From Female Patriotism to Diasporic Womanhood: Negotiating Diaspora and Feminist Aspirations
[Thesis]
Hamidi, Nafiseh Yalda
Bona, Mary Jo
State University of New York at Stony Brook
2020
149 p.
Ph.D.
State University of New York at Stony Brook
2020
In this dissertation, I investigate the politics of location in Iranian women's writing in the genre of Iranian diasporic literature. I re-read the work of three diasporic writers, Azar Nafisi, Marjane Satrapi, and Nahid Rachlin, to see how these women have imagined home and addressed their version of "question of travel." Because of the significance of location/ space in the heart of almost all versions of Iranian women's feminisms, I rely on the genealogy of the feminist concepts of "politics of location" and "question of travel." Furthermore, in response to the cultural appropriation of Iranian diasporic writings in white feminist and literary canons, I utilize the methodology of rhetorical listening. My work suggests the alternative concept of "politics of dislocation," primarily for investigating the entangled network of discrimination that results in the uprooting of diasporic women and accommodating the situation of communities with no privilege of belonging to a location. In promoting the methodology of rhetorical listening, I propose three techniques of "listening to discursive space," "listening to the history of trauma," and "listening with precarity," to make the methodology compatible with the genre. Through my findings, I uncover both the significance and the precarity of homes imagined in the literature of these diasporic authors. Finally, I criticize the elitism of this corpus of work, because of its shortcomings in representing the voices of different groups of Iranian women, and excluding their existence from the imagination of Iran.