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Madella, Thayse. "Otherness in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Autobiography and the Graphic Novel as a Subversion of the Western Gaze." Cultural Excavation and Formal Expression in the Graphic Novel. Eds. Jonathan C. Evans and Thomas Giddens. At the Interface, Probing the Boundaries. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Pr. 2013. 55–63. 
Added by: joachim (27/09/2025, 12:00)   
Resource type: Book Chapter
Language: en: English
BibTeX citation key: Madella2013
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Categories: General
Keywords: "Persepolis", Autobiography, France, Identity, Iran, Orientalism, Satrapi. Marjane
Creators: Evans, Giddens, Madella
Publisher: Inter-Disciplinary Pr. (Oxford)
Collection: Cultural Excavation and Formal Expression in the Graphic Novel
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Abstract
Based on Edward Said’s book Orientalism that describes the process in which the people from the Middle East are constructed as all the same by the West, and Stuart Hall’s concept of identity, I shall discuss how Marjane Satrapi uses the graphic novel format in Persepolis, for the construction of Marji’s identity. Persepolis subverts the Western gaze that locates the Iranians in a position as the other and shows a more complex life in Iran through Marji’s identity construction. Her unfixed identity, constructed by the articulation of her own interests and the positionality society imposes over her, according to terms defined by Hall, has been influenced by the location Marji’s persona finds herself, being in Iran or Austria, home or exile. Those life experiences, that, in a sense, are traumatic, become source for the autobiographic graphic novel Persepolis. For Hillary Chute, the embodiment of the self and the chance of materialising history and traumas make the graphic novel format one of the ways some women could express their stories. In this way, Satrapi makes use of autobiography and the graphic novel in order to subvert the Western gaze upon her showing a more complex perspective of herself and Iran in opposition to the homogeneous other constructed by the West about the Middle East.
  
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