Female Flâneurs and Modern Urban Spaces in Goli Taraghi’s Tehran

Abstract This study examines how Goli Taraghi’s short stories, “The Grandma’s Home” and “The Flowers of Shiraz,” portray young female protagonists navigating mid-20th-century Tehran as flâneuses (female urban flâneurs). Applying Western theories of flânerie, spectatorship, and gendered space to Persian literature, this article argues that Taraghi’s characters leverage consumer culture, cinema outings, and sensory exploration to negotiate opportunities offered by a modernity structured by traditional gender norms. By repurposing socially sanctioned activities (shopping and ballet classes) for unsanctioned roaming, observation, and desire, these girls transform streets, shops, and cinemas into sites of negotiated feminine subjectivity. Their embodied flânerie—marked by defiant gazes, political engagement, and public self-fashioning—subtly challenges the Pahlavi state’s “modern woman” ideal, offering a nuanced perspective on theoretical understandings of the Iranian flâneuse. The article thus repositions Taraghi’s heroines as agents of everyday resistance to norms, definitions and expectations, recalibrating urban modernity through small, defiant acts in contested public spaces.