Remapping the Cultural Geography of Iran: Women, Space, and Mobility

FAIN: FA-37403-02

Farzaneh M. Milani
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)

No project description available

Media Coverage

"Saudi Arabia Freedom Riders" and (Media Coverage)
Date: 1/3/2012

Associated Products

Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement (Book)
Title: Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement
Author: Farzaneh Milani
Abstract: A woman not only needs a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote, but also the freedom to leave it and return to it at will; for a room without that right becomes a prison cell. The privilege of self-directed movement, the power to pick up and go as one pleases, has not been a traditional “right” of Iranian women. This prerogative has been denied them in the name of piety, anatomy, chastity, class, safety, even beauty. It is only during the last 160 years that the spell has been broken and Iranian women have emerged as a moderating, modernizing force. Women writers have been at the forefront of this de-segregating movement and renegotiation of boundaries. Words, Not Swords explores the legacy of sex segregation and its manifestations in Iranian literature and film, in notions of beauty and the erotics of passivity. Milani expands her argument beyond Iranian culture, arguing that freedom of movement is a theme that crosses frontiers and dissolves conventional distinctions of geography, history, and religion. She makes bold connections between veiling and foot binding, between Cinderella and Barbie, between the figures of the female Gypsy and the witch. In so doing, she challenges cultural hierarchies which divert attention from key issues in the control of women across the globe.
Year: 2011
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Type: Single author monograph

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