Women Without Men: Discovering Self

Women Without Men is an independent film by Iranian filmmaker Shirin Neshat. It explores the personal journeys of four Iranian women in 1953. Done in a ‘magical realism’ style, the film juxtaposes the women’s personal journeys against the coup d’état of 1953, in which the democratic government of Iran was overthrown by the United States and Great Britain. Magical realism is defined as a style of art or literature which ‘involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic’ (Moore).
Shirin Neshat is widely known for her work, which explores gender relations and Islam, usually in Iran. She gained prominence for her photo series Women of Allah, which depicted women in veils carrying guns, with Islamic poetry painted across their skin. She followed that with a trilogy of films, done with fellow Iranian artist/filmmaker Shoja Azari, which explored women and Islam. These films were Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999), and Fervor (2000). She explored her personal feelings on her dual-cultured life in the films Rebellious Silence and Soliloquy (1999).

Shirin Neshat appears to be fond of using a split-screen technique in her films. In Rebellious Silence and Soliloquy, she projects images of herself in Iran on one screen and images of herself in America on the other. In Turbulent and Rapture, the split screen is used in another way; one screen has only male actors, and the other has only female actors. This is to reflect the way men and women are physically separated almost all the time in Islam. In Turbulent, Neshat explored singing as a metaphor for freedom. She made this film as a response to an Iranian ban on women singing.

In her work, Shirin Neshat portrays Iranian women. She shows their humanity, and how their culture ignores that its women are people, too. In her films and photography, we get a glimpse into the world of Muslim Iranian women; to many Westerners, this is a totally new experience. Iran is unwelcoming to Western people, because of cultural and religious differences. Many Americans, myself included, have little to no knowledge of Iran and Iranian culture. Before seeing Women Without Men, all I knew of Iran was that it was a Muslim country. I suspected that it was a theocracy, or a dictatorship. That was the extent of my knowledge of Iran.
                                                                                                                                                                                  
In Women Without Men, Shirin Neshat says she tried to remind people of the Iran before the Islamic Revolution. She strives to have Americans see that our government helped make Iran what it is today, by collaborating with Britain to overthrow Iran’s government in 1953. With Women Without Men, Neshat portrays the personal journeys of several women; we see their quests to break free from the control of men and find themselves. This is a story that many women can relate to, as women as a whole have been struggling to break free of male control, to varying degrees of success.

The characters of Women Without Men break free of perceptions of Islamic women. Fakhri leaves her husband, and Munis is a political activist. Most people do not think Iranian women would ever do things like this. In the women of this film, one can see where Neshat may have put her own feelings into this film. The women belong neither to one world nor the other, and this may reflect Neshat's own feelings toward her bi-culturalism.

This movie has an interesting title: Women Without Men. This is a film about self-discovery and freedom. All the women in the film find freedom after escaping from men. The only positive male character is the nameless gardener. In being ‘without men,’ these women find their ‘self’. Without negative males in their lives, the women are free to do the things they could not do before; Munis can finally be a political activist, Zarin can choose what she does, Faezeh can choose if she will marry, and Fakhri can run her life as she chooses.

This film relates to our class, because all four of these women are struggling to pull away from what they are expected to be, and they each try to find their ‘self’. In her TED speech, Thandie Newton says that we are not born with a ‘self,’ but it is created as we grow older. I have to disagree. I think 
we are all born with a true ‘self,’ but we do not always let it show. Indeed, sometimes we do not even know what our true ‘self’ is like; we suppress it in order to fit in and be liked. At some point in almost every person’s life, one must tear away the old, false ‘self’ to reveal what really lies underneath. Some people may never find that ‘true self’, and others may hide it away. In Women Without Men, each of the women ends up shedding that old life, that old ‘self’, and beginning anew.




The place you are born or the place you live can have a great effect on one’s ‘self’. If one is born in a Western country, like America, one has much more freedom to be and express one’s ‘self’. If a woman lives in a more oppressive country, like Iran, she has little to no freedom of ‘self’. A man might have more freedom of ‘self’, but a woman would not have that freedom. She would be confined by her culture into behaving a certain way, no matter if it goes against her nature.
There is definitely a power struggle in Neshat’s work. It goes beyond the very obvious political strife in Women Without Men, and into a much more personal power struggle. All of the women yearn for independence, for control over their futures, their bodies, their ‘self’. The men in the film desire power over women, and try to control them and tear them down. Munis’s brother attempts to force her to get married, and Fakhri’s husband emotionally abuses her to get what he wants. Zarin has no control what happens to her body until she runs away, and Faezeh has control of her body taken from her by force. The women strive to regain control over themselves in the film, and succeed. Munis becomes a political activist after (possibly) faking her death. Faezeh learns to move beyond the shame and horror of her rape. In death, Zarin moves beyond any other person’s control of her body.
Women Without Men is a very powerful, emotional film. It gives a rare look into the lives of four women in a now-barely-remembered time in Iranian history. Its overarching theme is one of self-discovery and freedom. Like Shirin Neshat’s other works, it explores the lives of women in Iran, and their relationships to their country, their religion, and men.