이란 여성작가의 한 계보: 포루그 파로흐자드에서 쉬린 네샤트까지

Abstract

This paper traces a genealogy of modern Iranian female artists, from a poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzād to a novelist Shahrnush Parsipur and a visual artist Shirin Neshat. Despite of their disparare preferences for media of writing, photography, and moving images, the three artists who share national and gender identities have addressed and problematized the politics of Iranian society and the regulation of Islamic femininity. Parsipur and Neshat have been greatly influenced by Farrokhzād’s transgressive poems beyond Islamic gender norms, and they explicitly inscribe Farrokhzād’s influence in their artistic creations. Among the plethora of criticisms on the three artists, especially on Neshat, this study seeks to contextualize the critical approaches on each artist so far, mainly focusing on their construction of (collective) Iranian female subjectivity based on their common use of allegory and representations of gardens. Farrokhzād’s poem “I Feel Sorry for the Garden” will be evaluated as recurring motifs in Parsipur’s Women without Men (1989), and Neshat’s feature-length film based on this novel. In order to do so, this article critically revisits Fredric Jameson’s thesis on national allegory and maps out a counter-allegorical register that recognizes Iranian women subjects as “people to come.”