My final paper looks at women in
Iran, and I have been doing some research on Shahrzad News for firsthand analysis
on the situation for women, per Margie’s recommendation. Yesterday in class, we discussed how Iranian
expats are often unable to return to their homeland, despite a deep connection
to issues there. I also thought of it
from the perspective of women who live in Iran, and how they must perceive
their homeland, despite severe oppression.
The article above, discusses how Iranian police, under
Article 638 of the Islamic Code of Justice, are using Facebook as a way to
persecute women who disobey Islamic dress code. According to the article, “Article 19 states
that an offender can serve up to five years’ internal exile in remote regions
of the country (February 14, 2014). It
is unimaginable how one would feel about their sense of identity and their
sense of home in a situation such as this. Chen (2013) states that “home can be
conceptualized as a place of belonging that offers a sense of comfort and
relational connections…to study the symbolic significance of home, it is useful
to pose a question that explores what home means to a particular individual and
how the dwellers construct meaning of their home within a historical, cultural,
sociopolitical, and economic context (484).
I’m curious as to how Iranian women would answer this question, where is
home? Where is this place of comfort, “where the soul can rest”? I imagine that there is a strong identity gap
between the enacted and the relational as well as the relational and the
communal, particularly for Iranian women who are trying to change the status
quo.
Chen V. (2013). “Authenticity and identity in the portable
homeland. In T.K. Nakayama & R.T.
Halualani (Eds.), The Handbook of
Critical Intercultural Communication (pp.483-494). Wiley-Blackwell.
No comments:
Post a Comment