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Finding and Making Meaning in the Life Writing of Diasporic Iranian Jewish Women

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Finding and Making Meaning in the Life Writing of Diasporic Iranian Jewish Women READING AND RESPONDING: FINDING AND MAKING MEANING IN THE LIFE WRITING OF DIASPORIC IRANIAN JEWISH WOMEN by Leora Ahuva Jackson A thesis submitted to the Department of Gender Studies In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada September, 2011 Copyright ©Leora Ahuva Jackson, 2011 Abstract This project investigates the English-language life writing of diasporic Iranian Jewish women. It examines how these women have differentially imagined their diasporic lives and travels, and how they have in turn been imagined and accepted or rejected by their audiences. In the first chapter, I use “home” as a lens for understanding three distinct life writing texts, showing how the authors write about what it means to have a home and to be at home in contrasting and even contradictory ways. I show how, despite potential hegemonic readings that perpetuate unequal relationships and a normative definition of the ideal home, the texts are open to multiple contestatory readings that create spaces for new formulations and understandings. In the second chapter, I look more closely at the intersections between trauma stories and the life writing of Iranian Jewish women, and I argue that readers use life writing texts about trauma to support an egocentric reconstruction of American democracy and dominance. I also show how a critical frame for understanding trauma can yield interpretations that highlight, rather than ignore, relationships of power and privilege. In the final chapter of the thesis, I present a case study of two online reading groups, and I show that communal reading environments, though they participate in dominant discourses, are also spaces where resistance and subversion can develop. ii Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the financial support that aided me in pursuing this research. Thank you as well to Professor Jane Tolmie, who supervised this project, and Professor Katherine McKittrick, for your prompt and insightful suggestions. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements.........................................................................................................................iii Table of Contents............................................................................................................................ iv Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Life writing as a critical practice.................................................................................................. 3 Multiculturalism and pedagogical praxis..................................................................................... 5 Iranian women’s lives: pre- and post-1979.................................................................................. 8 Iran-U.S. Immigration................................................................................................................ 11 Jewish Diversity: Iran and the United States ............................................................................. 13 New audiences for diasporic Iranian cultural production .......................................................... 16 Reception of diasporic Iranian women’s life writing................................................................. 18 Chapter 2: Imagining homes and homelands................................................................................. 22 Home and kinship in Wedding Song.......................................................................................... 26 Contingency and coalition: “In Exile at Home” ........................................................................ 35 Writing home through fiction .................................................................................................... 39 Chapter 3: Reading Trauma ........................................................................................................... 46 Reader Framings of Trauma ...................................................................................................... 49 Academic Framings of Trauma.................................................................................................. 52 Clinical perspectives .............................................................................................................. 52 Psychoanalytic perspectives................................................................................................... 54 Cultural perspectives.............................................................................................................. 56 The Norfolk Compass................................................................................................................. 57 “Feathers and Hair”.................................................................................................................... 62 Can We Read Trauma Differently? ........................................................................................... 64 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 72 Chapter 4: Reading in digital communities.................................................................................... 74 Results of previous book group studies ..................................................................................... 74 Classifying book groups............................................................................................................. 77 Responses to The Septembers of Shiraz .................................................................................... 80 New findings.............................................................................................................................. 84 Chapter 5: Conclusion and Future Directions................................................................................ 89 iv Improving pedagogical praxis.................................................................................................... 91 Complicating Jewish representations and analyses ................................................................... 93 What we hold onto ..................................................................................................................... 94 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................... 98 v Chapter 1: Introduction It seems appropriate that a thesis project investigating life writing should begin with a narrative, if only as a means of introducing the methodological and theoretical principles and interests that have guided me along this path. In the fall of 2010, I served as a teaching assistant in GNDS 120, my department’s introductory Gender Studies course. About 250 students enrol in the course each fall, and they participate in weekly small-group tutorials of 25 to 30 students led by teaching assistants. In my tutorial, only a handful of students identified as people of colour, and even fewer as male. This was representative of the rest of the course. The professor was a white woman, as were most of the teaching assistants. One of the reading responses assigned during the semester involved The Breadwinner, a novel by a Canadian author about the experiences of a young girl in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. Students were asked to respond to the text, and to “analyze gender representation in the novel and consider cross-cultural understandings of oppression and empowerment.” A number of themes emerged from the student responses; some were surprising, others less so. Three are of key relevance here. First, despite the generic status of the novel as a realist work of fiction, students routinely identified with the characters as “real people.” They wrote about hoping that, someday, the characters would be able to effect change in Afghanistan, or that they had not understood the situation of women in Afghanistan until seeing it from the perspective of someone who was truly experiencing it. Second, almost without exception, students’ self-positionings invoked an us-versus-them approach: students understood themselves as the enfranchised subjects of a liberal democracy that existed in isolation from the inhumane authoritarian state under control of the Taliban. When they discussed cross-cultural understandings, students rarely considered their own status as the novel’s consumers, or the involvement of their elected government in the current war in Afghanistan. Third, students accepted the premises of the novel 1 and its contents as valid and authentic. They did not question the authority or the knowledge of author Deborah Ellis, a Canadian who spent time interviewing women in an Afghan refugee camp. I was troubled by the student responses. Though the texts that I was studying for my thesis differed in significant ways from The Breadwinner, they also shared some key similarities: the employment of realist modes of writing, the presence of charismatic women or girl protagonists, and settings which referenced an Ur-narrative of oppressed women in Muslim lands. This was one of my initial reasons for thinking more carefully about reading practices, and how we shape the texts
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