Global Societies Journal

Iranian contemporary visual artist and filmmaker, Shirin Neshat gives us a unique lens into contradictions within Islamic feminism. She uses her situation as a culturally-hybrid individual to mediate the dichotomy construed between Eastern and Western cultures and male and female relationships. Special attention is paid to her use of art as a window into systemic socio-political and gender issues she observes from the vantage point of her “third space” locus. In her photographic and cinematic work, she creates provocative juxtapositions built on binaries to expose biases. Her work is equally political and personal. She uses it to critique societies and to construct her own cultural identity. As an actor in the supranational women’s rights movement, with the support of the Art World, she raises gender consciousness across cultures via her artistic provocation. Islamic feminism navigates the space within this chasm and Islamic feminist art is a visual articulation of its carefully construed ideology. An individual’s particular brand of Islamic feminism may be ascribed to a multicultural situation. This paper will explore the stereotypes established of Middle-Eastern women and Western women as a dehumanizing dichotomy, heightened by the way women are conflated with Islam as the problematic epitomization of an oppressed, mute “other.”