Beyond Diaspora: The Spaces in-between and the Cinematic Self in Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour

Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour (2014) centres on Shirin, an Iranian-American bisexual woman in her late twenties in Brooklyn trying to reconcile the tensions between her bisexuality and strong affiliation with her Iranian family and Persian culture. On the one hand, she is expected to accommodate the heteronormative expectations of her middle-class Iranian parents to find a boyfriend and a proper, lucrative profession. On the other hand, she is confronted by the monosexual imperative of coming out by her lesbian girlfriend and scepticism surrounding her bisexual identity. The film raises the question of “appropriate behaviour” in this interstitial context. Instead of conforming to either of the competing imperatives she faces, I argue that Akhavan attempts to reconcile these dichotomies by mobilising an in-between space. She does so by employing a multiplicity of desires and intimacies in her portrayal of Shirin’s relationships, never reducing them to simplistic dichotomous representations of cultural belonging and sexual identity, but rather offering an intricate and deeply personal perspective on her own intersectional identity. As many elements of the storyline of Appropriate Behaviour are autobiographically inspired, this chapter asks how the strategy of fictionalised self-representation opens up new possibilities for female authorial agency in cinema that addresses issues at the intersection of gender politics, queerness and cross-cultural subjectivity.