Between Two Worlds: Transnational Feminism and Aesthetic Resistance in The Fury (Neshat, 2023)

Ghorbankarimi, Maryam (2026) Between Two Worlds: Transnational Feminism and Aesthetic Resistance in The Fury (Neshat, 2023). In: ReFocus: The Films of Shirin Neshat :. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. ISBN 9781399562287 (In Press)

Abstract

This chapter examines the evolution of Shirin Neshat’s transnational feminist practice by placing two of her short films, The Last Word (2003) and The Fury (2023), in dialogue. It argues that The Fury marks a significant shift in Neshat’s aesthetic and political vocabulary, moving from the culturally specific and poetically inscribed register of The Last Word to a more expansive, confrontational and formally hybrid mode shaped by diasporic experience. While The Last Word stages a symbolic encounter with censorship through the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad, The Fury intensifies Neshat’s longstanding engagement with gendered violence, surveillance, trauma and authoritarian power, and reimagines the female body as an active site of affect, rage and embodied resistance. Drawing on concepts of accented cinema, hybridity and transnational feminism, the chapter situates The Fury within interconnected global systems of domination rather than a simple binary of East and West. The film’s shifting spatial registers, between interiors marked by Iranian-style repression and the textured urban landscapes of Brooklyn, render diasporic identity as an in-between condition shaped by fracture, ambiguity and continual negotiation. Through its choreography of exposure and concealment, its doubling, fragmentation and non-linear temporalities, The Fury transforms personal trauma into a collective and transnational feminist uprising. Taken together, the two films reveal a twenty-year trajectory in which Neshat moves from poetic interiority and allegory to a cinematic language grounded in embodied protest, solidarity and the transformative possibilities of the third space.