In the Wake of the Big Changes: How Does Life Narrative Register Abrupt Shifts in State Politics? (original) (raw)

Autobiography, Gender and Politics. A Case Study.

The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences: Annual Review, 2007

Focusing on the Persepolis series (vols I, II), the well-known graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, I attempt an inner view to the private as political in gender-orientated autobiography. Persepolis albums concentrate major characteristics of parallel kinds of narratives as political fiction or contemporary philosophy, while at the same time they are opened to a wide range of matters such as the social gender, identities, immigration, refugees, orientalism. Born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran, Marjane Satrapi was only a child when fundamentalists came to powerin her country and social life changed, especially for women. Marjane studied at the Lycee Francais in Tehran and later left for Vienna and Strasburg. Having studied Fine Arts and illustration, she now lives and works in France. Persepolis is an illustrated report of Marjane’s life from the prerevolutionary period to adulthood, describing the shaping of a young woman’s identity between a fundamentalist East and an orientalist West.