13 - In the House of Fatemeh: Revisiting Shirin Neshat's Photographic Series Women of Allah

Summary

Many scholars have already written on the 1990s photographic series Women of Allah by artist Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), but the series' relationship to its written texts has not been fully explored or explained, such as in her photograph Rebellious Silence of 1994 (Figure 13.1). This paper seeks to address this need by examining the importance of the written words inscribed on the images and texts that have created the ideal revolutionary woman in Iran during the Iranian Revolution (1978–79). In accomplishing this task, I argue two major points: first, one must read the Persian texts inscribed on these photographs or find their translations, as understanding what these texts say results in a more nuanced exegesis of the images. Neshat's appearance becomes subversive only when one reads the texts, thus dislodging prototypical representations of postrevolutionary Iranian women. Neshat's photographs offer more psychologically complex representations of Iranian women than the global mass media has projected.

My second point is that through the mixture of texts, both written and visual in Neshat's photographs, the representations of her body become metaphors for feminized spaces of sacred empowerment by reencoding signs that transform the female body into a house of Fatemeh. Hazrat-e (Her Holiness) Fatemeh Zahra' (c. after 605–32 CE) was the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570–632) and the mother of Imams Hasan (625–69) and Hossein (626–80), Hazrat-e Zaynab and Umm Kulthum, making her a locus of religious feminine authority in Shi‘a Islam.