Beyond the Voice of Egypt: Reclaiming Women’s Histories and Female Authorship in Shirin Neshat’s Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017)

By drawing on postcolonial feminist discourse and Hamid Naficy’s (2001) notion of ‘accented’ cinema, in particular his approach of combining the interstitial position of exilic and diasporic filmmakers with concepts of authorship and genre, this paper explores the intersection between biographical film, gendered rewriting of history, and self-narrative as a site of resistance to nationalist and patriarchal ideologies in Shirin Neshat’s Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017). I argue that Neshat’s authorial style and her position as an exilic artist inflect the biographical film in its traditional form, showcasing an innovative perspective on the genre, restructuring it to reveal the constructedness of not only a cinematic process, but also of history and historical figures. Blending the stories of a present-day Iranian woman filmmaker and the professional life of the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kulthum, Neshat displaces the biopic from its Western-centric roots by explicitly opening it up to a discourse of contemporary gender politics in the Middle East. In doing so, she exposes the social forces that shape the production of the biopic in relation to the notion of female authorship in the context of the transcultural circuits and feminist reclaiming of Oum Kulthum’s international stardom.

The Articulating-Self Inside Out

This chapter maps the different ways with which an Iranian woman artist, Katayoun Karami, critically responds to the stereotypes about the depiction of cultural identity in the artworks of female artists with a Middle Eastern background. The key point of Karami's response is the way she applies her self–portrait to articulate the self and her subjectivity, which is analysed in this chapter by examining one of her works named the Other Side. In this installation, the artist demonstrates the construction of gender identity in today's Iran through her personal perception of veiling. Working within the frameworks of feminist and Orientalist discourses, this chapter aims to explore how Karami's lived experience as a continual activity of becoming has been formed through the experience of veiling, and what strategies are deployed by her to interrogate the presumptions about the image of the veiled body in Western and Iranian contexts.

Divergent Identities in Iran and the Appropriation of Trans Bodies

While gender-based scholarship on the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is largely centred on a woman’s right to unveil, those adopting an LGBT+ framework tend to focus on human rights violations against homosexual males. This paper provides a more inclusive study in its assessment of the state’s oxymoronic approach to trans persons in Iran and the use of gender affirming surgery to reposition its subjects in line with hegemonic notions of “healthy” sexualities. In this context, the Iranian woman, bound by a particular conception of Islamic femininity, and the Iranian man, embodied by the hyper-masculine martyr figure, are promoted as the only genderisms acceptable to the state. This binary of hetero-Muslim male/female excludes all other expressions of gender. Ignoring the country’s historic array of masculinities and sexualities, the IRI criminalises gender “passing” in its limited notion of gender performativity. Furthermore, it utilises gender affirming surgery as a tool for repositioning divergent identities and sexualities within the state-sanctioned paradigm. While the state appropriates trans bodies to promote the ideal gendered subject, the framework of gender performativity is also adopted by regime critics to promote cis-gendered female agency: popular culture employs “cross-dressing” to contest the policing of heteronormative bodies and sexualities. Undoubtedly such methods are complicit in the continuation of discriminatory practices against trans persons in Iran.

Reflection of Iranian Women’s Gender Identity in their Traditional and Modern Lifestyle

The paper aims at representing reflection of Iranian women’s gender identity in their lifestyle. It applies the ideas of Judith Butler on performativity, based on which the repetition of actions create and naturalize the artificial constructions of gender. It seeks to illuminate the traces of gender identity in lifestyle. Comparing the traditional and modern lifestyle, it explores how discourse has constructed Iranian woman and how through repetition of action or failure of repetition they sustain or modify the gender identity. It is concluded that Iranian women, in both traditional and modern lifestyle are performing the conventions of gender and are identified by their gender of womanliness.

Herselves

Video installation; printmaking (photo-plate lithography on rice paper), chine-coll. As an Iranian woman artist who immigrated to Canada two years ago, my research creation examines ways of visualizing the notion of simultaneity in the lives of today’s migrants, in the sense of living between several cultures and multiple states of mind. In my work, I intend to show the shifts and reconstructions that take place in one’s identity as the result of immigration and living in a different culture, with the lens of simultaneity in identity, place, and language.