The Transnational Cultural Space of Iranian Youth: Diasporic Fantasy in Maryam Keshavarz’s Circumstance

This chapter, “The transnational cultural space of Iranian youth: The diasporic fantasy of Maryam Keshavarz’s Circumstance,” marks a shift from exilic discourses that focus on major political events and feminist reimaginings of Iranian history to a conceptualisation of cinema situated at the intersection of queerness and diaspora. Taking Patricia White’s (“Changing Circumstances: Global Flows of Lesbian Cinema.” In Global Cinema Networks, edited by Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams, 159–175. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018) discussion of Circumstance’s distinctive position within global cinema networks as a point of departure, the first section of this chapter explores the film’s discursive location, troubled categorisation and critical reception, aligning it with a shift towards diasporic filmmaking. In the second part of the chapter, I interrogate the diverse strategies that Iranian teens employ against the repressive social order of the Islamic state, arguing that the film stages the young girls’ responses to violations of their privacy, both within the family and in the outside world, as simultaneously playing into and challenging Western assumptions about the Iranian Islamic regime and its gender oppression. After that, I turn my attention to the key pervading motif of the film:—voyeuristic gaze as an intrusive, controlling look from the outside epitomised by the surveillance footage in the film. This repressive tool transforms the film’s construction of home into a site deeply fraught with tensions and anxieties, commenting indirectly on Keshavarz’s complicated diasporic reconstruction of Iran as an estranged homeland. Finally, this chapter explores the film’s central dubbing scene, linking acts of cultural translation to both adolescent and diasporic struggles with self-identity, and arguing that the interplay between narratives of cultural origin and the questioning of socio-cultural norms regulating gender and sexuality offer fruitful ground for challenging and changing a set of given circumstances.