“Imagine us in the act of reading”: a resistant reading of Reading Lolita in Tehran

Abstract

This article argues that much discussion of Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran relies on the desire to essentialize the gendered experience of a citizen (in this case, a citizen of Iran). Nafisi cannot be expected to be the mouthpiece for an entire country and its women, though some scholars criticize her for creating a work that plays to western desires to orientalize Middle Eastern countries in order to rationalize military action. Looking at the most condemnatory criticism from the large body of work about this much-read – and much-maligned – work, this article suggests that scholars and educators need to read the memoir as one woman’s experience, rather than offering it to western readers as a handbook for understanding all things Iranian. The article then looks at the model of resistance advocated by the book – specifically the use of one’s imagination – as a tenable form of opposition for the women protagonists, ultimately arguing that Nafisi is successful at creating a text that offers examples of resistance in the face of an oppressive theocracy, not a text that serves only to reify ideas of the Middle East in the western imagination.