“Why is it the women who have to be virgins?” demands her great-aunt in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Embroideries. Parvine poses her impassioned query to a group of women, three generations deep, about the expected state of women’s bodies at the time of marriage even while the same expectations do not fall on men’s bodies. Their conversation turns from marriage (arranged and love) and sexual pleasure (his and hers) to embroideries, vaginal re-stitching often employed to hide evidence of previous sexual relationships and, via this disguise, remake women’s bodies into – or remark them as – virgin. Throughout her visual and verbal illustrations of this conversation, Satrapi functions not as a removed narrator but as part of a larger group of storytellers, offering her own contributions while more often taking in the buzz around her: stories, told by and to other women, in which sex and sexuality are displayed on their physical and sexual bodies. Through these stories, readers begin to glean the extent to which “in heterosexual theology bodies easily become occupied territories, to be portrayed as faulty or sinful.”* Satrapi’s fellow characters-cum-narrators give in to and reject bodily (perhaps embodied) occupation by heteronormative systems and structures, specifically marriage, and in so doing accept or reject the expectation that their physical and sexual bodies be so marked. In and through a woman-only conversation spanning an afternoon, this varied group – upper- and middle-class; married and divorced, widowed and single; with various levels of education, practical, academic and both – creates a space in which they relive their life experiences, the ways they then responded and would respond if given another chance. In this paper, I trace the placement and representation of physical, sexual and embodied selves as they struggle with and, in some cases, transcend these states of occupation; I draw on Marcella Althaus-Reid’s discussion of ‘indecent theology’ and Saba Mahmood’s description of agency to trace the heteronormativity that serves as their occupier. By focusing on three women – an unnamed mother who has birthed four children but never seen a penis; Satrapi’s grandmother who has oft been called on for advice about sex and hiding its evidence; and Parvine, who ultimately rejects marriage and the bonds accompanying it – I trace the conceptualization(s) of self and body that results in or rejects transcendence. * Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology: Readings on Poverty, Sexual Identity and God (London: SCM Press, 2004), 96.