Nazgol Bagheri

In her presentation Nazgol Bagheri aims to bring focus on women in minorities by investigating the presence of the Iranian women in Tehran’s modern public spaces. Bagheri draws a connection between the Iranian and the American malls in terms of an enclosed controlled public space that embodied the postwar American utopia. Bagheri criticizes the shopping malls as a threat to the authenticity of “public” space in postmodern geographies that comes from the lack of sense of place and an attempt to modernize by using the “copy and paste” approach with an emphasis on commercialization.
In the process of her research, Bagheri discovers that majority of women are coming to the Iranian malls not for shopping, but for recreation, walking around for leisure, and “window-shopping.” Another important aspect that brings women to the malls is the absence of fashion police there. Based on the collected data, Bagheri learns that the shopping malls have different meanings for different users with local, social, and political circumstances varying across geopolitical and temporal boundaries. I enjoyed contemplating Bagheri’s research and found her observation of the Iranian malls very interesting; she argues that there is“consumption of the place rather …show more content…
Both works illustrate the commoditization and fetishism of the fashion industry by the women of the conservative nations. Moreover, like Gökarıksel and Secor, Bagheri notes that changes in the female apparel that nowadays is being sold in the predominantly Muslim countries, provide women an opportunity of self-expression. This idea made me think of the “neoliberal governmentality” concept, as the consumption of the fashionable clothes along with the places that sell it, tends to lead to the self-improvement of