The essay explores the entangled relationship between modernization and women's visibility and representation through three pictorial spheres most redolent of that relationship: photo studio culture (1880s–1930s), satirical cartoons (1920–58), and costume exhibition (1972–76). The study prioritizes minoritarian politics formulated by women through their organizations and public activities, whether charitable in the late nineteenth century, educational in the early twentieth century, or “civilizational” from the mid-twentieth century on. By examining pictorial and textual sources, it proposes that the Armenian woman as a discursive phenomenon was central to Iran's mainstream modernization and foregrounds the complex working of a double marginality to the processes, strategies, and anxieties of late Qajar and Pahlavi modernization.
