"Visionary Terrains of Post Revolution Iran: War, Youth Culture, Media and Public Space" by Roxanne Varzi

Roxanne Varzi

Deposited 2002

Abstract
Visionary Terrains of Post-Revolution Islamic Iran: War, youth culture, media and public space analyzes the Iranian revolutionary project of creating an Islamic citizenry through an all-encompassing Islamic social space. Through an ethnographic study in Tehran of secular, middle-class Iranian youth and research on cultural production of the state (radio, television, cinema, public space: Islamic laws regarding public behavior and dress, billboards and murals in Tehran), this work examines ways in which youth consumed, transformed or rejected various state-produced “cultures.” My findings demonstrate how the attempt to create an Islamic reality centers on a performative Islamic identity and a visual representation of Islamic space.

Fieldwork in Iran showed that the cultural space produced by the state was largely defined by the events and themes surrounding the Iran/Iraq War. This work engages closely with cultural materials and spaces generated by the war to show how the war constructed Tehran as a space of revolutionary Islam. A key tension in Islamic Iran between the mystical notion of bikhudi (self-annihilation) and the notion of khudsazi (self-help or self-construction) is highlighted. Ayatollah Khomeini's public discourse emphasized Islamic mystical notions like bikhudi (martyrdom) as a vehicle for excitement in the Revolution and, later, the Iran-Iraq War. After the war years, however, the faith that was necessary to keep the foundation of an Islamic reality intact waned. Reformist President Khatami's election led to a change on the surface where the struggle between faith and belief, inner reality, batin and the surface reality, zaher, became paramount to the question of identity. Over 20 years since the founding of the Islamic Republic, the drug-use, suicide and prostitution rates have skyrocketed among the very youths that should theoretically be ideal Islamic citizens. The nation is racing to transform this era of bikhudi to one of khudsazi through western psychology, self-help courses, television and radio shows, 12-step programs, and other desperate and mostly ineffectual methods. This work ethnographically explores the move from Revolutionary Iran to Reformist Iran.