Women's Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran


Book Description

The four essays in this volume discuss the autobiographical writings of Iranian women. The contributors to the collection include William Hanaway, Michael Hillmann, and Farzaneh Milani. Milani asks why modern Persian literature, with its rich self-reflective tradition, has not produced many autobiographies, and what particular problems confront Iranian women engaging in autobiographical writing. Najmabadi discusses one of the earliest modern autobiographical writings by a woman, Taj os-Saltaneh’s Memories, and Hillman projects Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry as an autobiographical voice. Hanaway investigates the possibilities of going beyond lack of Western-style autobiographical form and looking for what Persian literary forms and categories provide for the autobiographical voice.




Veils and Words


Book Description

This is the first book in any language about the writing of women in Iran. For centuries any sense that there could be a literary tradition among women was suppressed. Since the middle of the 19th century, however, a number a of pioneering women have defied the traditional order to produce poetry and novels of the highest quality; but many of them have paid for their courage with accusations of immorality, promiscuity, heresy and even lunacy.




Women Write Iran


Book Description

Women Write Iran is the first full-length study on life narratives by Iranian women in the diaspora. Nima Naghibi investigates auto/biographical narratives across genres—including memoirs, documentary films, prison testimonials, and graphic novels—and finds that they are tied together by the experience of the 1979 Iranian revolution as a traumatic event and by a powerful nostalgia for an idealized past. Naghibi is particularly interested in writing as both an expression of memory and an assertion of human rights. She discovers that writing life narratives contributes to the larger enterprise of righting historical injustices. By drawing on the empathy of the reader/spectator/witness, Naghibi contends, life narratives offer the possibilities of connecting to others and responding with an increased commitment to social justice. The book opens with an examination of how the widely circulated video footage of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan on the streets of Tehran in June 2009 triggered the articulation of life narratives by diasporic Iranians. It concludes with a discussion of the prominent place of the 1979 revolution in these narratives. Throughout, the focus is on works that have become popular in the West, such as Marjane Satrapi’s best-selling graphic novel Persepolis. Naghibi addresses the significant questions raised by these works: How do we engage with human rights and social justice as readers in the West? How do these narratives draw our attention and elicit our empathic reactions? And what is our responsibility as witnesses to trauma, atrocity, and human suffering?







Iranian Women in the Memoir


Book Description

"This book investigates the various reasons behind the elevation of the memoir, previously categorized as a marginalized form of life writing that denudes the private space of women, especially in Western Asian countries such as Iran. Through a comparative investigation of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (1) and (2), the book examines the way both narrative and graphic memoirs offer possibilities for Iranian women to reclaim new territory, transgress a post-traumatic revolution, and reconstruct a new model of womanhood that evades socio-political and religious restrictions. Exile is conceptualized as empowering rather than a continued status of loss and disillusionment, and the liminality of both women writers turns into a space of artistic production. The book also resists the New Orientalist scope within which Reading Lolita in Tehran, more than Persepolis, has been misread. In order to reject these allegations, this work sheds light on the representation of Iranian women in Reading Lolita in Tehran, not as weak victims held captive by a totalitarian version of Islam, but as active participants rewriting their stories through the liberating power of the memoir. The comparative approach between narrative and comic memoirs is a fruitful way of displaying similar experiences of disillusionment, loss, return, and exile through different techniques. The common thread uniting both memoirs is their zeal to reclaim Iranian women's agency and strength over subservience and passivity."




Women in Place


Book Description

While much has been written about the impact of the 1979 Islamic revolution on life in Iran, discussions about the everyday life of Iranian women have been glaringly missing. Women in Place offers a gripping inquiry into gender segregation policies and women’s rights in contemporary Iran. Author Nazanin Shahrokni takes us onto gender-segregated buses, inside a women-only park, and outside the closed doors of stadiums where women are banned from attending men’s soccer matches. The Islamic character of the state, she demonstrates, has had to coexist, fuse, and compete with technocratic imperatives, pragmatic considerations regarding the viability of the state, international influences, and global trends. Through a retelling of the past four decades of state policy regulating gender boundaries, Women in Place challenges notions of the Iranian state as overly unitary, ideological, and isolated from social forces and pushes us to contemplate the changing place of women in a social order shaped by capitalism, state-sanctioned Islamism, and debates about women’s rights. Shahrokni throws into sharp relief the ways in which the state strives to constantly regulate and contain women’s bodies and movements within the boundaries of the “proper” but simultaneously invests in and claims credit for their expanded access to public spaces.




Alive and Kicking


Book Description

Alive and Kicking ‎This collection of twenty short stories by ten leading Iranian ‎women writers introduces many of them to English-speaking ‎audiences for the first time. These are successful authors ‎whose books are widely read and appreciated by Iranian ‎readers. Some have won awards and many of their books have ‎been reprinted multiple times.‎These writers live in different parts of the Islamic Republic of ‎Iran and work in a wide range of professions. They write ‎under difficult circumstances since all their works are ‎scrutinised by the Ministry of Guidance before permission to ‎publish is granted, often after substantial rewriting, cutting ‎and editing. Getting published thus requires a great deal of ‎energy and persistence, making the authors' efforts to keep ‎Iranian culture alive even more admirable.‎The stories range over the recent past and the present and ‎explore themes such as love and its ending, desire, friendship, ‎the strains and frustrations of family life, the challenges of the ‎workplace. Some are highly realistic while others are fantastic ‎and surreal. The female characters in the stories are often ‎strong and independent, sometimes angry and rebellious. In ‎this way the collection provides a series of portraits of women's ‎lives in modern-day Iran. ‎




Revolutionary Bodies


Book Description

Breasts, Hands and Faces : Gazing at Iran's Mediascape -- Red-Lights in Parks : a Social History of Park-E Razi -- Post-Revolutionary 'Prostitution' and its Discontents -- Naked Modesty and the Reformation of Statues in Post-Revolutionary Iran -- HIV/AIDS and the Problem of 'Taboos' Talking.




Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling and Reveiling


Book Description

Why were urban women veiled in the early 1900s, unveiled from 1936 to 1979, and reveiled after the 1979 revolution? This question forms the basis of Hamideh Sedghi's original and unprecedented contribution to politics and Middle Eastern studies. Using primary and secondary sources, Sedghi offers new knowledge on women's agency in relation to state power. In this rigorous analysis she places contention over women at the centre of the political struggle between secular and religious forces and demonstrates that control over women's identities, sexuality, and labor has been central to the consolidation of state power. Sedghi links politics and culture with economics to present an integrated analysis of the private and public lives of different classes of women and their modes of resistance to state power.




Iran Modern


Book Description

'Iran Modern' offers a timely exploration of the cultural diversity and production of avant-garde art in Iran after World War II and up to the revolution, from 1950 through to 1979.