As a contribution to the growing debate on the gender and sexual reading of spatiality and built public spaces, this paper aims to situate this issue in a new context, Iranian society. The recent studies of sexuality and environmental spatiality show that public spaces are constructed around official dominant discourses and particular notions of appropriate sexual components which include compulsory heterosexuality, gender bipolarism and procreative sex and simultaneously exclude and silence those subjects whose existences do not center around such notions. Therefore, it could be said with certainty that the notion of citizenship is built around the concept of heteronormativity and gender conforming. Engaging with the work of Gert Biesta (2012), and by drawing on public visual representations, we argue that official and cultural discourses in Iran such as the cult of martyrdom and Shiism work as a ‘pedagogy for public’ to ‘instruct’ and ‘teach’ the citizens of society the heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity as the ideal form of performativity and subjectivity. Such pedagogy for the public homogenizes and purifies the public spaces from non-heteronormative and gender non-conforming subjectivity and thus eradicates the very conditions under which, in Hannah Arendt’s words, ‘plurality’ and ‘togetherness’ in the ‘space of appearance’ are possible (1958). However, despite the homogenizing policy and pedagogy for the public, by giving an example from Daneshjoo Park in Tehran, we attempted to show how queer people have queered and dismantled the normative configuration of sexuality and gender through their non-heteronormative activities and produced a Foucauldian’s notion of heterotopic space (1986) within which they are able to build a space of appearnace and togetherness to perform and orient their gender and sexuality. Theoritcally, Biesta argues that there are two modalities of civic learning: socialization and subjectification. The first modality sees civic learning as a “process through which individuals adopt existing civic identities so that they become part of the existing socio-political order” (ibid, p. 428). This approach to civic learning views the main pedagogic challenge in terms of the inclusion of individuals in the societal order. Biesta takes the idea of public pedagogy as an analytical concept to investigate how media, culture and society at large function as educative forces to produce and instruct the dominant and hegemonic order of public spaces. On the other hand, Biesta proposes the conception of subjectification as the other modality of civic learning aiming to not focus on how individuals adopt the existing civic learning, but rather focus on the ways in which individuals exercise and exert their “political agency” in the ongoing practices and experiments of democracy (Biesta & Cowell 2016). To develop his argument, he refers to Hannah Arendt’s philosophy that centers around the plurality condition of human action (1958, p. 8) by which, according to her, human beings act and take up each other’s actions in order to make a political space or, in the case of hazards of undemocratic practices, make a Foucauldian hterotopic space. Following this description, the theoretical objective of this paper is to contextualize the theoretical toolbox of Biesta, Arendt and Foucault into Iranian context particularly in Daneshjoo Park in Tehran. Then, we aimed to show how public pedagogy is produced through different mediators and inscribed on the conventional image of society. Further, we aimed to show how queer people resist such pedagogy in the conventional image of society through appearing at each other and queering the space of the park.

By drawing on assemblage of analytical tools, we aim to enrich our critical perspective toward active togetherness as a form of freedom against the educative instruction of public spaces in the time of hazards of undemocratic practices. By doing so, we draw on ethnographic data (interviews, photos and field notes) in order to analyze and describe how public space(s) in Tehran, the capital of Iran, is constructed. The data were generated during fieldwork by the first author in 2015 and 2016. Access to interlocutors and the field was negotiated through friends and key informants with whom the first author had established contact prior to the fieldwork. When analyzing the interviews, major themes were identified and deduced from the data with the help of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019). These themes are then discussed and analyzed further by employing concepts and theoretical perspectives presented previously. It needs to be kept in mind that the findings based on the data used have their limitations. There are no claims made that the voices, practices, and subject positions presented and described represent the larger population in Iran. Ethically, the research was conducted in line with the ethical standards and guidelines of the University of Iceland. All the participants gave their informed consent, and when they are quoted, pseudonyms are used. For further discussions on ethics and how to conduct research in “dangerous” settings we refer to Kjaran (2019).

The spatial construction of sexual and gendered citizenship in Iran highly relies on the naturalization and celebration of heteronormativity as well as the exclusion of those who threaten and dislocate such normative configuration of sexuality and gender through non-heteronormative activities. However, as we demonstrate in the paper, transgression of heteronormativity and construction of an alternative model of citizenship is rooted not in the conventional understanding of public spaces, but in liminal spaces. It is argued that these spaces dismantle the dominant spatiality and geographies of heterosexuality by creating a political public space wherein individuals are able to craft their own sexual and gendered subjectivity. Thus, by drawing on Biesta’s concepts of pedagogy for the public and Arendt’s understanding of space of appearance and Foucauldian’s notion of heterotopia, we argue that in the Iranian context, the compulsory project of heterosexualization and masculinity during modernization in Iran and later the ideologization and institutionalization of martyrdom after the 1979 revolution have functioned as ideal forms of subjectivity. These are incorporated into the public spaces and instructed to the Iranian citizens as a form of pedagogy for the public in order to homogenize and purify the public spaces from non-heteronormative and gender non-conforming subjectivity. Such pedagogy produces an imaginary sense of sameness that entails only sexual and gender normativity. This kind of exclusionary pedagogy in public spaces is a part of selective and systematic visibility developed and fostered by the biopolitical state that has the aim of educating the citizens about normative and accepted behavior and practices in public spaces. However, alternative or what Foucault calls heterotopic spaces created by Iranians queer function as strategic and resistive spaces against disturbing power relations of public spaces and have the potentials of transforming public spaces from pedagogy for the public into a political public space.

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