THE GENDERED SOUNDSCAPE
A particularly intriguing aspect of the traditional architecture of Tehran (and other Iranian cities) are the beautiful and imposing old doors that grace the alleyways of the old city and which proudly mark the boundaries between public and private domains that are so important in Iran, as in other predominantly Islamic countries. Wandering around the older parts of Tehran, one can still see these doors, usually set in old-style mud-brick walls. Now, take a closer look and you’ll notice two door knockers, one usually heavier, rectangular or square, the other more rounded, sometimes in the shape of a heart or a bird. These knockers are beautiful artefacts, generally made from cast iron and decorated with patterns and images of plants, animals and other symbols. Knocking on the door, visitors would announce not just their presence but also their gender identity: men using the rectangular/square knocker and women the rounded one. The different sounds of the knockers would alert those inside; a woman would rarely open the door to a male visitor and would instead disguise or muffle her voice behind the door, in an act of sonic social modesty, to enquire as to the visitor’s business. You can see some of these beautiful old doors and their knockers in a documentary film Iranian Door Knockers (2015) by Alireza Jahanpanah and Irandokht Pirsaraee who travelled across Iran over a number of years photographing and documenting hundreds of door knockers, studying the different designs, many of which are specific to particular cities. The film focuses on the city of Kashan, famous for its beautiful old houses, many of which are now tourist attractions, and a rich site for such door knockers, some of which have now been stolen or removed or tied down by homeowners tired of curious passers-by trying out the knockers. Jahanpanah shows how larger houses required larger and louder door knockers and discusses the distinguishing visual markers of those made in different cities, including some from the city of Kerman 400 miles away, evidencing a large trading network associated with these sonic items. According to Jahanpanah, the heart shape was particularly common in Tehran for the ‘female’ door knocker and he shows an example where the metal tapers off at the lower end into the tail of a bird. As well as the sounds of the knockers themselves, then, were the latent sonic implications of the pictures, of birds and other animals in particular.
These beautiful door knockers speak to the gendered aspects of urban space in Iran, and particularly the culturally-rooted and more recently politically-framed attempts to delineate a clear separation between ‘public’ (omoumi or hamegani) and ‘private’ (khoosoosi) domains; and for women and their sounds to be contained within the latter. In reality, of course, such boundaries are highly blurred and permeable, and as I have written elsewhere, the relationship between public and private - whilst often presented as a binary - is in fact much more complex and better understood relationally, with differing degrees of ‘privateness’ and ‘publicness’:
… that challenge the stability of such a binary construction: a workplace may be less public than the street but more private than the home. Within the home the shared spaces of the living room or kitchen are usually more public than the bedroom. And of course, the spaces offered by technologies such as mobile phones and mp3 players are simply the most recent manifestation of being “private-in-public” or “public-in-private.” There is thus a tension between the binary spatial thinking encouraged by the discourses and the reality, which is rarely reducible to a comfortable opposition … one of the difficulties, then, in theorizing concepts of public and private is the terminologies that one is bound to—because of their widespread currency and lack of obvious alternatives—while at the same time acknowledging their instability. Further, while these concepts tend to be discussed and represented in spatial terms, they increasingly reference modalities of experience beyond physical space (2018:350).
Even within the home’s interior, traditional architecture facilitated a separation between the birooni (outside), where visitors and others beyond the immediate family would be permitted, and the more private andarooni (inside). Thus, gender segregation was inscribed both spatially and sonically. Strategies such as architectural design or differentiated door knockers reveal the extent to which the leakage of sounds - particularly gendered sound - from private to public represents a potential threat to the sonic and social order. But such subversive ‘leakiness’ is precisely what makes sound so interesting, most obviously its potential to both (and sometimes simultaneously) mark or reinforce, and transcend boundaries of various kinds. Sound’s refusal to be contained within a single physical space allows it to thwart official attempts to control the public sonic environment, whilst at the same time enabling sounds of power, such as the azan (call to prayer), to enter into and permeate private spaces such as the home.
THE FEMALE VOICE
These beautiful old door knockers have prompted me to think about what it means to attend to the gendering of the urban soundscape and to reflect on the forces at play: what exactly is at stake in thinking more broadly about urban sound and ‘difference’? Such gendering is highly nuanced and complex. The most obvious examples of sonic gendering is the prohibition of solo female singing in public (other than to all-female audiences) and the sounds of gender-segregated spaces. The latter include both long-standing culturally-rooted norms and traditions, as well as more recent segregation through post-revolutionary attempts to align public behaviour with Islamic precepts, in often inconsistent and contradictory ways: while women and men mix freely in many public spaces such as markets (with no controls on the calls of traders, although relatively few are women) and in venues such as cinemas and concert halls (pre-Covid), elsewhere there is strict segregation and policing of female sounds. Public transport is a good example of such inconsistencies: travelling on a bus, I am required to sit or stand at the back, separate from the men at the front; but on the metro, I can choose to travel in a mixed carriage or a women-only one; and in a shared taxi, I find myself squeezed up in the most intimate proximity with unrelated men. As I have written elsewhere, there is no logic to such rules, because logic is not the point: the point rather is to both control public behaviour and also perhaps to display the power of those who are in a position to enforce inconsistent and arbitrary rules if and when they so desire; as a way of showing who is in charge.
In fact, restrictions such as on the solo female voice have relatively little impact on the overall soundscape of Tehran; indeed, the spoken female voice is heard prominently in many public spaces, including for instance, announcements on the Tehran metro. Nevertheless, prohibitions carry much symbolic weight and are also a strong invitation to minor acts of what might be called ‘counter-sonics’: the strains of solo female voices - particularly Iran’s pre-revolutionary pop diva Googoosh - coming from passing private cars and taxis; musicians recording themselves on semi-public rooftops. Also, none of the restrictions stop me finding CDs of female singers in a Tehran book shop ...
Nor does it stop a government-sponsored film about the life of the Prophet Mohammad, directed by Majid Majidi and screened widely in Iran, using a wordless solo female vocalise as a prominent part of the soundtrack (by Indian film composer A.R.Rahman). The irony of the latter left me feeling a mix of bemusement, bafflement and outrage (on behalf of female singers unable to perform in Iran) when I saw it at the cinema of the Film Museum in Baq-e Ferdows in 2015.
But perhaps one of the most striking contradictions of all lies in that most ubiquitous, prominent and fetishised sound of the city: the thrice daily call to prayer. From one perspective, the azan is the most male-gendered sound of Tehran’s public space: always delivered by a male voice, from the phallic minarets that would once have been the highest points in the city and representing a religion that is centred around patriarchal power. And so, for many years I’ve been puzzled by the fact that whilst the azan and other chanting broadcast from mosques permeate the sonic fabric of Tehran and are the public sounds to most consistently and insistently transcend the strong public-private divide, the vocal delivery is highly strained and in a high-pitched range that could easily be the sound of a (low) female voice if one didn’t know the social and religious context. Here's an example from a mosque in north Tehran:
The same can be heard in Iranian classical music where one rarely hears male singers with bass voices, but more typically highly elaborate and high-pitched vocality. How then, is one to understand the material and symbolic silencing of women represented by restrictions on the solo female voice, when set against the highly audible aesthetic of publicly prominent religious sounds echoing across Tehran - strongly coded socially as masculine, yet occupying a gender-ambiguous sonic borderland? This is a question that has intrigued me for years and one I will return to in a later blog post.
GENDERED SPACES AND THE SOUNDS OF PATRIARCHY
I move on now to think about the sounds of gender-specific spaces within the city, some of which are voluntary and self-circumscribed, others defined by law, tradition or custom, and some on a spectrum between. I’ve already mentioned some of the spaces of public transport in Tehran, such as the metro where I can choose to travel in a mixed carriage or women-only one. The sound world of the latter is worth exploring. One prominent sonic feature of the metro is that of hawkers selling wares, both in the mixed and in women-only carriages. There is an extraordinary range of items for sale in this mobile market: from kitchen knives to bubble machines and from make-up to underwear, the women-only carriages are particularly interesting commercial hubs, with sellers carrying portable stalls on which to demonstrate the sharpness of a knife or a wide selection of nail varnish. On one occasion my lap was transformed into a shop counter on which the vendor offloaded her armful of underwear while she searched for a size 36C black - or rather asked me to find one for her! And sound is an important part of all this: like market traders or other street vendors the world over, the voice becomes an important medium for making a living in a competitive environment.
Other mandated (as opposed to voluntary) female-only spaces include the concert-e banuvan (women-only concerts) that began in the 1990s, partly as a legitimate space for solo female singing, including concerts that were part of state-sponsored events such as the Jasmine Festival. Men are entirely absent and all technical staff - including for lighting and sound – are women. Mobile phones are collected from attendees as they enter the venue, to prevent anyone from taking photographs or recording. Such concerts evidence the complex dynamics of ‘public’ vs ‘private’ space in Iran, ostensibly taking place in a public venue (including high-profile venues such as the Talar-e Vahdat) but sonically and visually ‘veiled’ and hidden away. There are mixed views on such women-only concerts as reported by Wendy De Bano (2005, 2009) and as I also found in my discussions with female musicians. Some that I spoke to liked the ambience, that also resonates with traditional female-only spaces connected to life cycle events such as weddings and births or religious celebrations such as for the birthday of Fatemeh, daughter of the Prophet Mohammad, usually held in private homes with entertainment by hired professional female musicians. Many musicians, however, object to the enforced segregation of the concert-e banuvan and told me they would prefer not to perform at all rather than under such circumstances.
There are many other gender-specific spaces, including the traditional bathhouses with their separate areas for men and women, and which were important sites not just of cleansing, but of sociality and exchange of news and information, as well as rituals associated with weddings, childbirth and mourning; the sounds of bathhouses deserve a blog post of their own. Women’s hair and beauty salons are located in private spaces, usually in basements or private houses away from the (male) public gaze; these are interesting sonic worlds of female sociality and banter, generally accessible only through informal networks and stand in contrast to the entirely visible world (through shop windows) of male barbers, but whose aural intimacies women are largely excluded from. And then there are the sounds of all-male spaces of sociality such as the traditional gymnasiums – the zurkhaneh, literally meaning ‘house of strength’ – the sounds of exercising itself and equipment such as clubs and swords, as well as the accompanying recitation, usually poetry from the epic Shahnameh, sung by the Morshed who also plays a large clay goblet drum and sounds various bells and other percussion to mark the changes in the exercise routine. All of this can be heard in Federico Spinetti’s fabulous film, Zurkhaneh. Today, modern sports centres similarly have separate sections for men and women. Attending a women’s gym on my last trip to Iran in 2015, I was required (as in female-only concerts and for the same reasons) to surrender my mobile phone on entry. Here, there was no live music as in the traditional gymnasiums, but background ‘muzak’ - both ambient and pop music - in the swimming pool area. Coming back to all-male spaces, generally speaking these are elective rather than enforced and include the more traditional cafés where women may not be prohibited exactly but often don’t feel comfortable or welcome, much like the ambience of pubs in the UK in earlier generations, and which reminds me of Sara Ahmed’s work on the ‘politics of stranger making; how some … become understood as the rightful occupants of certain spaces … whilst others are treated as “space invaders”, as invading the space reserved for others’ (2012:13). Or take the sports stadia from which women are excluded, portrayed so beautifully in Jafar Panahi’s 2006 film Offside.
The DVD cover is a still from the film showing both the guards and the women they have detained for trying to attend a football match disguised as men; captors and captives join together in vocal and physical engagement with the events of the match – which they are by necessity following purely aurally, with the roaring of the stadium crowd in the background (unheard in the image but very present in the film) and a running commentary provided by two of the guards. Watch from 1:05:10
Religious space is another example of culturally mandated gender segregation; in the case of mosques or shrines, this usually applies to certain sections (inside) and at certain times (of worship). Many have large outdoor areas where people mix freely, music is often broadcast, and it’s common to see and hear families picnicking in the evenings, with the wafting mixed voices of men, women and children.
Listen to sound examples from Emamzadeh Saleh shrine in Tajrish, north Tehran:
AUDITORY SCARS
For the final section of this blog, I return to the idea of ‘auditory scars’ - ‘the results of acts of silencing past and present’ (Black and Bohlman 2017:9) - discussed briefly in an earlier post, to think about the many silences and absences, the missing colours and textures in the threads of Tehran’s sonic fabric. Considering the ways in which women’s voices have been disguised, circumscribed or silenced, caused me to reflect on issues of silencing in urban space more generally. There are many dimensions of this that could be written about, but perhaps the ultimate act of silencing is that effected by the erasure of an entire area of the city, as happened with the government-regulated red-light district - Qal’eh-e Shahr-e No(literally ‘New City Citadel’ also known as the ‘Zahedi Citadel’) - originally established in the early 20th century just outside Tehran’s Qazvin Gate and which became part of the city with the destruction of the city walls by Reza Shah in the 1930s. The area was later walled off by order of General Zahedi following the 1953 coup, effectively becoming a ghetto which could only be accessed via two gates. Located close to the railway terminus in the south of Tehran, like other red-light districts Shahr-e No occupied a complex and contradictory space and was eventually burned down in an arson attack at the time of the 1979 Revolution, the whole area flattened and replaced by a park. According to Batmanghelichi, the district:
… housed at one time an estimated 4,000 prostitutes living in squalid, cramped quarters. From north to south, the area was made up of approximately twelve alleyways; from west to east, it covered the space of three major streets – in total a surface area of about 135,000 square metres (2015).
Shahr-e No housed a health clinic, a police station, a social services office, as well as ‘shops, restaurants, cabarets, and a theatre’ (Mahlouji 2014: 216) and in the years before the revolution attracted the attention of visiting foreign celebrities such as British theatre director Peter Brooke and Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci. With its destruction, Shahr-e No might have disappeared entirely from the collective civic memory had it not been for the photographs of Kaveh Golestan and the film The Women’s Quarter (1966-1980) by Kamran Shirdel, commissioned by the Women’s Organisation of Iran, but which the Ministry of Culture curtailed the filming of and confiscated the footage. This was later found after revolution, allowing Shirdel to complete the film, partly by using the images of photo-journalist Kaveh Golestan who over a number of years in the 1970s took a series of uncompromising and unforgettable black and white photographs, some of which are now on display at London’s Tate modern Gallery. Golestan himself said: ‘I want to show you images that will be like a slap in your face to shatter your security. You can look away, turn off, hide your identity like murderers, but you cannot stop the truth. No one can’ (from Photos: Tehran's brothel district Shahr-e-No 1975-77 by Kaveh Golestan). Golestan’s photographs of the citadel were shown briefly at the University of Tehran in September 1978 before the exhibition was closed due to official and public sensitivities.
The history and cultural significance of Shahr-e No is a complex topic which touches on many political and social sensitivities and on which a great deal has been written. My interest here is on its sounds and on the act of silencing. On one level, Golestan’s photographs are silent; on another they scream out despair, disempowerment and poverty. Shirdel’s film, on the other hand, is saturated with sound. Framed within the setting of a literacy class for women, many of whom came from desperately poor backgrounds, mostly from villages or provincial towns outside Tehran, we hear one story after another of how the women came to be in the citadel, often sold or tricked into prostitution and now trapped in cycles of poverty, violence and addiction. However shocking Golestan’s photographic stills, the emotive impact on the viewer of watching the film and specificallyhearing the sounds of the women’s voices - mostly broken and desperate – taps into a profound and intimate linking of sound and emotion that arguably operates at a much more visceral (primeval even) level than the purely visual. Most moving for me are the sounds of children, the crying of a baby or the voice of a 12-year-old girl, pleading with the camera to help her family ‘so that we can get away from here and be free’. We also hear from a woman who did manage to escape the citadel, now selling oranges on the streets of Tehran. In a Q&A session following a screening of the film at the University of Stanford in 2014, Shirdel described how the voices were recorded away from the camera, in an attempt to de-objectify the women who were sharing their stories so open-heartedly, ‘To me, they were not prostitutes, to me they were mothers who worked, who had found a job so as to feed their children [i.e. in the absence of state or family support]. I really respected these people and I sat together with them and we paid attention, we spent time, which you should spend time. Because they were sick, they were ill, they had many physical problems’. Shirdel went on to talk about how he managed to retrieve the confiscated sound recordings from the Ministry of Culture before the revolution, through an employee who switched blank tapes for the recorded ones. Once the film footage was found after 1979, he was able to match the voices to the faces, but only many years after the original filming. The Women’s Quarter includes a long passage with one of the women singing (13’11” to 15’40”), as well as ending with a song accompanied by a bowed instrument, most likely a kamancheh or qeichak. In the same Q&A, Shirdel talked about his love of music (he had wanted to follow a career as a musician, but this was not an acceptable profession to his family at the time) and he explained that he often recorded music-making by his subjects on location, mostly from different regions of Iran,
… because the people who were in the slums were mostly exactly those who, because of the ‘White Revolution’ of the Shah [from the 1960s], had been forced to leave their homes and come to Tehran, and the real exodus of people from the villages started in those days; so for example the song the prostitute sings – you don’t see the face, you hear the sounds - it was recorded on the spot and I used the music just like the material of filming, we were getting the music from live on the spot.
As one of the audience members in the Q&A noted, The Women’s Quarter records an aspect of the social history of Iran that is preserved nowhere else, and that at the time was largely hidden from the eyes and ears of wider society. Beyond the voices of the women, though, we get little sense of the broader sounds of the citadel, of the lives of some of the most marginalised and disenfranchised members of Iranian society. We can perhaps imagine the sounds of violence, of degradation and addiction - bearing in mind this was a period when the Iranian elite was reaping vast benefits of oil wealth and the Shah was promoting a very different image of Iran abroad - of children born and growing up in the ghetto, as well as the sounds of nightlife and entertainment. We might also think beyond the citadel, to the sounds of public morality and outrage that ultimately legitimised an arson attack, allegedly by ‘Islamic revolutionary extremists who had come to “destroy the roots of moral corruption”’ (Batmanghelichi 2015, quoting from Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Mehrangiz Kar 2007:181). This was a more than symbolic ‘purification’ of the city enacted just two days before Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile to assume leadership of the unfolding revolution. It is still not known how many people, mainly women, died in the attack, from which the citadel walls offered little hope of escape. Shirdel dedicated The Women’s Quarter ‘to the innocent women and girls who perished in the fire’. He described receiving news of the fire at a time when he travelled many miles every day from one part of the city to another, attempting to capture the rapidly changing events of the revolution; he arrived at the citadel at the height of the blaze which he photographed and filmed. I prefer not to imagine the sounds: of fire, of destruction, of people trying to escape the flames and fumes, all now conveniently erased in the present-day peace and calm of a park, Park-e Razi, ‘an empty stretch of nature – cypress trees, geese floating on the water surface of the lake’ (Mahlouji 2014:216), shown in the aerial photograph below from Batmanghelichi’s article.
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I have to admit to often feeling quite conflicted and uncomfortable when writing about issues of gender in Iran, including the gendered soundscape. How does one balance conveying the many limitations - social, cultural, legal – that women are obliged to negotiate and navigate, whilst also recognising the extraordinary agency that women have created for themselves since 1979. The former risks reinforcing the kinds of victim-focused orientalising so prevalent in western media representations of Iranian women; the latter risks understating the challenges that women face in many aspects of their daily lives in a still strongly patriarchal society. For me, the broader question here is what it means to listen to patriarchy. Listening to patriarchy means listening to everything I have described in this post, including the sounds of violence against women at every level, from micro-aggressions in the street through to the normalisation of domestic violence and femicide.
As I was writing this blog post in early April 2021, I happened to hear a conference paper at the annual conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, presented by Tore Størvold (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) on the music for the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. Although the paper was on a topic entirely unrelated to this post, I was immediately struck by certain resonances with aspects of what I am trying to pin down in my discussion here, and in particular through Størvold’s discussion of Timothy Morton’s concept of the ‘hyperobject’, ‘ massively distributed entities that can be thought and computed, but not directly touched or seen. The simultaneous unavailability yet reality of the hyperobject require a radical new form of thinking to cope with it’ (2013, 37). In Størvold’s discussion, the hyperobject in question is the invisible radiation that composer Hildur Gudnadóttir seeks to convey in the music to Chernobyl, and which she described in interview as the voice of the ‘character that we do not see on the screen’. Størvold writes about how Gudnadóttir’s music doesn’t so much attempt to ‘depict’ radiation as to make it ‘sensorially present’. He observes: ‘We cannot perceive or know radioactivity in itself. We can only know it by its effects’. Størvold’s paper immediately made me think about the ways in which the patriarchal frame similarly serves as an invisible yet always already hyper-presence that permeates every aspect of Iranian life, including urban sound. It made me think about patriarchy as a presence that is often hard to pin down, but is very much known by its effects; and about how hard it is to contest something so imperceptible and ghostly. And yet, in the same way that Størvold writes about the capacity of sound to provide an intimate and embodied sensation of what radiation is, so the sonic arguably allows for an intimate engagement with patriarchal power structures that we experience ‘through an embodied perception’ (2021). To a greater or lesser extent, everything I have described in this post amplifies the connection between patriarchy and sound and brings attention to the role of urban space as patriarchy’s echo chamber. Significantly, Størvold goes on to discuss a scene in the first episode of Chernobyl in which residents of the (now ghost) town of Pripyat, located close to the powerplant gather on a bridge to watch what they believe to be simply a fire at the plant:
… [the] residents remark on the uncanny beauty of this harrowing moment, as the air above the power plant is glowing with blue light. This is the Cherenkov effect, which occurs when ionizing electrons are shot through the air at a speed close to the speed of light. Gazing at the blue hues in the air, a young woman comments, “it is beautiful”, while children play in radioactive fallout raining down on them like snow … A full minute of slow-motion camerawork and no dialogue ensues, letting the audience spend time with the uncomfortable dissonance of the beauty that is nonetheless killing the characters on screen. The men, women, and children on the railway bridge are in this very moment being attacked by an enemy invisible to them, but not inaudible to us (2021).
I quote at length from Størvold because it seems to me that there are interesting parallels with the sonic and visual beauty of toxicity in urban space. Returning to the opening of this post, I find it hard to reconcile the artistic and cultural significance of the door knockers with the systemic violence of enforced gender segregation – the muffling of the female voice and its symbolic silencing – represented by the objects and their sounds. On the one hand, they attract and fascinate me; on the other, I’m intensely aware of their role as an aestheticised technology designed to control public boundaries and behaviour and to maintain the gendered division of space. Is the aesthetic culpable here in some way, by making such divisions more palatable, by detracting attention away from the operations of patriarchy? I find a similar tension between the aesthetic and affective dimensions of the azan and other religious sonics and the multiple socio-cultural-political meanings and power relationships embedded in them. All of this raises much larger questions about how one engages with aestheticised manifestations of systemic sonic violence, including silencing.
This blog post on the gendered soundscapes of Tehran has left me with more questions than answers and I welcome any comments or further thoughts on the issues above.
I would also like to ask readers:
· Does anyone have any photos and/or sound recordings of these door knockers from Tehran that they would be willing to share for the Sonic Tehran sound map?
· Do these kinds of door knockers exist in other Islamic-majority countries or are they specific to Iran?
Thank you for reading! If you have any comments or thoughts on anything discussed in this blog, I would love to hear from you via the comments box below or the contact form on the website.
References
Sara Ahmed. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press.
Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi. 2015. ‘Red Lights in Parks: A Social History of Park-e Razi’, in Divercities: Competing Narratives and Urban Practices in Beirut, Cairo and Tehran (conference proceedings). Orient-Institut Beirut.
Amanda M. Black and Andrea F. Bohlman. 2017. ‘Resounding the Campus: Pedagogy, Race, and the Environment’, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, 8(1):6-27.
Wendy S. DeBano. 2005. ‘Enveloping Music in Gender, Nation, and Islam: Women’s Music Festivals in Post-revolutionary Iran, in ‘Music and Society in Iran’, edited by Wendy DeBano and Ameneh Youssefzadeh. Special issue, Iranian Studies 38(3):441–62. 2009.
Wedny S. DeBano. 2009. ‘Singing against Silence: Celebrating Women and Music at the Fourth Jasmine Festivaz’, in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, edited by Laudan Nooshin, 229–44. Farnham: Ashgate Press.
Vali Mahlouji. 2014. ‘Recreating Shahr-e No: The Intimate Politics of the Marginal’, in Iran: Unedited History 1960-2014. Maxxi – National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome.
Mehrangiz Kar. 2007. Crossing the Red Line: The. Struggle for Human Rights in Iran. Costa Mesa.
Timothy Morton. 2013. Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press.
Laudan Nooshin. 2018.‘“Our Angel of Salvation” Towards an Understanding of Iranian Cyberspace as an Alternative Sphere of Musical Sociality’, Ethnomusicology, 62(3):341-74.