Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Asghar Farhadi’s complex female characters pose an immediate challenge for the Western viewer. His women are positioned as culturally and socially specific discursive agents of the complexities and internal divisions of Islamic feminism. On the one hand, Farhadi presents us with a set of women who are caught up in a dominant and suffocating patriarchal society, from which they constantly attempt to break through constructing a phantasy of escape either through actively seeking immigration or through engaging in public practices of female empowerment. On the other hand, Farhadi consciously portrays another set of women who are reluctant to follow in the footsteps of their Westernized and liberated sisters. These are the women who operate within an Islamic system of relationships, which Hamid Nafisy describes as the “averted gaze,” and which signals the Iranian establishment’s effort to create a desexualized presence of women in postrevolutionary Iranian cinema. The argument that we propose in this paper is that Farhadi masterfully navigates the encounters of the female characters within the cinematic space of his films by presenting a polysomic and infinitely open to negotiation space of female agency, which transcends and decenters the traditional conventions of both Western and Islamic feminisms.