“Unveiling the Veiled” in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Persepolis 2 and Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh: A Revolutionary Perspective

Abstract

This article explores the various “power” structures (epitomized in governmental institutions, state policies, patriarchal hierarchical relationships and inherited cultural norms) inflicted upon Muslim women in two dictatorial regimes: Islamic Republic of Iran and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; and the various tactics and maneuvers Muslim women in these two countries resort to as a means of circumventing these multi-directional sources of “power” and hegemony. The first section of the article, which is expository, is devoted to elucidating the notion of “power” in the Foucauldian context; and its interdependent and consolidated relationship with “resistance.” As Foucault contends: “Where there is power, there is resistance;” and this is the main trope and thrust of this article. Then, the paper securitizes and expounds in detail two feminist-oriented novels written by two contemporary Middle Eastern female writers: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004) by the Iranian-French graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi and Banat Al-Riyadh/Girls of Riyadh (2007) by the Saudi writer Rajaa Alsanea. In these two texts, both Satrapi and Alsanea provide new images of outspoken, revolutionary Muslim female characters who resist state enforcement mechanisms and existing cultural practices in their countries; and Western circulations about them as well–thereby subverting the “gaze” imprisoning women in fixed stereotypical images of passivity and submissiveness, and voicing the victimized and the voiceless. It is a non-ceasing process of “power” and “resistance.”