produce suitably modern wives and daughters who would reflect well on the nation without undermining male authority.Footnote ²⁵ The modern forms of patriarchy advocated by the state extended among and were internalized by the various modern middle and upper classes.Footnote ²⁶

As such, Iranian social historians note that the changes and novel landscape were stratified and fraught with tension. In practice, deep-rooted norms continued to circumscribe women’s freedom of movement. Farzaneh Milani incisively observes that in a traditional Iranian context, a woman requires “not only a room of her own…but also the freedom to leave it and return to it at will,” otherwise that room becomes a prison.Footnote ²⁷ For much of Iranian history, that freedom of movement was denied to women. Milani emphasizes that mobility—the simple act of walking out the door—was long a masculine prerogative in Iran: “The street was the man’s arena. The public square belonged to him,” and it was withheld from women “in the name of religion, chastity, [and] class distinction.”Footnote ²⁸

Even as late as the mid-20th century, a woman walking alone in the streets was met with suspicion; women in public were expected to keep their heads down, go about their business meekly, and quickly return home to the four walls of a house that often felt more like confinement than refuge.Footnote ²⁹ As Paidar and Afsaneh Najmabadi have documented, the Pahlavi state’s reforms did bring more women into schools, workplaces, and unveiled public life, but these top-down changes did not fully erase conservative gender norms.Footnote ³⁰ Women’s public presence remained socially policed and often justified only by “legitimate” purposes. For instance, Najmabadi notes that mid-century Iranian women were encouraged to become educated and contribute to society, yet were simultaneously warned about the “hazards of modernity and morality”—the idea that Westernized freedoms could lead to moral decay.Footnote ³¹

However, class and family background were also crucial determinants of a woman’s mobility. Women from progressive, affluent families receptive to Western influences could more easily frequent modern public sites, provided their activities aligned with prevailing ideals of the “modern Iranian woman.” Following the Constitutional Revolution, women from higher social strata gained opportunities to leave their homes for “legitimate” purposes—such as visiting the bathhouse, attending religious gatherings, or pursuing education.Footnote ³² Over time, these acceptable reasons expanded to include activities associated with modern femininity, such as attending classes, shopping, or visiting cafés, pastry shops, and, occasionally, cinemas.

These patterns gradually spread across social classes, driven by factors such as the expansion of coeducational schooling, economic pressures that drew women into the workforce, and the rise of a modern middle class during Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign that aspired to petit-bourgeois lifestyles. By the 1950s, this culture had taken root in Tehran, producing a generation of young urban women eager to engage with city life—attending classes, going to the movies, strolling, and shopping. As long as an outing could be framed as respectable—going to school, running an errand, or meeting a friend at a café—it was increasingly tolerated for women to move through public streets.

Yet this freedom was always conditional, as Milani reminds us that many women still “could neither freely travel nor freely linger in the streets” as men did.Footnote ³³ The picture that emerges from Iranian scholarship is one of contradictory modernity; on one side, educational demands, bright lights, and consumer pleasures beckoned women into public life, offering the promise of sociability and leisure; and on the other, state ideologies and social expectations tightly circumscribed how far women’s urban presence could extend. Najmabadi captures this paradox as the “hazards of modernity,” in which women’s visibility was celebrated as a sign of progress but also provoked acute anxieties about morality, giving rise to the ideal of the “modest-yet-modern” woman.Footnote ³⁴ These tensions explain the mixture of exhilaration and scrutiny Taraghi’s girls encounter when venturing outside: their pleasure in looking and being looked at is shadowed by a discourse that sought to police female mobility, casting it as both a marker of modernity and a potential threat to social order. In turn, the girls need to develop subtle strategies to legitimize their presence in public—using pretexts, navigating parental surveillance, and bending expectations of modesty—to negotiate restrictions imposed and opportunities offered by this discourse. Taraghi’s stories thus become a crucial literary record of how these contradictory pressures were felt and negotiated by young women in a modernizing Tehran.

While historians have adeptly outlined the ideological framework and social limitations, the question remains: how did women themselves navigate and negotiate these contradictions in their everyday lives? Literature provides a vital source for answering this question. Taraghi’s fiction offers a powerful counter-narrative, illustrating through her young protagonists how these official ideals were not passively received but actively navigated, appropriated, and subtly challenged by Iranian women in their everyday urban experiences. Yet, as Goulia Ghardashkhani observes, “critical studies that offer a comprehensive and in-depth textual analysis of Taraghi’s narratives are indeed scarce,” tending to provide broad overviews rather than deep analysis.Footnote ³⁵ Ghardashkhani’s monograph Another Place: Identity, Space, and Transcultural Signification in Goli Taraqqi’s Fiction stands out as the most comprehensive study of Taraghi to date, illuminating the social and cultural dimensions of Taraghi’s writing—particularly her engagement with urban space, consumer culture, and the metropolitan experience across her body of work. These themes align closely with the present article’s concerns. However, Ghardashkhani’s analysis, by necessity, spans Taraghi’s entire oeuvre at a general level; no single work is exhaustively explored in Ghardashkhani’s study. Earlier scholarship on Taraghi has likewise tended to focus on other aspects of her writing (such as narrative style, autobiographical voice, or psychological motifs) rather than the intersection of gender and space.Footnote ³⁶ Recent Persian-language articles have begun applying new theoretical approaches to Taraghi’s fiction—using narratology to dissect story structure or analyzing gendered language in her prose—but the urban theme remains under-explored.Footnote ³⁷ A survey of Taraghi studies shows that while critics often situate her stories in their historical context, they seldom address how her female characters experience social and spatial environments subjectively.

In contrast, this study directly foregrounds urban space and female flânerie in Taraghi’s storytelling, positioning her young female protagonists as a kind of Iranian flâneuse who navigates mid-20th-century Tehran’s streets, shops, and cinemas, negotiating norms and expectations.

Urban consumer culture and female mobility

It is within the consumer spaces that emerged in Tehran’s mid-20th-century modernization—spaces that offered women from modern middle and upper classes limited yet novel opportunities to appear in public—that Taraghi sets her stories, portraying how her young women from modern middle-class and intellectual families leveraged consumer culture as a socially sanctioned excuse to step into the public realm. This consumerism, actively promoted by the Pahlavi state as a hallmark of its modernizing vision, is depicted by Taraghi not as passive acceptance but rather a tactical opening for the negotiations of gender norms.

Both stories examined in this study overflow with scenes of shopping, browsing, and the thrill of Western goods, showing how consumer venues became stages for female exploration. In “The Grandma’s Home,” the schoolgirl narrator accompanies her mother and aunts on a shopping excursion to the city’s premier commercial district around Lalezar and Islambul streets. Lalezar Street—originally conceived in the late 19th century as Tehran’s answer to the Champs-Élysées—was considered a gateway to modernity for Iran from the early 20th century until the Islamic Revolution.Footnote ³⁸ This boulevard, a flagship project of Pahlavi urban modernization, was intended to showcase a cosmopolitan, Westernized Iran and draw its citizens into a modern consumer lifestyle. Lalezar, and its intersection with Islambul, hosted a plethora of modern attractions—cafes, cinemas, theaters, shops with ornamented displays showcasing the latest fashion trends, and automobiles teeming on the asphalted streets—with cosmopolitan citizens of diverse backgrounds strolling leisurely on the macadam sidewalks, engaging in socialization and window-shopping.Footnote ³⁹ This street appears in many of Taraghi’s stories and plays a significant role in her characters’ lives. Such is the case with “The Grandma’s Home.” As the family group strolls this boulevard, Taraghi’s narrative lingers on the dazzling merchandise and lively street tableau, highlighting how these state-sponsored spaces became grounds for young women’s individual interpretation and subversive engagement. The young protagonist observes women in black chadors boldly holding up lacy bras against themselves at a shop counter, prompting her to blush at their audacity.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the window of the upscale Pirayesh boutique, she spots “a large mannequin of a woman in lingerie, with part of her breasts exposed”—an arresting image that both embarrasses and fascinates her.Footnote ⁴¹ Amid these sensory temptations, the narrator feels a mix of shame and curiosity, trying to sneak glances at the mannequin while her mother is not looking. Taraghi uses such moments to depict the city’s new consumer paradise through a young girl’s eyes, highlighting how the public marketplace begins expanding her awareness, especially with its forbidden erotic impulses, beyond the sheltered world of home and school.

“The Flowers of Shiraz” similarly paints Tehran’s consumer delights from the perspective of teenage girls on the loose. In this story, the protagonist (now an older adolescent) and her friends meet up before their dance class to wander downtown and soak in the metropolis. Taraghi’s description of their outing reads like an inventory of modern allure: glittering fashion boutiques displaying slinky lingerie and sequined dresses, cinemas plastered with pictures of foreign film stars, the cacophony of the city’s famous Berlin Alley, and the venerable Ma’refat Bookstore at the end of Lalezar, hailed as “the center of the world of poetry and literature.”Footnote ⁴² For these schoolgirls, the bustling commercial district becomes a wonderland of sights and sounds, one that stands in stark contrast to the confined, predictable domestic spaces they come from. The excitement of window-shopping and crowd-watching in the streets gives them a taste of the novelty that urban modernity promises, and the partial freedom one can enjoy in it.

Taraghi’s heroines keenly understand that they must operate within socially sanctioned channels if they wish to claim any freedom of movement and be outside. In “The Grandma’s Home,” the young narrator cannot roam the city unaccompanied, so she takes full advantage of whatever chances arise—whether joining her elders’ shopping trips or insisting to pedal her new bicycle a few blocks to buy ice cream—to briefly immerse herself in street life. By contrast, the adolescent narrator of “The Flowers of Shiraz” and her friends devise more deliberate pretexts for leaving home. Their ballet class—ostensibly a wholesome, refined extracurricular pursuit for modern young ladies—becomes a convenient excuse to gather in town away from watchful families. As the narrator, referred to by others as Gol-e Laleh (Tulip Flower), bluntly admits, “Going to this class is just for fun. We are in the eighth grade of high school, and it is the year 1953. The city is chaotic. Protests, arrests, shootings.”Footnote ⁴³ Despite the political turmoil swirling outside (the story is set amid the unrest of 1953), the girls use the dance class as a cover to venture into the city’s vibrant streets. Yet even this innocent ruse meets resistance at home: fully aware of the “dangers” of Tehran’s unruly public spaces, the narrator’s parents impose strict limits, forbidding her from activities such as bike rides in Elahiyeh or leisurely strolls down Lalezar and Islambul. Chafing against these curfews, the narrator boldly declares, “We’ve grown up and have our own claims.”Footnote ⁴⁴ She insists on her independence despite her family’s fears. In one telling example, she even negotiates a compromise with her parents, persuading them to let her pursue dance classes in place of the more “proper” piano lessons, a switch her mother and father accept only because they manage to frame modern dance as another respectable accomplishment for a modern, cultured girl. The ballet class is a perfect example of a state-sanctioned, “modern” activity for girls, reflecting the Pahlavi regime’s efforts to cultivate a specific ideal of cultured, modern womanhood. However, Taraghi’s characters repurpose it, transforming a lesson in disciplined, graceful femininity into a pretext for the undisciplined and ungraceful exploration of the city’s political and sensual currents, thereby challenging the very definition imposed by state modernization.

As such, the reader sees that the narrator’s true motive is not to become a model modern lady at all, but simply enjoying herself and escaping the house. Throughout the story, she and her friends continuously scheme for small freedoms, whether it be running a trivial errand or attending a lesson, cleverly leveraging the modernized expectations of an ideal woman (classes, shopping, “visiting a friend”) as cover to slip out from under their families’ gaze. Tellingly, their elders—despite misgivings—often relent in the name of keeping up a modern, Westernized lifestyle. In other words, the very consumerist modernity their parents aspire to (and which underpins their social status) provides the loopholes that allow these girls to taste life beyond the doorstep.

For Taraghi’s young protagonists, the glittering city itself becomes an object of desire—a source of liberation lurking just outside the home’s walls. As Ghardashkhani observes, the schoolgirl is enticed by “the sparkling shop-windows, cinemas, bistros, bookstores, colorful ads and posters, and fashionable dandies” that beckon from Tehran’s streets.Footnote ⁴⁵ Once outside, the girls do far more than dutifully run errands. They loiter in cafés and pastry shops, browse books and magazines, and even strike up conversations—occasionally with the very boys they are supposed to avoid. In these moments, the protagonists savor a taste of autonomy that would be unthinkable in the regimented space of home. What begins as a sanctioned shopping trip or class outing often becomes an opportunity for the girls to explore the city on their own terms. Boulevards, theaters, and parks—initially visited for proper, family-approved purposes—open up as arenas for personal observation, curiosity, and pleasure beyond parental oversight. By embracing the role of consumerist, Taraghi’s heroines engage with the city in ways that subtly challenge prescribed gender boundaries. In doing so, they quietly redraw the limits of Tehran’s male-dominated public sphere, redefining these spaces as places where a young woman can belong and, in the process, enacting a form of flânerie that is negotiated yet unmistakably their own.

Female flânerie in mid-century Tehran

Both “The Grandma’s Home” and “The Flowers of Shiraz” center on young female protagonists who seize socially acceptable pretexts to venture into the urban streets and engage in a subtle form of flânerie—leisurely roaming and observing the city—under the guise of ordinary outings. In “The Grandma’s Home,” a schoolgirl joins her mother and aunts on a wedding shopping trip, an ostensibly dutiful errand that, for her, becomes an adventure in wandering the bustling city. Likewise, in “The Flowers of Shiraz,” a group of friends use their ballet class as “a good excuse to get out of the house” and explore town. The narrator rhapsodizes that “the streets of Islambul and Lalehzar are two heavenly roads that pass through our dreams and imaginations, filled with delightful promises and enchanting experiences.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This exuberant description—and the girls’ confession that they feel confused, frustrated, and impatient to grow up—underscores how the very act of walking the city fuels their coming-of-age fantasies of freedom to explore and adulthood.

Moreover, even amid Tehran’s male-dominated streets and gaze directed at the girls, they assert a gaze of their own. In “The Grandma’s Home,” for example, the schoolgirl narrator is surrounded by predatory male onlookers and constant catcalls, yet this does not deter her roaming. Unlike her adult chaperones, who react to the harassment with anger and discomfort, the young protagonist eagerly participates in the exchange of gazes. She is at once being watched and watching back. Far from feeling victimized, she finds a thrilling validation in this mutual looking. As she admits, “my body contorts with joy; I feel like a grown-up and [feel] that all the men in Islambul Street are in love with me.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Rather than remaining an invisible, detached bystander (as the classic male flâneur does), she derives a sense of belonging and budding power from being seen.Footnote ⁴⁸ Women’s street presence is often marked by being “in transit,” “out of place,” or “in fear,” yet precisely through these embodied street practices they gain a sense of presence and being in touch with the urban fabric.Footnote ⁴⁹ Taraghi’s narrator does something similar: she embraces her visibility as a way to belong, turning potential vulnerability into a sense of belonging.

The narrator’s fascination with urban attractions is intensified by her self-awareness of being an attraction in her own right, fostering enhanced rapport and empathy with the urban milieu. The narrator’s self-awareness of attracting male attention only heightens her fascination with the lively urban scene, drawing her deeper into the experience of the city. As Lauren Elkin observes, the flâneuse always walks with a consciousness of her own visibility: she “cannot slip invisibly into the city as a man might; her presence is marked, questioned, and sometimes challenged.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet Elkin also insists that this visibility, though freighted with risk, does not nullify women’s urban agency; rather, it can serve as a paradoxical form of freedom and self-fashioning. Taraghi’s adolescent flâneuses exemplify this paradox: their heightened awareness of being seen does not reduce them to passive spectacles but instead propels them into fuller engagement with the urban world, where looking back and being looked at are both acts through which they test desire, assert presence, and begin to shape their own modern subjectivities. This active negotiation of visibility and gaze in the specific sociocultural context of Pahlavi-era Tehran thus offers a crucial nuance to existing flâneuse theories, emphasizing how the lived experience of being both spectator and spectacle becomes a powerful tool for female self-fashioning and agency, even under surveillance. Furthermore, this dynamic directly reflects the “hazards of modernity” inherent in the Pahlavi state’s project, which simultaneously encouraged female visibility as a sign of progress while fostering anxieties about morality and appropriate feminine conduct.

A striking moment in “The Grandma’s Home” drives home how intimately Taraghi links flânerie with the heroine’s emerging self-awareness. Inside the modern Pirayesh boutique, the girl—while mesmerized by a female mannequin dressed in revealing Western lingerie—is surrounded by men ogling the window display with a sense of entitlement. Here, the girl’s glance is furtive yet deliberate. This is not a passive absorption of an image but an act of clandestine seeking. She actively chooses to look at what fascinates her, engaging in a visual transaction on her own terms, despite (or exactly because of) the risk, overwhelming male presence, and the fact that her mother is nearby, who would become furious if she caught her daughter gazing at the mannequin. The girl’s furtive glance that situates her in an erotic field of gaze—men gazing and she gazing in return—is a tiny but potent act to pursue her own curiosity. As a result of strong erotic impulses, her body responds in an unfamiliar, visceral way: “My heart sinks… I glance at the mannequin’s breasts, and my stomach starts churning.”Footnote ⁵¹ In this charged instant, aesthetic curiosity merges with the protagonist’s dawning consciousness of sexuality and spectacle. Significantly, this scene parallels an earlier episode on the crowded sidewalk when the narrator suddenly realizes that she is the object of male desire. In both cases—the bustling street and the glittering shop window—a convergence of gazes leaves her confused but powerful, as she senses that she has entered a new stage of visibility as a young woman. Together, these experiences mark a formative step in the narrator’s coming-of-age: she begins to perceive her own female body as a public presence loaded with significance and learns to negotiate the interplay of desire and visibility in the urban arena, relishing the thrill of being the object of a gaze without surrendering to passive objectification. In these moments, she actively participates in a subtle exchange of looks, taking pleasure in the erotic charge of being watched while aspiring to maintain control over her own boundaries. Her enjoyment is tempered by an acute awareness of the dangers of male possession; after such encounters, she recalls how her uncle subdued and constrained his wife, silently fearing the prospect of a similar fate.

Taraghi’s stories thus illustrate that even within the confines of 1950s Tehran, a form of female flânerie is possible. Importantly, their flânerie is not purely visual or detached—it is an embodied, sensory encounter with the city that catalyzes self-understanding and coming-of-age. By roaming the city, observing and being observed, the girls awaken to new desires and social identities, beyond their domestically defined, chaste, and respectable one. This deeply embodied flânerie paves the way for the next facet of Taraghi’s portrayal: the sensual and affective experience of urban space as a driver of the girls’ self-discovery and negotiation of constraints.

Embodied sensory experience

Through such an engaging flânerie and exploration of the urban landscape, Taraghi’s flâneuses do not drift through the city as detached spectators; rather, they inhabit it through all their senses, immersing themselves in its sights, sounds, textures, and smells. This multisensory engagement transforms their strolls into moments of self-fashioning. In the Lalezar and Islambul episode of “The Grandma’s Home,” for example, Taraghi skillfully interweaves the narrator’s sensual and affective experiences with the dynamic ambiance of the city, showing how she engages with it fully through all her sensory faculties, from physical interactions with the urban crowd to tactile engagement with commodities and textiles.

Particularly striking is the narrator’s heightened olfactory response to Islambul Street, which exemplifies her holistic, corporeal absorption into the cityscape: “I love Islambul Street. Its redolence of fish, coffee, heated seeds, fragrances, and foreign cosmetic powder induces a fervent and liberating bodily sensation, akin to a reverie, as I stretch in ecstatic contentment.”Footnote ⁵² The detailed enumeration of scents, combined with her bodily response—described through warmth, pleasure, and dreamlike surrender—foregrounds the intensely haptic and embodied nature of her urban encounter. Rather than viewing the city from a distance, the narrator experiences it through a richly textured sensory field that affirms her presence and engagement within the public space.

This reconfigured understanding of flânerie, deeply rooted in the girls’ visceral and multisensory engagement with Tehran’s urban fabric, provides significant lived insight into how bodily presence and sensory exploration become foundational to female urban belonging in contexts marked by gendered spatial risks. Taraghi thus reconfigures the act of flânerie not as a purely visual or intellectual endeavor, but as a corporeal and gendered mode of urban belonging. Eva Pelayo Sañudo describes this as the “embodied spatiality” of the flaneuse, whose experience of the street is inseparable from the sensory immersion resultant from the social risks of gendered space and awareness to them.Footnote ⁵³ Taraghi’s protagonists enact precisely this corporeal flânerie, negotiating desire and danger through smell, touch, and crowd proximity.

The same happens in “The Flowers of Shiraz.” In its urban episodes, Taraghi interweaves the girls’ changed behavior resulting from their quintessentially multisensory encounters. These encounters help them challenge the imposed definitions, behaviors, and constraints requiring that they be passive, “head facing the ground,” shy bystanders.Footnote ⁵⁴ At home, they are expected to embody silence and chastity; in the city, they become active subjects whose senses, desires, and gazes animate the narrative.

This transformation is most evident in the character of Gol-e Maryam, who undergoes a striking arc from passive bystander to active participant in the excitements of urban life. Initially, Gol-e Maryam is the antithesis of a flâneuse: introduced as “a sullen, taciturn girl” who “keeps to one corner during the warm-up and merely watches the others dance.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Her existence is circumscribed by the gloomy, museum-like home she shares with her grieving father: a space shrouded in “white dust-sheets,” where time seems to have stopped, filled with ghosts of the past in “photo albums” and “memories.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Within this domestic enclosure, she is not a character in her own right but an extension of her father’s world, defined by his loss and his politics, passively “watch[ing]” others live.

Her entry into the city initiates a dramatic shift in her subjectivity, centrally orchestrated through her gaze. Taraghi meticulously charts how the city teaches the girl “how to look” like a flâneuse. When she first joins the group, she is overwhelmed, “like someone who has never seen a street, a car, or a two-legged person before.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Her gaze is fearful and unaccustomed. However, the sensory spectacle of the city, particularly on Saʿdābād Street, actively captivates and educates her gaze:

This description is crucial. Gol-e Maryam is not just seeing; she is observing a complex, multisensory social tableau—a “banquet” of modern urban life in which looking is reciprocal (“everyone looks at one another”). She is learning the codes of public interaction and visual exchange. Her newfound agency is defined by her ability to hold a gaze and respond. Taraghi repeatedly emphasizes Gol-e Maryam’s active gaze and the subsequent engagement with the subject of her gaze, marking the character’s transformation.

This apprenticeship in looking culminates in a tabooed intimate relationship with a person of the opposite sex, her boyfriend, Parviz; she has “learned to stand before Parviz [her new boyfriend], to meet his gaze and sit beside him in the cinema and on the bus.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The timid girl, who once blushed at being seen, now actively—and daringly—returns the male gaze.

This active visual agency is directly contrasted with the passive, backward-looking gaze enforced in her home, which is spent “looking at photo albums” of her father’s past.Footnote ⁶⁰ The domestic sphere keeps her fixed in memory, silence, and mourning; the urban sphere invites her into a present-tense visual and sensory world where she is seen and sees others as a living participant. Her laughter, her conversations, her flirtations, even her act of intoxication with the olfactory festival of perfumes and foods in the street, or eating ice cream in public, all are small but radical gestures of presence when compared to the “head facing the ground” presence expected of her.

Gol-e Maryam’s final transformation is marked by these once-forbidden activities: “She has learned to laugh. She has learned to speak out loud.”Footnote ⁶¹ No longer the mute extension of her father’s grief and ideals, she becomes an active character in her own right, reclaiming her gaze and presence in the world of the living. Her arc demonstrates that becoming a flâneuse is not only a process of learning to command one’s gaze and actively engage with urban stimuli, but also a process consisting of resisting the passive role assigned to her at home and stepping into the role of an active, desiring subject within the urban spectacle.

These multisensory engagements often carry tabooed sensual and corporeal undercurrents—whether erotic or gastronomic—rooted in the interplay between the senses and desire. The erotic is most vividly rendered in “The Grandma’s Home” in the Pirayesh shop scene, where watching the mannequin and feeling the weight of the male gaze elicits an unmistakable bodily reaction, forging a direct link between her sexual sensations and her awareness of her own body. Similarly, in “The Flowers of Shiraz,” anticipation of romantic encounters—dates, flirtation, and physical proximity with boys—unfolds in spaces saturated with a multitude of sensory stimuli, as evident in Saʿdābād episode.

On the gastronomic side, “The Flowers of Shiraz” accentuates the girls’ insatiable appetite and the subsequent corporeal gratification derived from novel fast-food and junk-food establishments. The narrative vividly depicts their “astonishing ravenousness” as they “devour two, perhaps even three, cold cut sandwiches” at Andre’s, and then “stroll [leisurely] from Shah Street to Naderi, ending up in the Khosravi Pastry, the entire journey happening amidst unrestrained and loud conversations.”Footnote ⁶²

Whether expressed through the tactile thrill of being looked at or the uninhibited pleasure of eating on the move, these acts—along with outings with boys and sexual reveries—subtly undermine the codes of feminine modesty expected within the home. Yet these tangible markers of transgression and corporeal pleasure dissolve the moment the girls cross the domestic threshold. These tangible markers of transgression and corporeal pleasure directly illustrate the paradox of Pahlavi modernity: the state encouraged consumerism, empowering women with a sense of individual desire that directly contradicted the state’s parallel emphasis on female chastity and domesticity. Taraghi’s stories skillfully depict this inherent conflict as it unfolds in the protagonists’ sensory engagement with the city.

Public vs. private spaces

Placed side by side, the public and private spaces in Taraghi’s stories reveal a persistent opposition between spontaneous urban wanderings—snacking, outings with boys, and illicit flirtations—and the rigid etiquette of the family dining room and its expected “chaste” demeanor. The street is rendered as a multisensory banquet in which the girls can test out loud laughter, rapid speech, even illicit flirtation; the home, by contrast, demands a constrained performance of femininity—quiet, slow, and watchful. Thus, seemingly trivial acts such as consuming foods on the move crystallize the broader dialectic in both stories between an urban space that enables self-fashioning and a domestic space that seeks to discipline it.

In “The Flowers of Shiraz,” the dichotomy between the two spaces is evident through shifts between episodes in the domestic space with the families, where the girls are confined, restricted, and have to assume roles confirming their adherence to expectations of such modern young women, and episodes in public urban spaces where they can challenge these expectations. For instance, Gol-e Maryam and her friends crack walnuts and nibble roasted corn as they drift along Saʿdābād Street, their mouths, eyes, and ears equally stimulated. This multisensory indulgence loosens Gol-e Maryam’s body and “unties her tongue”; yet, on returning home, the narrator herself is met by her anxious mother and punished with confinement, “kept indoors and barred from Friday-night outings or cycling with the neighborhood boys.”Footnote ⁶³

Throughout the narrative, the protagonist contrasts her domestic environment—filled with arguments over what is expected of a “respectable” young woman—with the freedom found in public spaces. She also contrasts the gloomy, stagnant atmosphere of Gol-e Maryam’s house, shrouded in white dust-sheets, the lights dim, the air tinged with stagnant pond water; here, eating is a silent, regulated ritual that makes her feel like she has stepped into “a house of ghosts,” while the outdoors is bustling, dynamic, and vibrant.Footnote ⁶⁴ By the end of the story, this dichotomy has crystallized for Gol-e Maryam:

Precisely the same tension structures “The Grandma’s Home.” The narrator fantasizes about the food-filled bustle of Islambul Street—“ice-cream from Villā Avenue, Friday-night walnuts, the scent of unripe summer fruit”—while dreading the marriage that might “lock her up and steal her snacks.”Footnote ⁶⁶ When she must sleep in her grandmother’s back bedroom, far from kitchen and street alike, she lies shivering under a blanket listening to the wall clock—“tick-tock, tick-tock; Islambul Street is a world away.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Here, as in “The Flowers of Shiraz,” the city appears to the girl as a space of freedom and pleasure, while the domestic realm serves as a site of confinement. Like true flâneurs, these girls have managed to reshape the city for themselves, transforming this male-dominated space into one in which they can negotiate and challenge expectations. They use the city to loosen the restrictions and avoid the societal expectations imposed by their families. For them, as is natural for a flâneur, the city has become a homey space, whereas their actual domestic space is one of confinement.

However, driven by their affection for the city and its streets, the girls remain acutely aware of the prevailing societal views and restrictions imposed on their public activities, as well as the vigilance and strategies needed to evade confinement at home. They also recognize that they are fundamentally defined within domestic spaces, as the parents in both stories seek to keep the girls indoors or limit their outings. Public spaces, in contrast, remain masculine domains—a fact the narrator of “The Grandma’s Home” observes in the contrast between the confidence and freedom of men in Lalehzar and Islambul streets and the cautious demeanor of her female companions, who move as though navigating hostile territory. Similarly, in “The Flowers of Shiraz,” the narrator observes how men freely roam the streets to pursue their political inclinations, while her own family, especially in politically charged times, attempts to ban her from going out altogether. In “The Grandma’s Home,” this awareness surfaces in the narrator’s anxious speculation: “What if a man falls in love with me? What if he confines me within the home and forbids me from biking? What if he restrains me from venturing to Islambul Street?”Footnote ⁶⁸ Here, she refers to the uncle mentioned before, who was so “in love” with his wife that he curtailed her freedom outside the home. The narrator resents this concept of love, equating it with compulsory supervision and guardianship by one’s husband. She fears that, as she enters adulthood, her family may restrict her outdoor pursuits. Already, the young narrator faces constraints that label her as a “young lady” and limit her playful, childish activities. This is why, when distressed and restricted by her house, she dreams and yearns for the outdoors, where she can be “herself,” a self that is challenging to the defined ideals.

The story concludes with the narrator dreaming of her own idealized cityscape. Following a series of perturbing confrontations with normalizing familial realities, she succumbs to a state of semi-consciousness. Under the compassionate care of her grandmother, the narrator enters a dreamlike state in which the city she has constructed for herself appears as the utopic space she yearns to inhabit:

Similarly, in “The Flowers of Shiraz,” the narrator’s presence in public spaces is closely tied to the quest of escaping the confinements of home. The streets of Tehran are a realm in which she relishes the absence of domestic surveillance and distances herself from the societal expectations and familial burdens imposed within domestic spaces. Even Gol-e Maryam “has learned to speak out loud. She has learned to deceive, to lie to her father and sneak out of the house.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Alternative public spaces of cinema

The movie theater is a specific urban space consistently highlighted by Taraghi as a vital urban enclave of pleasure, collective belonging for women, and for fleeing from constraints. In “The Grandma’s Home” and “The Flowers of Shiraz,” among other tales, the cinema operates as an exemplary metropolitan sanctuary where ordinary restrictions loosen up. Within the darkened theater, Taraghi’s female characters find a haven in which “collective dreams” can flourish and the usual detachment of daily life dissolves, drawing them closer into the civic body of the city. Notably, in “The Flowers of Shiraz,” when discovering that Gol-e Maryam has never experienced a trip to the movies, the narrator concludes that her sheltered friend lacks true self-awareness and a grasp of the wider world. A visit to the cinema, in the narrator’s eyes, represents the very essence of a modern woman—one who challenges constraints, is up-to-date, indulges her curiosities, and steps beyond the confines of home into the public life of the city.

Building on the theoretical foundation established earlier, in which scholars such as Hansen and Friedberg identified cinemas as uniquely enabling spaces for women’s public spectatorship and nascent flânerie, Goli Taraghi’s fiction vividly illustrates this potential within mid-century Tehran. Her heroines experience the movie theater precisely as Hansen’s “refuge”: a space offering temporary liberation from pervasive social monitoring.

Friedberg’s concept of cinema as the “apparatical sequel” to 19th-century consumer spaces that paved the way for new modes of spectatorship finds potent expression in Taraghi’s narratives.Footnote ⁷⁰ For characters constrained by societal norms, like the young protagonist of “The Grandma’s Home,” movie-going becomes a vital mode of vicarious urban exploration. Confined physically, she transforms the cinema into an extension of the flâneur’s domain, imaginatively traversing cinematic cityscapes and reveling in sensory and consumer pleasures far beyond her actual reach. Crucially, this occurs within the relative safety and social anonymity of the theater, mirroring the paradoxical blend of autonomy and collective experience cinema afforded women historically.

Furthermore, Taraghi’s work illuminates how cinema empowers female visual agency, moving beyond Mulvey’s foundational critique of the male gaze. While acknowledging the cinematic structures that position women as spectacle, Taraghi’s heroines extend their active look from the streets to the cinema. They do not merely absorb the screen; they curate their viewing—selecting, judging, and desiring—even more freely in the darkened space of the cinema. In this act of curation, they mirror the classic flâneur practice of collecting and classifying urban impressions, but they do so from the sanctioned space of the theater seat.Footnote ⁷¹ They become connoisseurs of their own desire, actively editing the cinematic city to fit their imaginative and emotional needs. As such, for Taraghi’s women, the cinema is not only an extension of their urban gaze but also a space in which they practice the freedom to look back and define their own perceptions. The theater becomes their training ground for a gendered gaze that navigates between being simultaneously spectator and spectacle. This resonates with the complex spectator positions later feminist scholars (e.g., Hansen, de Lauretis, Doane, Williams, and Hooks) identified.Footnote ⁷²

Taraghi’s schoolgirl protagonists, ensconced in the cinema’s darkness, freely survey the romantic spectacle before them—delighting in it, critiquing it, even imagining themselves within it—all beyond their parents’ controlling gaze. Such moments illustrate how the cinema empowers Taraghi’s female characters to be active viewers cultivating their own interior world of thought and fantasy, rather than passive subjects of a defined viewpoint.

The exploration of desire is a particularly significant taboo that the girls practice and hone within cinemas. In Iran’s gendered social order (as elsewhere), female sexuality and erotic expression were heavily policed and confined to the private realm. By mid-century, however, the influx of urban modernity and consumer culture had begun commodifying eroticism, making romance and sexual imagery part of public life through advertising, fashion, and film. The movie theater became a liminal zone in which women could safely encounter and experiment with these once-forbidden experiences. Hansen observes that the shared yet anonymous darkness of the cinema allowed women a unique freedom to explore desire—both vicariously, through watching screen lovers, and directly, through discreet intimacy with companions in the audience.Footnote ⁷³ In the cover of darkness, a young woman could hold a boyfriend’s hand, exchange glances, even steal a kiss—gestures of affection unimaginable on a public street—all without drawing the reproachful stares of neighbors or family. This newfound latitude was precisely why conservative moralists railed against cinemas: Islamist critics in Iran argued that the “sinful” and shadowy environment of movie houses was breeding immorality, corrupting young women’s minds and bodies by luring them into impure thoughts and clandestine trysts.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such denunciations only affirm how radically the cinema subverted traditional constraints: it created a public yet private enclave where women could indulge desires that society at large strenuously suppressed.

Taraghi powerfully illustrates this erotic emancipation in her stories. In “The Grandma’s Home,” the narrator—a curious adolescent girl—returns again and again to watch Swimming Beauties (George Sidney, 1944),Footnote ⁷⁵ a Hollywood musical teeming with attractive stars and romantic spectacle. These repeated viewings immerse her in what might be called the “erotic geographies” of the film’s world—sun-dappled pools, glamorous bodies, flirtations, and love affairs—an alluring landscape so distant from her own sheltered life.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the collective anonymity of the theater, she savors these sensations freely, without the blush of shame that colors her experience of, say, staring at the voluptuous mannequin in Pirayesh’s shop window when her mother is present. In the movie house, by contrast, the girl indulges all her senses—sight, sound, and taste—in a liberating carnival of modern pleasures. “My pockets are full of money, and I can buy as many fruit rolls and cream puffs as I want, and watch Swimming Beauties a hundred times,” she exults, reveling in the decadent freedom of being both consumer and spectator. This jubilant declaration encapsulates how the cinema experience lets her momentarily live out the fantasy of autonomy: she has money to spend, sweets to eat, and the opportunity to watch the same romantic dream over and over until satisfied. Likewise, in “The Flowers of Shiraz,” Gol-e Maryam savors the simple illicit thrill of sitting hand-in-hand with her boyfriend in the dark theater, sharing stolen moments of affection. Such acts might seem ordinary, but, for these young women, they are quietly revolutionary: small affirmations of sexual and personal freedom in a society in which even walking unaccompanied with an unrelated man could invite censure.

Beyond personal fantasies and desires, Taraghi also portrays the cinema as a site of collective activity. In “The Flowers of Shiraz,” the movie theater literally becomes a refuge and rallying point amid the turbulence of 1953 Tehran. Fleeing a dangerous street confrontation with armed goons targeting supporters of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, the narrator, Gol-e Maryam, and her driver duck into a packed cinema to hide. Inside, they discover a remarkable scene: the film has become secondary as the audience itself has erupted into impromptu political demonstration. “The cinema is packed… most of the spectators are on their feet, chanting slogans against Britain… they wave their clenched fists in the air, and the cry ‘Death or Mossadeq!’ makes the hall quake,” the narrator recounts, astonished to find herself in the midst of a roaring crowd.Footnote ⁷⁷ In that electric atmosphere, she finds her voice, shouting along in unison: “Long live! … Down with!” The crescendo of euphoria in the theater fuses the disparate attendees into a single, cohesive entity—a massive living body animated by shared fervor and hope. In this moment of unity, individuals who might never mingle outside—men and women, rich and poor, young and old—suddenly perceive themselves as part of a larger collective will. It is the very phenomenon Siegfried Kracauer observed in Weimar-era cinemas: a “homogeneous cosmopolitan audience” where “everyone is of one mind, from the bank director to the sales clerk, from the diva to the stenographer.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Taraghi’s scene vividly echoes this dynamic. Bound together by the dark, the film, and the political passion of the moment, social differences melt away. The young female narrator—normally confined to the margins of public life—is swept into the heart of a public action, fully embraced as an equal participant. In joining the theater’s spontaneous chorus, she experiences a profound sense of communal alignment, her voice merging with hundreds of others. For perhaps the first time, she belongs to the public, sharing in its collective ardor and empowerment. Through this exhilarating episode, Taraghi underscores the movie theater’s capacity to function as a microcosm of society, one in which women like her protagonists can momentarily claim membership in the public sphere at its most visceral. Furthermore, this powerful scene acts as a direct example of how state-promoted modern venues, far from producing an “apolitical, docile femininity,” could unexpectedly galvanize collective societal action and serve as forums for expressing public sentiment (and against the state in the case of 1953 political turmoil, for that matter).

In Taraghi’s Tehran, then, the cinema is far more than a site of idle amusement; it is an alternative forum of modern life in which women renegotiate their place in the city, functioning as “embodied streets,” in Sañudo’s words, i.e., spaces where women negotiate visibility and desire within controlled environments that nonetheless allow for transgression.Footnote ⁷⁹ Within the cinema walls, they taste freedoms that the outside world still begrudges them: unchaperoned social mixing, freedom to look and desire, and direct engagement in civic emotions. Taraghi’s heroines extend their street flânerie into the darkened cinema, momentarily freed from surveillance.

Conclusion: challenging the “modern woman” ideal

Goli Taraghi’s narratives of mid-century Tehran reveal a profound act of negotiation with the state’s project of modernization: her young female protagonists use the city’s modern spaces—products of the Pahlavi modernization program—as laboratories for challenging and subverting the state’s archetype of the “modern Iranian woman.” Through their tactical flânerie—leisurely strolls, consumer excursions, cinematic spectatorship, and sensory immersion—they forge a challenge to the prescribed codes of modesty, chastity, and being based in domestic spaces. Their journeys demonstrate that even within constraints, women can recalibrate modernity’s compass.

The flâneuse, as enacted by Taraghi’s schoolgirls and adolescents, is neither Baudelaire’s detached observer nor a mere shopper fulfilling domestic duties. She is a tactician of urban space, leveraging socially sanctioned activities—such as wedding errands in “The Grandma’s Home” or ballet classes in “The Flowers of Shiraz”—as alibis for unsanctioned exploration. Lalezar Street’s glittering boutiques and Islambul’s sensory cacophony become classrooms in which the girls learn to navigate the male gaze not with submission, but with a defiant joy in their own visibility (“my body contorts with joy… all the men… are in love with me”). This repurposing proves central: the consumer paradise, intended by the state and modern middle class to mold a domesticated, apolitical modern woman, is instead weaponized for self-discovery. The Pirayesh mannequin sparks erotic self-awareness; Villā Avenue ice cream embodies “the taste of first love… the first secret cigarette.” The girls uninhibited consumption—public snacking, raucous laughter—becomes a corporeal language rejecting the chaste silence demanded at home.

Crucially, alternative public spheres such as the cinema amplify this experience. Within its anonymous darkness, Hansen’s “refuge” becomes a training ground: vicarious flânerie transports the girls beyond physical limits (watching Swimming Beauties “a hundred times”); Mulvey’s male gaze is complicated by their active, critical spectatorship (“selecting what they admire, judging what they see”); and the collective dreamscape fosters both illicit intimacy (Gol-e Maryam holding hands with her boyfriend) and political activity (chanting “Long live Mossadegh!” amidst a unified crowd). Here, the paradox of the flâneuse—simultaneously spectator and spectacle—culminates in a claim to civic belonging and desire.

This also extends to the political realm, offering a literary rebuttal to the state’s vision of an apolitical, docile femininity. The girls of “The Flowers of Shiraz” are fiercely engaged—debating Mossadegh, the shah, and the Tudeh, translating street-smart confidence into ideological clashes in instances such as:

This fervent political engagement erupting within the dance studio—a space meant for cultivating genteel, modern femininity—powerfully illustrates how societal engagement with modernization was inherently politicized. The girls’ fights show that the state could not successfully compartmentalize “modernity” from the political turmoil its own policies helped generate.

Their trespasses into forbidden urban zones (the dim side of the bridge near the bazaar) also mirror their refusal to be confined by ideological or spatial boundaries dictated by social definitions. Gol-e Maryam’s arc—from a “sullen, taciturn girl” bound by her father’s rules to one who “learned to deceive… to lie… and sneak out”—epitomizes this hard-won, limited freedom of movement. Her transformation, fueled by Saʿdābād Street’s vibrant spectacle and the cinema’s sanctuary, is not mere rebellion; it is the reconstruction of a self beyond what was defined by her father and paternal house.

Ultimately, this article contributes to debates on Pahlavi-era modernity by arguing that Taraghi’s fiction provides a critical record of everyday resistance to the state’s gendered modernization project. Although her heroines do not engage in overt revolution, they inhabit its modernizing structures and challenge them from within. Taraghi’s protagonists’ power lies in the relentless accumulation of small, defiant acts that, taken together, reveal the fault lines in the state’s ideology and the ways in which gendered ideology is contested. By seizing Tehran’s sensory, social, and visual opportunities—spaces ostensibly created for their “modern” domestication—the girls cultivate a different female subjectivity: one rooted in curiosity, bodily awareness, openness to senses and desires cultivated by urban spaces, political voice, and the right to claim pleasure in the public eye. Their flânerie is thus more than urban wandering; it is a mode of existential cartography, mapping a Tehran where women are not passive symbols of state modernity but agents actively attempting to be authors of their own becoming. Their power lies not in grand gestures, but in the relentless accumulation of small, defiantly active moments of seeing and being seen. Specifically, Taraghi’s detailed portrayal of sensory experiences, robust bodily presence, and the complex, often defiant, interplay of the female gaze offers a compelling lived dimension to the theoretical understanding of the flâneuse, demonstrating how these elements are not merely descriptive details but integral to the shaping of female subjectivity and resistance within modern urban spaces. Within the paradoxical context of Pahlavi-era Iran, where women’s public visibility was simultaneously encouraged as a symbol of progress and policed for “morality,” Taraghi’s heroines embody the quintessential Iranian flâneuse. This figure is not simply a woman wandering a modern city; she is a tactician navigating a highly stratified and often hostile male-dominated public sphere. Her flânerie is profoundly shaped by the acute awareness of being both an object of scrutiny and a subject of desire. Through a heightened bodily presence that embraces forbidden erotic and gastronomic impulses, and a gaze that defiantly looks back, she transforms potential vulnerability into a source of agency and belonging, thereby subtly but persistently undermining the patriarchal control over female bodies and public conduct that the state sought to maintain. Thus, Taraghi’s enduring contribution lies in her literature’s crucial engagement with how the very tools of state modernization (consumer streets, cinemas) could be repurposed into sites in which young women quietly, insistently challenged the state’s and socially enforced meaning of being a modern woman, reflecting broader societal negotiations with the promises and perils of the Pahlavi era. The Iranian flâneuse, as Taraghi reveals, emerges from negotiating rather than escaping restriction. She is a figure forged in the tension between societal constraint and an irrepressible drive for self-discovery, defining her own presence and desires amidst a public sphere that sought to both display and contain her.