Bio: Fataneh Farahani

Fataneh Farahani is a Ph.D student at the Ethnology Institution at Stockholm University, Sweden. For her dissertation, she is exploring Iranian immigrant women¹s self-presentation and understanding of their bodies and sexual desire, within the context of patriarchal culture and religion (Islam) and diasporic experiences. Through a Foucauldian discursive analysis of the recorded interviews of some of the first generation Iranian immigrant women living in Sweden, the intent of the dissertation is to study sexuality as gendered, historicized, and culturally constructed. Area of interest: Female sexuality, Violence against women, Postcolonial Theories, Feminist and Ethnicity theories, Diaspora and Multiculturalism

Abstract

Diasporic Sexual Narratives

This article presents an analytical study of the notions of virginity among some of the first generation Iranian immigrant women in Sweden. By exploring how the concept of virginity is discursively constituted and normalized in Iranian contemporary culture I aim to show how virginity govern not only women¹s sexuality but also shape all their movements and lives. By deconstructing the notion of virginity and its relation to the hymen, I demonstrate how virginity, as a physical technicality, not only govern women¹s sexuality but also produces enormous anxiety, within the realm of female life in general and her sexual life in particular. By gendering the ways in which the establishment of virginity is accomplished, I will demonstrate how the demands of women¹s virgin status become the core ambition in order to make the female chastity and virtue socially valuable and desirable.