Abstract
Shirin Neshat, a multidisciplinary expatriate Iranian artist, depicts the lives of four Iranian women from diverse social strata during a decisive period, in her first feature film, Women without Men (2009) that is loosely adapted from the novel by the same name, written by Shahrnush Parsipur in 1989. Neshat also visualizes the fifth character from the novel, Mahdokht, in a separate short film of identical designation in 2004. Women without Men and Mahdokht are set within the notorious context of the 1953 coup d’e ́tat in Iran contrived by the CIA and the British against the secular democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. These movies are multi-layered portrayals of the intertwining lives of Iranian women “all trapped in seemingly poignant and oppressive situations”: Zarrin, Munis, Faezeh, Fakhri, and Mahdokht, where the critical space of garden becomes a sanctuary for these women to find safety and security. Hence, the majority of scholarship on Women without men is circulating around the exploration of the symbolic employment of the garden as a “site of rebellion” and “as a feminist epistemic space”. However, I aim to offer a novel reading by providing a narrative analysis to tease out how these women, in Neshat’s movies, engage with the politics of everyday resistance, negation, and subversion in a patriarchal society that inhibits women’s activism and freedom of expression.
By drawing on feminist standpoint theory with its emphasis on “the lived experiences of women”, Bettina Aptheker’s resistance “shaped by the dailiness of women’s lives”, and Asef Bayat’s theory of “quiet encroachment”, I argue that Neshat intends to illustrate that Iranian women, despite “Sokut-o-Sokun,” or silence and immobility that is the expected social norms for ideal virtuous and desirable females in Iran, exercised agency in opposition to oppressive power with quotidian practices, such as appearing in public spaces to reverse the domestic private sphere of the home, to negate, resist, and subvert the dominant power structures, and existing social and gender norms.
Keywords: Everyday resistance, Quite Encroachment, Agency, Gender Norms, Shirin Neshat, Women Without Men
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