The Cinepoetry of Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men: Female Histories and the Cinematic Space of the Garden

This chapter, “The cinepoetry of Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men: Female histories and the cinematic women’s space of the Garden,” provides an analysis of Shirin Neshat’s film Women Without Men (2009), which returns to one of the most critical episodes of Iranian history:—the British-American staged coup of 1953 against the democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddegh to reinstall the Shah. Drawing on postcolonial feminist discourse and the feminism of sexual difference, this chapter argues that Neshat places emphasis on the renewal of past as a site of resistance against patriarchal and imperialist ideologies. Before embarking on a detailed analysis of the film, the chapter provides a brief background of Neshat’s artistic career, since many of the narrative and stylistic hallmarks of her work, especially those related to her own identity positions, feature prominently in Women Without Men. The second part of the chapter focuses on how women re-inscribe their histories into an official history from which they have traditionally been excluded. The chapter then moves onto the film’s gendered construction of space, particularly Neshat’s reclaiming of the trope of the Persian garden as a cinematic and female place, located outside of the violent masculine-dominated world of Tehran in the midst of political crisis. My reading of this space connects two central threads of this book: intercultural subjectivities or spaces, and the issues of gender and women’s creative expression. By adopting Luce Irigaray’s concept of self-defined female subjectivity and enunciation, I contend that the Garden not only alludes to the liminality of Neshat’s own intercultural subject position, but also functions as a visual representation of the process of women’s becoming-subject on their own terms outside of the restrictive confines of patriarchal discourse.