1. This research was supported by funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the French Institute of Research in Iran (IFRI). This essay is a re-worked chapter from the author's PhD thesis. The author is deeply indebted to all the following individuals for their comments and help, notably: William Maurer, Karen Leonard, Teresa Caldeira, Liisa Malkki, James Ferguson, Susan Ossman, Mahla Zamani, Shadi Parand, Maryam, Ghassideh and Houshang Golmakani, Nilufer Gole, Soheila Shahshahani, Nader and Michael Tingay for editing. Without the dedicated work of Patricia Hayes and Marti Lybeck this article would not have attained its intellectual coherence and fluidity. All names of the interviewees have been changed out of respect for the personal desire for anonymity.
2. The research forms part of Alexandru Balasescu, 'Fashioning Subjects, Unveiling Modernity: The Co/motion of Aesthetics between Paris and Tehran', unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, Irvine, 2004.
3. Pierre Bourdieu,Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Jurgen Habermas,The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989); Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds),Woman, Culture, and Society(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974). For an overview of historical transformations of public space see Richard Sennett,The Fall of the Public Man(New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).
4. See William M. O'Barr,Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising(Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright and Constance Penley (eds),The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science(New York: New York University Press, 1998).