Pedalling in Pahlavi Iran: Cycle mobility and competing masculinities

Abstract

Using Persian memoirs, periodicals, and photographs, this essay examines how Iranians integrated the bicycle into their everyday lives in the rapidly changing socioeconomic contexts of the Pahlavi period (1925–1979). It seeks to achieve two goals. First, by drawing comparisons from different geographical contexts, it illustrates how Iran's comparatively belated encounter with bicycle technology shaped its use and social meanings, revealing the agency of consumers of small technologies in the global South. Second, by examining competing ideals of manhood associated with the bicycle, it expands Middle Eastern historiography on masculinity beyond the modern middle class. As growing Iranian working-class men developed peculiar aesthetics and practices around the bicycle that distinguished themselves from modern middle-class men, cycle mobility became highly contested along class and gender lines, raising aspirations and anxieties in the Iranian urban space.