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Words, Not Swords
Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement
Farzaneh Milani
Cloth $39.95s
| 978-0-8156-3278-8
| 2011
Latifeh Yarshater Book Award
Farzaneh Milani’s Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement is the co-recipient of the Latifeh Yarshater Book Award presented by the International Society of Iranian Studies. The Latifeh Yarshater Book Award is given every two years to a work that contributes, directly or indirectly, to the improvement of the status of women in Persian societies. The award, announced this month at the organization’s annual conference in Turkey, comes after Milani was named "Woman of the Year" by the Iranian Women Studies Foundation in June.
"While Milani’s credentials as an academic shine through on almost every page, it is her passion as a writer and feminist that gives Words Not Swords the lustre of a labour of love."
—The National
"The breadth and depth of her work is astounding,
expansive, and extensive—a tour de force."
—Shahla Haeri, author of No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women
"Helps us understand how today’s Iranian women occupy a far greater space than ever in their changing society. This is a rare, complex and much needed discourse that should help transform the perpetual Western gaze which continues to define Iranian women as pure victims."
—Shirin Neshat, artist and filmmaker
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Farzaneh Milani is professor of Persian Literature and Studies in Women
and Gender at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Veils and
Words: The Emerging Voice of Iranian Women Writers and the coeditor
and translator of A Cup of Sin: Selected Poems by Simin Behbahani.
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A woman not only needs a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote,
but also the freedom to leave it and return to it at will; for a room without
that right becomes a prison cell. The privilege of self-directed movement,
the power to pick up and go as one pleases, has not been a traditional
"right" of Iranian women. This prerogative has been denied them in the
name of piety, anatomy, chastity, class, safety, and even beauty. It is only
during the last 160 years that the spell has been broken and Iranian
women have emerged as a moderating, modernizing force. Women
writers have been at the forefront of this desegregating movement and
renegotiation of boundaries.
Words, Not Swords explores the legacy of sex segregation and its
manifestations in Iranian literature and film and in notions of beauty and
the erotics of passivity. Milani expands her argument beyond Iranian
culture, arguing that freedom of movement is a theme that crosses frontiers
and dissolves conventional distinctions of geography, history, and
religion. She makes bold connections between veiling and foot binding,
between Cinderella and Barbie, between the figures of the female
Gypsy and the witch. In so doing, she challenges cultural hierarchies that
divert attention from key issues in the control of women across the globe.
View other books in the Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East series
6 x 9, 312 pages, notes, bibliography, index
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