Redefining ‘Taboos’: A Postfeminist Reading of Ida Panahandeh’s Titi (2020)

Ghorbankarimi, Maryam (2022) Redefining ‘Taboos’: A Postfeminist Reading of Ida Panahandeh’s Titi (2020). In: Post-Millennial MENAWA, 2022-06-21 - 2022-06-22, Lancaster (online).

Abstract

Looking at Ida Panahandeh’s latest film Titi (2020) as a case study, this chapter will take a transnational position in analysing this film in the light of the contested postfeminist discourse. The women in Panahandeh’s films, break social taboos similarly to the works of some of her earlier predecessors and her films might have similar visual aesthetic to other social realist films made in Iran. But they take the social criticism beyond the dominant topics and venture more into a fictitious world. While her this world is neither utopian or completely dystopian, they do offer a unique place for the women, where they can have full agency and freedom of choice. For instance, the surrogacy plot line of Titi while it might not directly address a dominant issue in Iran, I argue she is responding to the “makeover paradigm” in the postfeminist discourse leading the media worldwide. Simidele Dosekun in her article “For Western girls only? Postfeminism as transnational culture”, argues for a transnational analytic and methodological approach to the critical study of post-feminism. Postfeminist culture tends to emphasize on educational and professional opportunities for women along with freedom of choice in both personal and public life and above all it promotes sexual empowerment. While at first sight some of these features might seem alien to Iranian cinema or what Iranian cinema can represent considering the tight censorship and the existing codes of modesty, Panahandeh’s films navigate these in a unique way. Rosalind Gill contends that postfeminism is “deeply enmeshed with neoliberalism” (Gill 2016: 613) and Negra and Tasker argue that “postfeminism is white and middle class by default, anchored in consumption as a strategy (and leisure as a site) for the production of the self.” (Tasker and Negra 2007: 2).Taking postfeminism as a transnationally circulating culture, this chapter continues the discussion of whether or how this notion exists in non-western cultures that might not be as individualistic as their Western counterparts.