Daughters of Persia

Representing Female Characters in Iranian Graphic Novels

Straddling the binary of us/them, literature produced within the Iranian diaspora is faced with representing the, often vilified, Muslim-“other” whilst engaging its audience to witness human rights violations in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Here, writers negotiate discourses of cultural relativity and condemnation. While a critique of the IRI provides a tangible form of reference for orientalist discourses within “the West”, attempts to ignore human rights violations here flirt with the apologetic discourse of cultural relativism. Undoubtedly, women and girls provide the most striking form of visual reference for “western” perceptions of Middle Eastern “otherness”. Here, notions of a particular form of gendered, Islamic oppression are centred around discourses of the oppressed hejabi v. the liberated, unveiled woman. Certainly, the Iranian graphic novel is, due to its emphasis on the visual, forced to contend with such discourses. Moreover, such texts are confronted with the white-feminist expectation of the veiled, Middle Eastern woman to be devoid of agency, while grappling with the emotional labour associated with persistence in both Iranian and European patriarchal society. This paper considers the renowned graphic novels of Marjane Satrapi alongside Parusa Bashi’s Nylon Road, Persia Blues by Dara Naraghi and Brent Bowman, and Amir and Khalil’s web-novel Zarah’s Paradise. In using these texts, this paper deliberates how women and girls are framed within Iranian graphic novels as mothers, daughters, and wives. Using these exemplary texts, this paper determines the ways in which the Iranian graphic novel is utilised to convey trauma, persistence, and representation inside Iran and within the diaspora. Moreover, in demonstrating the graphic novel’s ability to convey meaning through its aesthetic style, theses texts highlight the importance of this medium in providing a “western” readership with an insight into both a gendered struggle within the IRI and the racialisation of Iranian women and girlhoods within “the West”. Through these means, this paper challenges the elitist, white-feminist view of Iranian women and girls as oppressed and lacking agency. Moreover, this paper acknowledges both the female struggle against Iranian and “western” patriarchal societal models and the writers’ negotiation of character empowerment and the emotional labour of persistence.