Congratulations to Zahra Ghoreishi for her successful thesis defense

Zahra Ghoreishi is the first student in the Women's, Gender and Sexualities Studies MA program who successfully defended her thesis. WGST celebrates Zahra's success and congratulates her on this accomplishment.  Zahra's thesis focuses on visual and textual representations of Iranian women in the works of Neshat, Satrapi, and Nafisi. Read below the abstract for Zahra Ghoreishi's thesis. 

Abstract

Beliefs and assumptions about different groups of people are shaped through the representations provided through public discourses and the institutions that reproduce them, including but certainly not limited to educational institutions, mass media and works of art and literature. As an Iranian researcher living in Canada, I am particularly interested in understanding the representations of Iranian women that saturate the consciousness of western audiences and influence public perceptions of Iranian culture, politics and experiences. I focus on works by diasporic Iranian artists and authors who have been widely published and/or exhibited in the one-third world. In this thesis, using feminist intersectionality, I explore the ways in which selected and often pain-centred narratives by Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, and Azar Nafisi have rendered partial accounts of the lives of Iranian women and have been taken up in the west in ways that reinforce Orientalist views of Iran and broader politically motivated projections involving Middle Eastern cultures more generally.