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Reclaiming Womanhood, Redefining Gender: A Study of Iranian Society’s Gender Roles in Mania Akbari’s Film "20 Fingers" (2004)
Abstract
For centuries in the history of Iran, the confined female body set the norms for defining the ideals of womanhood for Iranian women in a patriarchal religious context. As the result, the representations of female body and sexuality in Iranian arts were also concealed through the abundant of “displaced allegories”. In recent years, however, a new Iranian female generation is redefining and renegotiating the notions of femininity, sexuality, and gender. Aligning with this revival of “gender consciousness” in Iran, Iranian cinema, as the site of Iran’s social and cultural showcase, has been the main venue for the representation of these new practices of gender and sexuality. In this paper, I argue that the emergence of young female filmmakers in Iran has not only brought about the transgression of constituted boundaries of gender in a social, cultural, and religious context, but also subverted the cinematic modesty codes imposed upon Iranian cinema after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in order to restrict the representations of female body on the screen. In particular, I examine the unprecedented cinematic work of Mania Akbari, "20 Fingers" (2004), in regard to redefining the notions of femininity and sexuality in Iran through a new portrayal of Iranian woman on the screen. Inspired by Abbas Kiarostami’s "Ten" (2002), "20 Fingers" puts the female body at the cinematic threshold of Iran’s contemporary culture and subverts the constituted notions of sexual differences and gender norms in Iranian society to challenge the gender disparities and segregations enforced upon Iranian women in the name of biological differences. My aim, therefore, is to highlight a less known (due to the lack of public distribution and screening as well as the censorship of Iran’s government), yet crucial, practice of feminist film making in Iranian post-revolutionary cinema and connect it to a broader socio-cultural context of gender and sexual transformations in contemporary Iran. By studying Mania Akbari’s "20 Fingers", I conclude that the novel sexual practices in Iranian society and cinema have invoked a new contingent value-system through which the boundaries of gender and sexuality are blurring. The transgression of carnal and gender boundaries by the young Iranian generation, especially women, is certainly a valiant act that sheds light on the determination and active agency of Iranian women in the society in order to bring about gender parities.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
None