Queering the “Iranian” and the “Diaspora” of the Iranian Diaspora

Queering the “Iranian” and the “Diaspora” of the Iranian Diaspora Farhang Rouhani Department of Geography University of Mary Washington Published in Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures, edited by Gul Ozyegin (2015) Ranging in scope from widely popular women’s memoirs to academic research in the social sciences and humanities, conceptualizations of an “Iranian diaspora” have flourished in the past couple of decades, particularly in the United States. In this essay, I argue for the critical value of a queer diasporic analytical lens that disengages the idea of an “Iranian Diaspora” from concerns over authenticity and belonging and instead, through an analysis of diasporic Iranian women’s memoirs, situates it within future possibilities for the creative expression of kinship and intimacy. I begin by justifying the vitality of a queer intervention on Iranian diaspora studies that questions the divisive concerns over authenticity and looks for opportunities to construct new relationships outside of an exclusive connection to a rooted idea of belonging. I will then apply such a lens to critically consider a recent popular memoir within this genre, Jasmin Darznik’s The Good Daughter (2011). When viewed through the de-normalizing and de-stabilizing framework of a queer diaspora lens, the text provides an opportunity to challenge conventionally held understandings of gender, nation, narration, and home, and suggests new opportunities for building community through the intimate sharing of experiences. I contrast such a frame with examples of more conventional, Orientalist readings of the book, gleaned through reader responses of the book on the Amazon and Goodreads online review pages. As such, I argue that the strength in a queer diaspora methodology of re-reading texts lies in its questioning of the assumed coherence of authenticity, gender, nation, and home, and its construction of a relationship with the past that suggests possibilities for the future. By offering a new reading of popular texts, this approach presents a critical, anti-Orientalist methodology that simultaneously opens up new ways of building relationships within diasporic experiences. Resisting Authenticity, Embracing Possibility In recent years, Iranian scholars and artists abroad have articulated compelling representations of home, Iranian-ness, and the formation of transnational communities in a variety of forms, including the visual and dramatic arts, cinema, literature, and an academic realm of study that has come to be known as “Iranian Studies.” In their introduction to a special journal issue on the “Iranian diaspora,” Elahi and Karim question the possibility of referring to this group as a whole, given the different waves of Iranian emigration, political connections and tensions with Iran, and varying experiences of treatment in host countries (Elahi and Karim 2011, 81). While early on the terms “refugee,” “exile,” and “immigrant” were most commonly used, the contributors to this special issue discuss the “Iranian diaspora” in terms of a set of issues that cohere around the complexities of nostalgia for the home country, civic engagement in the host country, liminal and syncretic hybrid identity construction, the maintenance of strong political connections with Iran, and the creation of globally dispersed communities. Shakhsari, however, cautions against the “chic of diaspora,” given how diaspora studies have become fashionable in a way that assumes ease of mobility and oversimplifies hybrid identity formation (Shakhsari 2012, 25). In her analysis of representations of Iranian queer subjects in cyberspace, she concludes that “diaspora” acts not all that differently than “exile,” in that it similarly “conjures up an idealized image of homeland as fixed and imagines a homogenous heteronormative Iranian community.” (Shakhsari 2012, 32) Any deployment of the term “diaspora” must address the power relations through which immigrants construct, maintain, and resist community formations, in a contextualized and de-essentializing way that does not assume internal cohesion around “Iranian-ness” as an identity category. This argument echoes Rogers Brubaker’s suggestion that instead of thinking of a diaspora as an already formed coherent entity, “it may be more fruitful, and certainly more precise, to speak of diasporic stances, projects, claims, idioms, practices, and so on,” which creates opportunities for empirically-based understanding (Brubaker 2005, 13). One of the most high-profile recent academic enactments of an “Iranian diaspora” concerned a debate over the role of memoirs written my Iranian immigrant women. These memoirs, most popularly represented by Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series, Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad, and Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi, among others, have become a lucrative industry within book publishing in North America and Europe since the late 1990s. Whitlock identifies the main elements of the memoir genre as examining experiences of expatriation and exile, providing intimate glimpses of the lives of affluent urban Iranian domestic life abroad, and constructing more complex representations of Iran through the narrative device of the return to the home country (Whitlock 2008). In the process, authors establish central themes of nostalgia and mourning for what they have lost in Iran, how they became American (or European, as in the case of Satrapi) women, and the “homing devices” they use to develop cosmopolitan, hybridized identities and communities. Malek argues that these memoirs have achieved particular popularity with Euro-American and second-generation Iranian-American audiences because of the extent to which create a strong sense of truth through the use of first-person direct experience narration, make familiar to audiences what initially appears as foreign and exotic, create a vivid sense of the in-betweenness of place, and enchant their readership with art, humor, and wit (Malek 2006). Given the extent to which they have come to represent an “Iranian diaspora” experience, these memoirs have come under attack by some of the most prominent Iranian scholars within the diaspora, especially for the roles they play within global imperial-capitalist power relations (see particularly Mottahedeh 2004; Dabashi 2006; Keshavarz 2007). The most widely-cited of these critiques is Hamid Dabashi’s essay in Al-Ahram Weekly that addresses the memoirs in general and Reading Lolita in Tehran in particular. He perceives Nafisi as having taken up the subject position of the “Native Informer,” someone who foregrounds the interests of a predatory US empire that is seeking a rationale for invasion and control, while opportunistically benefiting from the entrepreneurial role that the empire allows her. The fact that the memoir is about a group of women finding salvation through reading Western classics in Tehran, he argues, further serves as a part of a “civilizing” mission, denies Iran’s rich literary heritage, and counteracts immigrant community and academic pride within the Iranian diaspora (Dabashi 2006). As a result, a very limited group of privileged transnational women become the mouthpiece for “Iranian women” as a whole in a new global marketplace that has developed a niche for the production, marketing, and consumption of such narratives (Mottahedeh 2004; Akhavan et.al. 2007). While Dabashi makes compelling arguments about the appropriation of the memoirs,his criticism is also problematic. One concern is the “vituperative” nature of much of the criticism, which potentially has the effect of heightening tensions among transnational Iranian academics (Motlagh 2011, Darznik 2008). Motlagh also finds it puzzling that in critiquing how the memoirists’ narratives have supplanted the researched, scholarly narratives of the experts, the scholars often use first-person narration in their own criticisms. “It is as if the memoir can only be answered in kind: personal experience of the ‘wrong’ kind can only be corrected by presenting personal experience of the ‘right’ kind.” (Motlagh 2011, 411) What ensues is a struggle over authenticity and authority, of whose voice and politics get to represent Iran and Iranians. Thus, in their efforts to presumably correct the record and send the right message, the critics argue that there is a coherent message to be disseminated, which ultimately leads them to assert a sense of coherence on their own terms around the category of “Iranian-ness.” Moreover, while effectively focused on how the memoirs fit within imperial power relations and a capitalist world economy, the critics have very little to say about the actual content of the memoirs, or how audiences interpret them. Surely, there are alternative ways in which the memoirs could be critically read in constructive ways, rather than rendering them invalid. Whitlock suggests one such way in her reading of Reading Lolita in Tehran. She states that while initially she found the text to be deeply problematic, singular, and overly focused on aesthetics, when she re-read it in a more intersectional, transnational way as a part of larger body of women’s memoir-writing, she came to a different conclusion: “The fix of memoirs spawned by the Iranian revolution signals intractable issues in thinking about women, feminism, and life writing across cultures, as well as possibilities for mobilising alternative ways of framing the subject.” (Whitlock 2008) This analysis is only possible through a de-essentializing of the “Iranian” part of the genre and for building a sense of understanding across and beyond national cultures. For an in-depth examination of how such critical reading practices are possible, I now turn to the recent work in queer diaspora studies. The florescence of queer diaspora studies over the past two decades has revitalized both queer and diaspora studies. As Gayatri Gopinath argues, “The concept of a queer diaspora enables a simultaneous critique of heterosexuality and the nation form while exploding the binary oppositions between nation and diaspora, heterosexuality and homosexuality, original and copy.” (Gopinath 2006, 11) Queer studies, like diaspora studies, concern disorientation, dislocation, and unsettling (Ahmed 2006). A focus on queerness helps to denaturalize and complicate diaspora studies in its relationship to the family, nation, and nostalgia for the homeland, while a focus on diaspora helps to bring questions of race, colonization, and globalization to the center of queer studies. This combined perspective, furthermore, serves as an interpretive framework that works to make connections. What I find particularly missing in the memoir critiques is an emphasis on reading practices, which scholars of queer diaspora studies address prominently. A queer perspective works “as a methodology, an oppositional mode of reading, interpretive strategy, or critical lens through which to question dominant ideologies of gender, sex, and nation.” (Parker 2011, 640) This methodology argues for a way of critically reading content in a way that argues against dominant and normative understandings, wherever they appear. While much of the queer diaspora literature concerns queer subjects, a queer methodology can be applied to destabilize other practices of normativity (see for example Wesling 2011). In relation to the category of the Iranian diaspora, such a perspective can aid in denaturalizing and disorienting the category of “Iranian-ness” that so many scholars take for granted, particularly in relation to questions of home, family, and nostalgia. This interpretative framework helps to “foreground the resistant potential of what may initially appear as capitulations to, and collusions with, the dominant.” (Gopinath 2011, 636) As such, a queer diaspora lens serves as a bridge over the impasse between the Iranian memoirists and their critics, by looking for clues to possible sources of relationality through difference within the unsettled, uneasy spaces of migration. Of particular concern to queer diaspora studies and to my project is the experience of home. Queer diaspora scholars approach the home outside a linear narrative of “homecoming” and instead one that engages with the multiple negotiations with the past and future that queer migrants face (Fortier 2001; Mai and King 2009). This approach requires seeing the diasporic home as an unsettled, sometimes violent space, outside the conventional perspective of home as a privatized, often invisible site (Wesling 2011, 649). These scholars build upon work by critical feminist human geographers, who starting in the 1970s criticized the long-held masculinist representation of the home as a space of comfort and refuge and instead began to show the complexities of the experience of home spaces for women. Blunt and Dowling summarize three significant feminist insights about the home as a concept: its simultaneous materiality and symbolism; the connections between home, power relations, and identity; and its connection to the multiple scales of family, community, nation, and empire. (Blunt and Dowling 2006) The diasporic home can be understood simultaneously as a materially grounding space, a space with complex meanings and attachments, and as a space where multiple forms and scales of power relations intersect. It is a dynamic, destabilized space in motion, with complex links to the past, present, and future. Moreover, as Iris Marion Young posits, the home needs to be approached as a productive, creative space. While she agrees with the feminist critique, particularly through her examination of Heidegger’s privileging of the male-dominated enterprises of building and constructing home spaces over the female-centered domains of cultivating and dwelling, she argues for the recognition of the positive value of individual and collective identity building that comes with practices of home-making. “Recognizing this value,” she writes, “entails also recognizing the creative value to the often unnoticed work that many women do.” (Young 1997, 164) Applied to experiences of diaspora, this recognition has particular salience in suggesting the complex, gendered processes of home-making and identity-building within transnational immigrant homes. In my quest to queer Iranian diaspora studies, I am particularly drawn to the work of scholars who unsettle and disturb ideas of attachment, the so-called homing instincts or desires. Johanna Garvey, for example, uses the concept of “queer (un)belonging” to refer to spaces of habitation that “undo belonging while not leading to the destructive behavior of not-belonging.” (Garvey 2011, 757) There is tremendous creative potential in such a stance, which begins with the impossibility of a queer diaspora, given that there is no such thing as a queer homeland, and instead works toward building a new kind of community that does not exist within the destructive belonging/not-belonging binary. In her analysis, Garvey identifies some of the major elements of queer (un)belonging as an embrace of the reality of daily migrant life that does not conform to diasporic nostalgia, the shaping of a different relationship to time and space, and new methods of reading and identifying people that incorporate difference into community. What a queer diaspora approach does above all else is to show the constructive potential of residing within the uncomfortable spaces that disorient normative domestic arrangements. Such as approach invites us to draw power and inspiration from “the ways in which those who occupy impossible spaces transform them into vibrant, livable spaces of possibility.” (Gopinath 2005, 194) The set of reading practices discussed by queer diaspora scholars provide a crucial opening for a new discussion of the memoirs. I will primarily employ this approach for examining The Good Daughter, but I will argue its importance for the memoir genre as a whole as well. Learning to Relate Differently Jasmin Darznik’s The Good Daughter tells the stories of three generations of Iranian women. It begins with Jasmin, who at the age of three had emigrated from Iran to the US with her Iranian mother and German father, finding a photograph of her mother in a wedding dress at the age of 13. Her mother, Lili, eventually sends Jasmin a series of 10 audiocassettes on which she tells of her mother Kobra’s difficult life with an abusive husband, Lili’s sadistic first husband and the first-born daughter that she was forced to leave behind, her education in Germany as a midwife in the 1960s and subsequent second marriage to a German man, and their departure from Iran and settlement in California during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The final chapters concern Jasmin’s experiences growing up in an immigrant family in the US. The Good Daughter is in many ways an unconventional book within the Iranian women’s memoir genre. The author acts as the narrator minimally, in the prologue and the last two chapters. The majority of the story is Darznik’s retelling of her mother’s story, including her retelling of her mother’s retelling of her grandmother’s early life. While each chapter begins with a quotation from the audiotapes to reinforce their centrality, it is unclear how much of the story is a narration of the tapes and how much is Darznik’s reimagining of her Iranian family’s lives. As such, it reads more as a creative work of literary nonfiction than strictly a memoir, but it does contain several of the thematic characteristics of the memoir genre, especially in its narrative of overcoming adversities in the immigration process, its use of the exotic aromatics of scents and flavors to reimagine the Iran of the past, and its detailing of the complexities of immigrant life and exile in the US. What I find to be its most distinguishing feature is the absence of a “return” narrative. Most of the prominent Iranian women’s memoirs feature a return to post-revolutionary Iran at their central, dramatic moment through which the narrator deals with loss and nostalgia. Here neither Jasmin nor Lili ever make that return, which becomes one of the ways in which Darznik disorients the diasporic memoir genre, as discussed below. In the following analysis, I employ a queer diasporic lens to examine The Good Daughter for how it unsettles the Iranian immigrant woman’s memoir genre and for how such an unsettling can lead to new opportunities for kinship and intimacy. In arguing the case for a queering of reading practices, I contrast their possibilities with a set of conventional comments about the text posted by readers on the book’s Amazon and Goodreads review pages, especially as related to the themes of gender, nation, narration, and home. I analyzed a total of 68 reviews from Amazon and 120 reviews from Goodreads, posted between 2011 and 2013. I particularly focused on the reviews which sought to make generalizing claims, that were troubled by the book’s narration, and that made comparisons across the memoir genre. I pursued this line of evaluation to make a case for queering conventional reading practices and for asserting the significance of audience reception to understanding the impact of the memoir genre, something that the critics of the memoirists often do not address. I follow the practice that does not perceive queering to be limited to queer content, but an approach that can destabilize and question any significant kind of normativity. I conclude my analysis by assessing the prospects for kinship that a queer diasporic reading offers. Several reviews equate the domestic abuse faced by Lili and Kobra with generalizations about Iran as a backward cultural nation. One reviewer, for example, states that the book “is a heart wrenching and mind opening look at a different culture's treatment of its women” (4/28/13, Amazon) and another argues that “Lili's story could belong to any woman raised in Iran during the same time period.” (2/9/11, Amazon) For some, the book comes to represent the “backwards ways of the non-western world and the suppression of females that is still rampant today.” (2/7/13, Amazon) A closer, more critical assessment of the text, though, reveals a much more complex depiction of Iran. Woven through the personal story of the memoir is a retelling of twentieth-century Iranian politics that echoes the nuanced perspectives of post-revolutionary Iranian studies. For example, the author does not glorify the “Peacock throne” of the Pahlavis, and chronicles the rapid speculation, hyperurbanization, and corruption that foreshadowed the revolution of 1979. In a particularly complex section, she imagines what the women in her family, had they been allowed greater access to education and news during the 1950s, might have known about oil, power, and imperialism in Iran during the Mossadegh and subsequent coup period. This passage is nuanced both in its telling of history and its argument for how it information was disseminated in a highly gendered way. By no means is this the nostalgic diasporic retelling of the Iran’s past. Similarly, her retelling of the revolution itself is a careful, removed delivery of the sholooqi (busyness) of the period, without any judgment of what happened and what followed, other than that it led to her family’s exile. Given that the Iranian memoir genre depends so much on a return narrative that disparages post-revolutionary Iran, this omission is in itself a highly destabilizing move. The fact that Darznik’s post-revolutionary account occurs entirely in the US and has little to say about conditions in Iran does not deter reviewers from making their own judgments. Many reviewers identify the treatment of women in Iran now as “not so different from what it was in the 1950's” (7/15/12, Goodreads), address “the appallingly different lifestyle women lead in Iran” (2/9/11, Amazon) in the present tense, even though the Iran context of the book occurs before the revolution, and argue that “unfortunately for women in Iran not much has changed.” (11/10/12, Amazon) Given the absence of discussion of the post-revolutionary period in the book, these interpretations are more a product of long-standing American perceptions than they are a reflection of Darznik’s aims. One reader even goes as far as to make a connection to Reading Lolita in Tehran: “…it's extremely interesting to see how women's lives were beginning to improve in 'The Good Daughter' up to the time of 'Lolita' and then how both books follow the downward spiral to where Iran is today.” (9/12/12, Amazon) Instead of critically embracing the destabilizing ambivalence that the author constructs for post-revolutionary Iran, the reviewer uses a limited interpretation of Reading Lolita in Tehran to stand in for what she leaves out. This is an interpretation inspired much more by contemporary Euro-American Islamophobia the content of the text itself, as exemplified by the following comment of another reviewer: “I fear the growth of radical Islam largely because of the treatment of women.” (7/17/11, Goodreads) A more critical lens embraces the text’s omission of a post-revolutionary narrative as a learning moment that counteracts the limitations of Orientalist perceptions. Orientalism, as critiqued first and foremost by Edward Said, concerns the limited, derogatory colonial and post-colonial representations of “the East” by scholars and artists from a vantage point in “the West.” Such representations serve to reinforce understandings of “the East,” particularly the Middle East, as static, corrupt, and violent, thereby bolstering the self-image of “the West,” and to justify political and economic imperialism.(Said 1978 and 1985) Elements of Orientalism are evident in other aspects of reviews, from generalizing the book to represent “Middle Eastern women” and “Muslim countries” to expressing gratitude for being located in the West. Many reviewers state that the book “helps to understand life in Muslim Countries” (3/25/12) through how “these Middle Eastern women go through hell and back” (5/15/11, Goodreads), and that ultimately, “This book will make you glad you were born in this century and this country.” (2/10/11, Goodreads) But these reviews overlook the tensions between cultural generalizations and experiential specificity in the book. There are interspersed essentialisms in her text, in generalizing statements such as that “Paradise, for Iranians, has always been a garden.” (Darznik 2011, 158) But these mingle with a narrative that emphasizes the uniqueness, rather than the generalizability, of experience. Certainly nowhere does the story stand in for the category of “Middle East woman” or “Muslim.” There are many instances through the text in which Darznik inserts criticisms of Orientalist interpretations, from Lili’s close-minded German in-laws crudely referring to her as an “atheist” and to Iran as a “barbaric country,” to the prejudice and ethnocentrism the family faces in California as immigrants. She even includes a scene earlier in the 1960s, while Lili receives her training as a midwife in Germany, in which she experiences herself as a character from The Thousand and One Nights as the doctors exotify Iran through their admiration for classical Persian arts and their desire for dark-haired and -eyed Orientalisch women like Lili (Darznik 2011, 185, 220-221). These insertions suggest the author’s awareness and criticism of the Orientalist gaze, but they require a critical approach that de-normalizes the standard interpretation of the oppressive Muslim society to bring their significance into view. The reviewers’ conventional understanding of gender extends to both women and men, most prominently represented through the long-suffering Muslim Woman and the violent, abusive Muslim Man, leaving some reviewers to wonder, “Are there/were there any kind or normal men in the Arab [sic] world?” (3/18/11, Goodreads) I find it particularly interesting that in none of the reviews does Darznik’s representation of her largely absent, alcoholic Johann stand in for a representation of a German or European Man. As scholars of Middle East representations in the global media have pointed out, rape and domestic abuse happen everywhere, but only certain societies become represented as rapist and violent in their gendered characterizations, another aspect of Orientalism that filters how readers interpret a text like this (Alsultany 2012). Understanding the gap between the how some people come to stand in for a whole category and others do not is an essential part of de-Orientalizing understandings of the memoir. According to many of the more positive reviews, the author achieves a sense of authenticity through her Persian heritage, attention to cultural details especially food, and empathic narrative. It is interesting that readers give her this authority, even though she migrated to the US at the age of three and has never returned. While Darznik’s attention to detail is engaging, I would like to offer a different interpretation, that rather than the lens of authenticity, this narrative needs to be read as the re-imagining of home and Iranian-ness from the vantage point of the diaspora. How do you create an attachment and an identity with a place that you have not physically seen and felt since you were three years old? It has little to do with authenticity and much to do with a creative diasporic need to imagine sensory and emotional connections. To read Darznik’s text in such a way makes it less a story about Iran and more a story about reckoning with alienation. Food is one of the central ways in which she makes connections between growing up in the US and how she imagines Iran. It is fascinating, for example, that even when she is reconstructing what Lili and Kobra ate in times of poverty, it sounds luscious and inviting: “a soup of marble-sized meatballs bobbing alongside a single potato, a pot of plain rice seasoned with a pinch of cumin seed, … or skinny eggplants that Kobra fried in water, turmeric, and few slivers of onion.” (Darznik 2011, 154) She states near the end that her Iran had always been a place in California, filled the sadness of women and their stories. In this sense, her book can be read as an attempt to recapture a different Iran through her mother’s stories. It is a complex representation that seeks to be romantic and gritty at once, from the description of the sensual aromatics to the explicitly violent retellings of domestic abuse in her family. In this tension, Darznik reveals the complexities of attempting to recapture a homeland within the diaspora, something that seems desirable and undesirable, possible and impossible, at the same time. What particularly unsettles some readers, and receives the bulk of negative comments about the book, is its ending. Several reviewers identify the ending as abrupt, incomplete, and unsatisfying, given that Jasmin decides not to return to Iran to visit her newly discovered sister and her dying grandmother. Here, the memoir genre is particularly influential on how readers comprehend the text, with the expectations of a “return” narrative. Readers become uneasy with how Jasmin and Lili do not want to return, instead believing that the “story can really only be fully understood in the context of Iran, the land of Jasmin's own birth.” (11/19/11, Goodreads) But if we perceive the story to be about an understanding of Iran through its diaspora, we have to let go of the idea that a physical return to Iran could provide any kind of resolution or complete a sense of belonging. Reviewers are so passionate about their dissatisfaction with the unresolved nature of the ending that one even suggests that Darznik’s editors should pay for her to go to Iran and add that story as a set of new chapters, while another speculates if she might be holding back on the return narrative for a sequel! But by embracing the unsettled ending, we gain insight into the sense of loss in diasporic living, at the same as the liberation it may provide. Toward the end, she states, “The truth was that my mother Lili didn’t believe the past could be recovered, no matter how much time had passed by.” (Darznik 2011, 320) There is a great sadness that pervades these last few pages, but also a sense of possibility and completion through the decision that the past can and will not be recovered. A final area of uneasiness that permeates the reviews concerns the often painstaking details Darznik provides of the constant moving from home to home and cycles of wealth and poverty of her family. One reviewer writes, “The flurry of activity, the homes bought, sold or foreclosed, the fortunes made and lost gets hard to follow.” (3/18/11, Goodreads) But this is precisely one of Darznik’s greatest contributions to understanding diasporic experiences, through her delineation of the multiplicity of homes, leave-takings, and changing fortunes. In contrast to the majority of the Iranian diasporic memoirs that take the moment of the revolution and immigration as their point of departure, in this story there are multiple changes and shuttling between residences, beginning far before the revolution and continuing into the US, that signal a complex relationship with home and where it may lie far preceding the moment of revolution. By showing how Lili and Kobra both experienced multiple forms of exile before the revolution, and continued to do so afterward, Darznik also undoes the narrative connection to the 1979 Iranian Revolution as single turning point in Iranian immigrants’ lives. Also, in her depiction, home in itself is never a safe place, given the context of abuse of her grandfather, the sadism of Lili’s first husband, and the alcoholism of Jasmin’s father in the US. Home only serves as a refuge in moments. In these ways, Darznik disrupts any notions of dependable safety, comfort, or refuge to be derived from “home” and ‘homeland,” and does so in a way that disengages an exclusive relationship between exile from home and migration, suggesting multiple spaces of exile. In a recent newspaper piece called “Home is Where They Let You Live,” Darznik tells another story that has made her uneasy about the concept of “home.” At the age of 13, she and her mother traveled to Germany to visit relatives, and on their planned return, the US consulate did not renew their visa. The officer asked her where her home was, and when she replied the US, the officer did not renew their visas on the indication that the family intended to stay in the US permanently, rather than temporarily by way of a business visa. After two years of waiting in Germany, they were finally allowed to return, but the experience left her with a complicated relationship with “home” and the US, in ways that disrupted any dependable sense of belonging. She realizes that for her, like for countless other diasporic children, home is not just what is safe and desirable, but also what is legally permitted and denied. She concludes, “‘Home.’ At 13, I had that notion knocked out of me in ways that were useful, or mostly so. But the word still makes me uneasy, and even now, whenever I am given a choice, I leave the answer blank.” (Darznik 2012) While exile is usually represented in Iranian diasporic writing primarily as a moment of sadness and mourning, for her it is also useful in giving a sense of liberation through detachment from the idea of “home.” Furthermore, as Nasrabadi argues in her analysis of the Iranian women’s memoirs, there is strength and value in a collective sense of melancholia, when an author makes a crucial shift “from viewing her difficulties in belonging to either society as a personal failure to understanding her struggle as a part of the vicissitudes of melancholic diasporic existence.” (Nasrabadi 2011, 497) This sense of liberation ultimately leads to the possibilities of recreation of “home,” but in an uncertain way. What exists for Jasmin and Lili in the concluding chapters is very much along the lines of Garvey’s notion of “(Un)Belonging,” a new intimacy based that resides outside of the belonging/not-belong immigration binary. There are two passages, each at the end of the last two chapters, that both suggest such a possibility of learning to relate differently, outside the conventional diasporic logic of nostalgia and exile. The first occurs through Jasmin’s recollection of the stories her mother would tell her when she was growing up, while feeding her pomegranates in the bathtub: I’d forgotten home, I’d forgotten Iran, but just as some memories linger in spite of our longing to forget them, there are some loves that will take in just about any soil. When my mother Lili lined my bathtub with pomegranates, she was giving me an appetite for an unearthly fruit and the stories and secrets encased in its many-chambered heart, and this, she knew, was a pleasure from which not even a small girl could be exiled. (Darznik 2011, 293) There is a powerful sense of intimacy and pleasure here linked to sharing of stories and food. The fact that this connection is an unearthly fruit that will take in just about any soil suggests simultaneous materiality and ethereality. It holds tied to the past, through the lingering of memories, but is not dependent on the past alone to grow and thrive. The shared stories lead to a frank new intimacy between Lili and Jasmin, which allows Jasmin to feel “safe in that small, crowded, makeshift house” of her mother (Darznik 2011, 321). In a manner similar to how Gopinath argues that “queer desire reorients the traditionally backward-looking glance of diaspora,” here the newfound intimacy between mother and daughter looks forward rather than back (Gopinath 2006, 3) In the final sentences of the book, after Jasmin has explained the death and burial of her grandmother’s death in Iran without her or her mother’s presence, she writes: Where there is too much distance, and too many leave-takings, there are no returns, or none in which we can fully believe. Still, one love always entangles itself in another, grows unrecognizable, and survives. (Darznik 2011, 324) Here Darznik disrupts the notion of return to a home or homeland and suggests the possibilities for a different kind of home rooted in the unpredictable, undetermined nature of relationships. They have experienced so much distance, movement, and dislocation that have worked together to obliterate the possibility of a return in any kind of meaningful symbolic or material way. Instead, what they have remaining is a shared love, tangled and rooted in the past, but growing in unpredictable ways into the future. There is sadness and grief in the realization of distance and the impossibility of return but also tremendous potential and dynamism in the unrecognizability of how relationships rooted in the past take shape and thrive into the future. The newly rekindled relationship between the two women, in this way, serves as inspiration for the meaningful constructing of relationships and identities within a diasporic experience. Queering the Past and Re-Imagining the Future In his book Cruising Utopia, Jose Esteban Munoz presents queer utopian memory as a critical recollection of the past in a way that allows us to see beyond the present to imagine worlds of political possibility (Munoz 2009). This motioning toward an engagement with the past that creates new possibilities for the future is exactly what queer diaspora scholarship offers. On the level of an “Iranian diaspora,” this lens serves to challenge concerns for authenticity in representations of Iran and Iranian-ness, and instead looks to the past in a critical way that unearths meaningful opportunities for building relationships into the future. It requires a critical reevaluation of the meanings and significance of nation and home, and it moves us toward moments of uneasiness and destabilization as critical opportunities for liberation and intimacy. While The Good Daughter is in many ways a unique book within the genre, a queer diaspora approach de-normalizes the genre as a whole and can be applied, sometimes oppositionally, in future-looking ways to other diasporic representations as well. This means that as readers, we must examine how authors queer diasporic experiences, while at the same time queering the normativities that exist within the text and within the world of possible interpretations of the text. A queer diaspora lens, as such, supports a vital set of reading practices to counter the conventional Orientalism through which people read books such as these memoirs. This approach requires critical reading and thinking in a way that questions dominant and normative assumptions about home, family, gender, and nation. While the memoirs’ critics effectively point out the imperial power relations within which the memoirs are located, their critiques do not extend to audience reception. Given that learning how to read in opposition to imperialism is central to dismantling it, a queer diaspora lens provides a radical frame for learning how to read and relate to others differently. That the readers’ reviews show Orientalist thinking to be alive and well argues for the urgency of queer reading practices in multiple spaces. While such queer methodological frameworks are often limited to academic settings, the posts suggest the need for them to be expanded to engage with social networking venues such as the review sites. The narrow interpretations of some readers extend the need for queer pedagogical reading approaches far beyond the classroom setting to more popular public sites of discussion and exchange. A queer diaspora approach, ultimately, has critical and creative implications for both diaspora and Iranian studies. To make difference visible and question normative urges when they appear make diasporic authenticity and singularity impossible. It becomes unworkable to question one set of experiences as more valid than another, or to speak of “the Iranian diaspora” as a coherent entity. Instead, a queer diaspora approach presents us with the challenge of building connections and relations between experiences, but in a way that also critically questions normativities when they appear. The concluding reconciliation of Jasmin and Lili, after a lifetime of sharply different experiences and perspectives, provides inspiration for such a building on a larger social scale, a new way of relating that admits the past, but points toward the future.  References Ahmed, S. (2006), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. (Durham: Duke University Press) Akhavan, N., Bashi, G., Kia, M. and Shakhsari, S. (2007), ‘A Genre in the Service of Empire: An Iranian Feminist Critique of Diasporic Memoirs’, first published in Zmag.org, accessed July 1, 2013 at: http://www.payvand.com/news/07/feb/1007.html. Alexanian, J. 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