Refining Manhood: Spatial Coloniality, Industrial Sexuality, and the “Company Man” in Abadan, 1942–52

This paper adopts a spatial and biopolitical approach to the 1951 Iranian oil nationalization, arguing that the movement was a visceral rejection of the "Company Man"—a sanitized, domesticated masculinity engineered by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). Following the 1946 labor crisis, the AIOC shifted from simple extraction to a "Master Plan" of social engineering. This regime utilized urban planning and the "techno-politics" of housing—such as replacing the communal korsi with Western furniture—to "literally" lift Iranians off the ground and into an individualized, upright industrial subjectivity. Central to this spatial coloniality was a rigid "tripartite" partitioning of Abadan into racialized tiers, enforced by a cordon sanitaire designed to protect the "purity" of British domestic spaces from the perceived "sanitary menace" of the Iranian workforce. While senior staff enjoyed the manicured garden-suburbs of Braim, the vast majority of laborers were bureaucratically categorized as "migrant" bachelors and relegated to the shantytowns of Hasirabad. Drawing on Hanan Hammad’s framework of "industrial sexuality" and AIOC medical archives, this paper demonstrates how the company pathologized these "bachelor" margins, using invasive venereal disease surveillance to manage the "sexual crisis" of the laboring body. Thus, the 1951 strikes represented a "re-masculinization" and a reclamation of space. By breaking the spatial cordon to occupy the refinery and the city streets, Iranian workers and women dismantled the biopolitical boundaries of the company town, reclaiming Abadan as a living Iranian city.