Abstract
The 1953 Coup, engineered by the CIA to remove the first democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, is one of the most significant turning points of the contemporary history of Iran. Despite the impact of this political climax on Iranian women’s lives and activisms, the scope of the academic studies addressing the Coup still remains exclusive to men. However, this general masculine approach in academic research, Iranian women authors have written a female standpoint of national geography and history in the genre of fiction. In this paper, I re-read the novel Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran (2012) by Shahrnush Parsipur, one the of most famous novelists of the Iranian diaspora, to argue how the author attempts to fill the blanks in narratives of the 1953 Coup in her novel.
Literary scholars read the novel as an unmarked and white-washed feminist piece that advocates for Iranian women leaving their male partners and family members behind. Nevertheless, in my reading through the lens of feminist geography, I argue that Parsipur writes Tehran and Karaj, the capital and its suburb at the time, as representatives of Iran after the Coup. As the novel opens with the Coup unfolding in the streets of Tehran, a group of women struggles with the different oppressions. As a result of the intersectionality of governmental violence of the Coup, combined with previous traditional patriarchy and misogyny, some of these women found their way into a female-exclusive space of an abandoned garden in Karaj. This transformation happens through the performativity of their genders in several unforeseen ways; from murdering an abusive husband to becoming victims of rape or family honor killings.
Their chosen performativities change the colonized space into a temporal safe-space. However, before these women have the needed time to own the space, they have to return from Karaj to Tehran. In Tehran, this time the scene of post-Coup upheavals, they found no option but to return to their old oppressors. This paper argues that Parsipur has written the spatiality of the Iranian female body under the governmental violence of colonization under Pahlavis and showed how the colonized space prohibits any possibility of the emergence of feminist consciousness.
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