Bathhouses as Sites of Protest: Rebellious Bodies in the Arts of Early Modern Iran

Abstract

Bathhouses have a strong presence in Iranian folklore and Persian literature. In parallel with literature, there are illustrations in which the topic of bathhouses is exhibited. This paper focuses on a 16th century Persian miniature painting in which the location of a public bathhouse is used as a place of occurrence of a homosexual love story. On the one hand, bathhouses as places of “purification”, and, on the other hand, corporeal bodies as agency of tactile experience create a novel dialectic between the space and its inhabitants. In an atypical study of the spatial organisation of bathhouses in the Safavid period Iran (1501-1736), the paper argues that architecture at the beginning of Iran’s modern era, not only questions the normative configurations of space, but also starts to object to the solid foundations of existing religious/societal norms.