The home as a site of state formation: The politics of transnational media consumption in Tehran

Abstract

How is the middle-class Tehran home, as a site of satellite television and Internet consumption, implicated within the processes of Iranian state formation and transformation? The new media technologies of satellite television and the Internet have far-reaching societal effects. Most significantly, their use has brought the role of the middle-class Tehran home to the center of state politics. Even though the technologies are used within the private space of the home, their use has become a significant matter of political contestation for the Iranian state. The middle-class Tehran home has become a significant site of Iranian state formation through a combination of debates and conflicts over surveillance, regulation, and access; the production of transnational, in addition to national identities; and the relational connections of the home as a space of refuge in connection with other kinds of public and private spaces. I argue theoretically for a local understanding of state formation as an everyday process; the production of space and scale as fundamental processes through which politics are constituted; and, in particular, the space of the home as a significant site of state formation. Methodologically, my project calls for the use of ethnographic, local scales and methods of analysis for observing and analyzing national and transnational processes of state formation. What centrally organizes this project is an attempt to get at the heart of the complexities through which the space of the home in contemporary Tehran is produced and reproduced through social experiences of the processes of state formation, as they intersect with global media flows. Focusing on the everyday space of the home as the site through which local, national, and transnational processes are experienced allows me to examine the range of ways in which power relations are perceived and reconfigured by Tehran residents. State formation, as a process, reveals the complex ways in which abstract notions such as "the state" and "the globe" require and are shaped by everyday spatial processes that give meaning to power relations.