‘POSITIONALITY’ & THE POLITICS OF WOMEN’S IDENTITY IN AZAR NAFISI’S READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN

Abstract

Known as a conscious and in-depth reading of one’s experience, the autobiographical selves are full-fledged through the medium of writing. This writing style aims at reflecting on the ‘I now’ and the ‘I then’ notion in an act of recollection and self-atonement. Hence, it cannot be deemed as precise replicas of the selves who struggled along. In other words, the prevailed selves can never be duplicated, especially since the autobiographical selves are genuinely actualized through the writing initiative. In reference to women’s identity politics, both Postmodern and Poststructuralist feminisms have implemented almost similar discourses: ‘Intersectionality’ and ‘Positionality’ as new approaches to analyzing women’s dilemma. The core principle of ‘Intersectionality’ is based on the coexisting and the overlapping of race, class, gender as different modes of oppression that negatively affect women’s subjectivity. However, Poststructuralists emphasize that those discourses are not the only markers of identity, but they are dynamic discourses that acknowledge women’s identity along with other emblems. The fact that one’s own identity is no longer allotted to being fixed or stable, but it is to be interpreted in relation to its social context (temporal and spatial). Both rejected the monolithic autonomous self, while enhancing the diversity of the subject position in relation to the diversified social situations. Given that, this study is to demonstrate the Poststructuralists’ notion of ‘identity in flux’ in the analysis of Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). Throughout, the article draws upon how Nafisi and her students’ identities have been perpetually shaped and reshaped anew within a set of complex and conflicting experiences and situations, deconstructing the discourse of ‘fixity’, ‘static positionality’, and set binaries. This new trajectory adopted by Third Wave Feminists infringes not only the static pedagogical definitions of identity but also the emphasis on ‘gender’ as its sole proprietor.