Unveiling Desire

Devaleena Das,Colette Morrow

• Editore: Rutgers University Press
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813587868
• Argomento: Scienze sociali
• Categoria: Studi di genere

In Unveiling Desire, Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow show that the duality of the fallen/saved woman is as prevalent in Eastern culture as it is in the West, specifically in literature and films. Using examples from the Middle to Far East, including Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Japan, and China, this anthology challenges the fascination with Eastern women as passive, abject, or sexually exotic, but also resists the temptation to then focus on the veil, geisha, sati, or Muslim women’s oppression without exploring Eastern women’s sexuality beyond these contexts. The chapters cover instead mind/body sexual politics, patriarchal cultural constructs, the anatomy of sex and power in relation to myth and culture, denigration of female anatomy, and gender performativity. From Persepolis to Bollywood, and from fairy tales to crime fiction, the contributors to Unveiling Desire show how the struggle for women’s liberation is truly global.  

Part I

Chastity, Fidelity, and Women’s Cross-Cultural Encounters

1

Feminist Neoimperialism in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

Colette Morrow

This chapter analyzes Persepolis, a coming-of-age story about Marji, an Iranian girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. Written by Marjane Satrapi, the graphic novel was published after 9/11 when President George W. Bush infamously included Iran on the “Axis of Evil” because of the country’s alleged support for terrorist groups and its nuclear power program. Morrow examines how, in these politically charged contexts, Persepolis achieves Satrapi’s oft-stated goal of “humanizing” Iran and Iranians for Western audiences by foregrounding Marji’s passage into adulthood in a series of vignettes that use feminist Orientalist stereotypes that demonize Muslims, a strategy that US audiences, including feminist scholars, generally fail to recognize. Countering conventional wisdom in US scholarship on the book, Morrow concludes that Marji’s fallenness is her failure to develop a mature sense of self that would have enabled her to safely negotiate sharply contrasting gender codes in her family culture and Iran’s public sphere. Unceasingly rebellious and resistant, she is sent to Austria to finish secondary school because she cannot cultivate and deploy a self-protective borderland (mestiza, in Gloria Anzaldua’s words) consciousness.

Introduction

In 2003, Pantheon Books published an English translation (from French) of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, in the United States. Set in Iran against the backdrop of the 1979 Revolution when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was deposed and the Islamic Republic of Iran established, this coming-of-age story featuring Marji Satrapi, its charismatic, precocious protagonist and narrator who constantly rebels against the country’s new cultural hegemony, was an instant hit.1 Story of a Childhood’s extraordinary success in the United States coincided with President George W. Bush’s so-called War on Terror, during which his administration twice considered taking military action against Iran (soon after 9/11 and again from 2005 through 2007). Although the United States did not launch an attack on Iran, Bush infamously included Iran on the “Axis of Evil” because of the country’s alleged support for terrorist groups and its nuclear power program, which, according to Western governments and the United Nations, could have been converted to produce nuclear weapons (“State of the Union Address”). During this period, Iranian-American diasporic fiction and prose, most notably Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003), which transnational feminists and postcolonial scholars in Iran and the United States decried as neo-Orientalist because its diatribes against the Islamic Republic promoted the case for US military intervention in Iran, garnered huge audiences (Rowe 254 and 271; Dabashi; Bahramitash 234).2 In these politically charged contexts, Satrapi’s goal in writing Story of a Childhood was, as she often stated, to “humanize” Iran and Iranians. Educators and activists, including feminists, who were working to foster respect for populations perceived as “suspect” in the post-9/11 hate-fest, quickly introduced Story of a Childhood to secondary schools and universities, while other enthusiastic fans flocked to Satrapi’s book signings, lectures, and later, film showings. Scholarly essays subsequently lauded its ability to “provide a productive avenue for beginning the process of critical thinking necessary in order for Western students to reconsider their [false, negative] beliefs about Iran, gender, and war” (Botshon and Plastas 2).

Story of a Childhood does prompt US audiences to reconsider stereotypes about Iran and Iranians, but at the expense of fostering Islamophobia. On one hand, Marji’s character effectively counters depictions of Iranians and Iran as “evil.” She is a charismatic character whose antics evoke empathy among readers who can see themselves in the jeans-wearing, heavy metal-loving, back-talking youngster with spunk because she is like them, an “ordinary” girl made “different” only by the extraordinary circumstances of her life. However, in addition to calling attention to commonalities between US readers and Iranians like the Satrapi family in such representations of Marji, the book also argues that Islam is responsible for Iran’s misdeeds at home and abroad. In effect, it recuperates Iran’s image by blaming Islam for all that demarcates Iran as the West’s antithesis, including the country’s suspected support of terrorism, human rights violations, oppression of women, and totalitarianism.

In so doing, Story of a Childhood does not distinguish between Islam as a whole and Khomeinism, which was a unique phenomenon in the Muslim world when Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini, its architect, designed the Islamic Republic on the basis of his radical reinterpretation of the Qur’anic notion of velayat-e faqih (clerical authority). According to Khomeini, theocentrism is the only legitimate form of government, a tenet inconsistent with 1,500 years of Islamic theology. Thus Khomeinism is a politicized form of Islam that, as such, Ervand Abrahamian argues, “broke sharply with Shia traditions” (3) by establishing, as Adib-Moghaddam writes, a never-before-seen form of government (5). Khomeinism also departed from the Sunni institution of the caliphate, which for most of its history distributed rule between religious leaders and hereditary, lay monarchs.3 Khomeinism was also innovative in its synthesis of disparate Muslim and non-Muslim ideologies, fusing, for example, Marxist ideas (though Khomeini rejected Marxism and persecuted socialists during his reign), nationalism, and Islamic precepts to fashion populist remedies for Iranians’ “economic, social, and political grievances” (Abrahamian 3, 17, 30). These problems, held Khomeinism (and the vast majority of Iranians agreed regardless of their political affiliation), were the result of Mohammad Reza Shah’s totalitarianism, US exploitation of the country’s resources and control of the government (evidenced by the CIA-engineered overthrow of democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953), and gharbzadegi (Westoxication or Occidentosis),4 Western-driven market globalization and cultural imperialism. Gharbzadegi, according to Khomeinism, led to secularism and a concomitant decrease in religion’s importance, erasure of Iranian culture, immorality, and social injustice in the form of increasing poverty and intensifying class stratification. In addition to this populism, Khomeinism was socially conservative, invoking legal and other materials that had dubious connections to the Qur’an to develop idiosyncratic interpretations of scripture to justify imposing draconian regulations on private and public spaces. Violations and dissent were punished with execution (at least seven thousand from 1979 through 1985), detention without trial, rigged trials, torture, and rape. Clerics and lay people who opposed Khomeinism (especially Khomeini’s radical notion of velayat-e faqih) on the basis conventional Islamic perspectives and other theocentric models of government that did not align with Khomeinism were targeted for persecution,5 which is an incontrovertible indicator of Khomeinism’s unorthodoxy.

Feminist Neoimperialism

Because Story of a Childhood does not clarify that Khomeinism’s theology, extreme social conservatism, and political despotism deviate significantly from orthodox Islam—and, in fact, continues to be considered illegitimate by even conservative Muslim scholars and clerics—it humanizes Iran but only by scapegoating a synecdochic version of Islam. This maneuver clearly imbibes feminist neoimperialism,6 a pseudo or convoluted feminism that, among its other traits, characterizes Islam as a uniquely oppressive form of patriarchalism in order to justify Western interventions in Muslim societies under the auspices of women’s liberation. Fatimeh Keshavarz, in Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, identifies feminist neoimperialism’s Islamophobic strategies and features, which include (1) essentializing the nature of Islam and Muslims, (2) focusing excessively on veiling, (3) depicting Islam as a monolithic belief system mired in religiosity, (4) characterizing Muslim men as misogynistic bullies and terrorists, (5) representing individual experiences as totalizing explanations of Muslim culture, and (6) portraying middle-class status as universal while erasing experiences of the working classes and poor (26–45). In short, feminist neoimperialism genders the false dichotomy between West and East that, as Edward Said famously argues in Orientalism, depicts the East as the inferior Other in relation to the “superior” Western Self.

The performance of feminist neoimperialism in Story of a Childhood resonated well with audiences, including feminist readers (especially those who, ironically, worked to resist Islamophobia in the post-9/11 era) because it sublimates Islamophobia into a desire to rescue Marji (and, symbolically, all Muslim women) from Islam vis-à-vis dramatic confrontations that she has with Muslim characters who are represented as ignorant, stupid bullies. While Marji “wins” these conflicts (at least until the end of the book) because, as her autonarrative insists, she is cleverer than her tormentors, these episodes make the point that she is contained within a milieu that is repressive and hostile and from which she needs liberating. The book thus appeals to the Western, feminist savior complex7 (Spivak 48–50; Abu-Lughod 122–23; Cole), a self-edifying desire to impose an ethnocentric form of feminism on Other women—a topic explored by Lila Abu-Lughod in Do Muslim Women Need Saving? and Chandra Talpade Mohanty in Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Just as colonial-era European men sanitized Orientalism as ennobling of themselves, making it a matter of saving “brown women from brown men,” in the words of Gayatri Spivak (296), the history of US feminisms is littered with salvific sentiments, which not only are imperialist on their face but also justify colonizing agendas, feminist or otherwise. For example, the Feminist Majority Foundation, after almost a decade-long initiative aimed at ending gender apartheid in Afghanistan, welcomed the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 as an opportunity to reinstate women’s rights, a position that, as Ann Russo argues in “The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid: The Intersections of Feminism and Imperialism in the United States,” enabled Bush to argue that the war would liberate women (559). The feminist savior complex, therefore, is a matter of Western feminism colluding with the patriarchal, neoimperialist, neo-Orientalist agenda, but in a manner that appears to take the moral high ground. In Story of a Childhood, this tactic, of course, makes Marji even more sympathetic to readers while shrewdly, deftly reifying Islamophobia and feminist neoimperialism rather than resisting them.

But most US scholarship on the book, instead of bringing critical attention to this Islamophobia and neoimperialism, celebrates Story of a Childhood as a “borderlands” text that deconstructs the East/West binary, with some analyses going so far as to suggest that Story of a Childhood counters Islamophobia. Nima Naguibi and Andrew O’Malley argue in “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Satrapi’s Story of a Childhood” that the book “upsets the easy categories and distinctions . . . between the secular West and the threatening religious East” (245). Amy Malek makes a similar point in “Memoir as Iran Exile Cultural Production” when she states that Story of a Childhood synthesizes “traditionally Western genres with Iranian history, culture and storytelling, producing a particularly constructive opportunity to create . . . a third space from which to question dominant notions in Western society regarding Iran and Iranian culture and history” (359).

In “Crossing Cultures/Crossing Genres: The Re-invention of the Graphic Memoir in Story of a Childhood and Story of a Childhood 2,” Lopamudra Basu likewise asserts, “Satrapi’s reworking of autobiography as graphic memoir disrupts the categorization of Iranian female identity as one in direct opposition to modern Western female identity, positing one as complete suppression by religious authority and the other as the apotheosis of freedom and individualism” (1). Manuela Constantin asserts in “Marji: Popular Commix Heroine Breathing Life into the Writing of History” that Satrapi “questions cultural assumptions and . . . deconstructs the role of stereotyping in the articulation of ideologies” (438).

Monica Chiu opines, “By capitalizing on standard images of veiled Iranian women, Satrapi ironically individualizes her protagonist Marji, collapsing the terrain between accepted impression (or stereotype) and personal, lived experience” (101). Chiu subsequently concludes that Satrapi’s use of space and images “offers a corrective to the notion of mutually exclusive divisions between colonizer and colonized, modernity and tradition, secular and religious, the institution and the private individual” (108). Furthermore, claims Stacey Weber-Feve, Story of a Childhood “mobilizes in both word and image stereotypes and generalizations of the Islamic Republic and clichés of Western ideology in manners that contest traditional ways of both being and seeing and their methods or processes of constructing meaning and identity” (324). Joseph Darda adds that as an autographic text, Story of a Childhood is a transnational account that “falls outside U.S. frames of understanding and thus works to unsettle them” (38).

This consensus that Story of a Childhood contests “U.S. frames” and encourages Westerners to reconsider negative stereotypes largely rests on the argument that as Marji matures and completes her rite of passage from child- to adulthood, she selects elements of both Western and Eastern cultures to develop a hybrid sense of self that is empowering and enables her to function proficiently in both milieus. However, these analyses overlook that Marji’s task is to develop a sense of self that enables her to enter Iranian, not Western or US, society and that the borders that she must cross lie between Iran’s new cultural hegemony and her family’s now marginalized ethos. Furthermore, the book’s conclusion does not support the claim that she acquires social skills that serve her well in Iran, for Story of a Childhood ends with Marji leaving the country to go to school in Austria because her evolving sense of self ill prepares her for adulthood in Iran. In fact, the antics that the scholarship calls empowering actually endanger Marji, for even minor rebellions can lead to imprisonment, torture, rape, and death. Third, rather than suggesting that she is learning to negotiate disparate private and public values, Story of a Childhood consistently represents Marji’s rite of passage as a binarized choice between her freethinking, secular family culture and the oppressive Khomeinist order, though, as noted previously, without distinguishing between it and Islam as a whole.8 That the contrast between the two spheres is built by excessively focusing on veiling, characterizing all Khomeinists as Muslim bullies and Khomeinist men as misogynistic, monstrous Muslims, and often does not acknowledge how class status differentiated Iranians’ experiences and cultivates an insidious feminist neoimperialism that dilutes or sanitizes Islamophobia, reconstituting it for Western audiences as a principled antioppression stance—readers’ prejudices about Iran are challenged with humor, but the structure of Islamophobia is left intact, including the “righteousness-endowing” desire to rescue women from Islam.

Veiling as Spectacle and Myopic Vision

In fairness, Iran’s 1979 revolution creates a particularly challenging social landscape for Marji’s journey into adulthood. Initially, a broad coalition of activists across the political spectrum—left to right, secular to theocratic, liberal to conservative, and poor, working- and middle-class—united to depose US-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi from the throne, and Marji’s parents, as did most everyone in Iran, supported a change in government. In fact, as members of the Qajar Dynasty that the Pahlavis had ousted in 1925, Marji’s family long ...