Damsels in distress: manufacturing ‘Lolitas’ for the West in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran

ABSTRACT

When Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran was first published in 2003, it was widely acclaimed as a narrative that exemplified the ‘oppression’ of Iranian/Muslim women in post-revolutionary Iran. More importantly, Western critics were quick to praise the text as a testament to the significance of teaching Western literature as a liberating medium for young Iranian women. This paper, however, argues that Nafisi’s representation of the Iranian ‘woman question’ operates within the paradigm of the neo-Orientalist discourse, particularly rejuvenated in the post-9/11 political landscape. More specifically, it will be demonstrated that the representation of Iranian/Muslim women in the narrative is informed by the convergence of Orientalist feminism and feminist Orientalism. As such, the narative serves to further marginalize, silence, and oppress women by demonizing Muslim women, erasing significant historico-political contexts, misrepresenting and oversimplifying the question of the veil, and subjecting Iranian women to a colonial gaze in a quasi-haremesque space.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Henceforth abbreviated as RLT for brevity.

² Gillian Whitlock, ‘From Tehran to Tehrangeles: The Generic Fix of Iranian Exilic Memoirs’, ARIEL 39, no. 1–2 (2008): 8.

³ Seyed Mohammad Marandi, ‘Reading Azar Nafisi in Tehran’, Comparative American Studies 6, no. 2 (2008), 179.

⁴ Zeinab Ghasemi Tari, ‘The Politics of Knowledge and Post-Revolutionary Iran: An Analysis of the Iranian Studies Journal and Iranian-American Memoirs (1979–2012)’, (PhD diss., University of Tehran, 2015): 243.

⁵ Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2003): 1. All citations are from this book, hence ‘RLT’ is omitted from subsequent references.

⁶ Amy Malek, ‘Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production: A Case Study of Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” Series’, Iranian Studies 39, no. 3 (2006): 362.

⁷ Roksana Bahramitash, ‘The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14, no. 2 (2005): 221; Fatemeh Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007): 112; Anne Donadey and Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, ‘Why Americans Love Azar Nafisi’s ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’, Signs 33, no. 3 (2008): 624.

⁸ Richard Byrne, ‘A Collision of Prose and Politics’, The Chronicle of Higher Education 53, no. 8 (2006a): 9.

⁹ Malek, ‘Memoir as Iranian’, 365; Amy DePaul, ‘Re-reading Reading Lolita in Tehran’, MELUS 33, no. 2 (2008): 73–4; Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh, ‘Why Americans’, 623.

¹⁰ While both ‘New Orientalist’ and ‘neo-Orientalist’ have been proposed by scholars to refer to the recent literary manifestations of Orientalism, this study adopts ‘neo-Orientalism’ to emphasize the continuity between contemporary and classical modes of Orientalism.

¹¹ Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars, 2.

¹² Ibid., 4.

¹³ Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams, ‘Neo-Orientalism;’ in Globalizing American Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 285.

¹⁴ Nafisi was employed by the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She was hired while Paul Wolfowitz was dean before he became a key advocate of the invasion of Iraq as Deputy Secretary of Defence from 2001 to 2005 under George W. Bush.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars, 6.

¹⁷ Lamont Lindstrom, ‘Cargoism and Occidentalism’ in Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 36.

¹⁸ 82.

¹⁹ 186.

²⁰ 232.

²¹ 32.

²² 152.

²³ 45.

²⁴ 281.

²⁵ 265.

²⁶ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): xviii.

²⁷ Ibid., 15.

²⁸ Richard Byrne, ‘Peeking under the Cover’, The Chronicle of Higher Education 53, no. 8 (2006b).

²⁹ Hamid Dabashi, ‘Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire’, Al-Ahram Weekly 797, https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/10542/native-informers-and-the-making-of-the-american (Accessed 19 December 2020).

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars, 22.

³² Grogan, ‘“Lolita” revisited: Reading Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”’, Women’s Studies 43, no. 1 (2014): 53.

³³ Firoozeh Papan-Matin, ‘Reading (and Misreading) Lolita in Tehran’, Common Review 6, no. 1 (2007): 31; John Carlos Rowe, ‘Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho’, American Quarterly 59, no. 2 (2007): 268.

³⁴ Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh, ‘Why Americans’, 632.

³⁵ Dabashi, ‘Native Informers’.

³⁶ Charlotte Abbott, ‘Book Lovers of the World Unite’, Publishers Weekly 106, (2004): 106.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ 6.

³⁹ Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars; Nesta Ramazani, ‘Persepolis: The story of a childhood, and: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A memoir in books (Review)’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004).

⁴⁰ DePaul, ‘Re-reading’, 82.

⁴¹ Eck, ‘From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism: The Challenges and Rewards of Teaching Foreign Literature’, English Faculty Presentations, Posters and Lectures, Paper 7, http://digitalcommons.framingham.edu/eng_presentations/7, (2013): 13.

⁴² Bahramitash, ‘War on Terror’, 221.

⁴³ Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran. Vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 7.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Imagining Western Women: Occidentalism and Euro-eroticism’, Radical America 24, no. 3 (1990): 74.

⁴⁶ Nader, ‘Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women’, Cultural Dynamics 2, no. 3 (1989): 323.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Bahramitash, ‘War on Terror’, 222. To provide a contemporary case, Bahramitash cites the example of George W. Bush’s speech on the need to save Afghan women (222).

⁴⁹ Bahramitash argues that while Muslim women were being constructed as backward and repressed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women in Western countries had few legal rights and were not allowed to vote (222). This offers a further example of what Nader has dubbed ‘misleading cultural comparisons’ between Western and Eastern women (323).

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Paidar, Women¸7.

⁵² Ibid., 8.

⁵³ Bahramitash, ‘War on Terror’, 223.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 222.

⁵⁵ 19, 30, 57, 60, 73, 212.

⁵⁶ 273.

⁵⁷ 27, 43, 60, 61, 257.

⁵⁸ 335.

⁵⁹ The word veil and its synonymous derivatives appear more than 160 times in the memoir and the narrative is packed with numerous descriptions of characters’ veiling and unveiling routines.

⁶⁰ 43.

⁶¹ 257.

⁶² 335.

⁶³ Behdad and Williams, ‘Neo-Orientalism’, 293.

⁶⁴ S. Asha, ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran: Rehashing Orientalist Stereotypes’. IUP Journal of English Studies 4, no. 1 (2009): 49.

⁶⁵ Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Feminist Review 30, no. 1 (1988): 293.

⁶⁶ Helen Watson, ‘Women and the Veil’ in Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity (Oxon: Routledge, 1994): 153.

⁶⁷ Asha, ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’, 49.

⁶⁸ 167.

⁶⁹ Meyda Yeğenoğlu, ‘Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism’ in Feminist Postcolonial Theory (New York: Routledge, 2003), 558.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ Lisa Yoneyama, ‘Liberation under Siege: U.S. Military Occupation and Japanese Women’s Enfranchisement’, American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005).

⁷² Robert Walter Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

⁷³ Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1991).

⁷⁴ Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 21–78: 50.

⁷⁵ 6.

⁷⁶ Elkholy, ‘Feminism and Race in the United States’, Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/fem-race/, (Accessed 19 December 2020).

⁷⁷ Mitra Rastegar, ‘Reading Nafisi in the West: Authenticity, Orientalism, and “Liberating” Iranian Women’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1/2 (2006), 113.

⁷⁸ Bahramitash, ‘War on Terror’, 226.

⁷⁹ Yeğenoğlu, ‘Sartorial fabric-ations’, 75.

⁸⁰ 112.

⁸¹ DePaul, ‘Re-reading’, 85.

⁸² Paidar, Women and the Political Process, 107.

⁸³ Alec Alexandru Balasescu, ‘Faces and Bodies: Gendered Modernity and Fashion Photography in Tehran’, Gender & History 17, no. 3 (2005): 744.

⁸⁴ Behdad and Williams, ‘Neo-Orientalism’, 290.

⁸⁵ Dieter Nohlen, Florian Grotz, and Christof Hartmann, Elections in Asia: A Data Handbook. I, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

⁸⁶ Ramazani, ‘Persepolis’, 280.

⁸⁷ Mitra Shavarini, ‘Admitted to College, Restricted from Work: A Conflict for Young Iranian Women’, The Teachers College Record 108, no. 10 (2006): 1979.

⁸⁸ Balasescu, ‘Faces and bodies’, 764.

⁸⁹ Behdad and Williams, ‘Neo-Orientalism’, 290.

⁹⁰ Ibid.

⁹¹ Ibid.

⁹² DePaul, ‘Re-reading’, 83.

⁹³ 27.

⁹⁴ Ramazani, ‘Persepolis’, 280.

⁹⁵ Ibid.

⁹⁶ Bahramitash, ‘War on Terror’; Ramazani, ‘Persepolis’, 280.; Ansia Khaz Ali, ‘Iranian Women after the Islamic Revolution’, A Conflicts Forum Monograph, http://conflictsforum.org/briefings/IranianWomenAfterIslamicRev.pdf, (Accessed 24 October 2014): 6–20; Martina Koegeler, ‘American Scheherazades: Auto-Orientalism, Literature and the Representations of Muslim Women in a Post 9/11 U.S. context’ (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2012): 34.

⁹⁷ 191.

⁹⁸ Ibid.

⁹⁹ Unlike the identities of ‘Muslim’ and politically active students, the names of the students and other people with whom Nafisi sympathizes are never forgotten. Moreover, the names she assigns to these ‘nameless’ characters often have negative connotations in Persian.

¹⁰⁰ 192.

¹⁰¹ Ibid.

¹⁰² 152.

¹⁰³ 197.

¹⁰⁴ 199.

¹⁰⁵ 197.

¹⁰⁶ The surname given to him by the author means ‘in need’ in Farsi.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid.

¹⁰⁸ 192.

¹⁰⁹ 331.

¹¹⁰ Whitlock, ‘From Tehran’, 11.

¹¹¹ 26.

¹¹² 6.

¹¹³ 24.

¹¹⁴ 26.

¹¹⁵ 6.

¹¹⁶ 24, 26.

¹¹⁷ 24.

¹¹⁸ 26.

¹¹⁹ 299.

¹²⁰ 300.

¹²¹ Ibid.

¹²² 301.

¹²³ Hossein Nazari, ‘Constructing Alterity: Colonial Rhetoric in Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter’, Interventions 19, no. 8 (2017): 1187.

¹²⁴ 244.

¹²⁵ 8.

¹²⁶ 58.

¹²⁷ DePaul, ‘Re-reading’, 73.

¹²⁸ 58.

¹²⁹ Ibid.

¹³⁰ 22.

¹³¹ 26.