Vision and Precarity in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

What does it mean to survive, and when, and how, does survival matter? As the editors of this special issue have suggested, “To survive is messy, elaborate, layered,” contingent as it is on biological, political, and material conditions that support life or liveliness. The claim for the renewed centrality of survival in modern times rests on the recognition of widespread threats to human life, social, and physical environments brought about by political violence, social persecution, and ecological crises. Domestic violence, the right to abortion, and equal pay are only a few of the additional issues that disproportionately impact women’s lives. Survival is always contingent on the unfolding of an event’s horizon and is shaped by evolving circumstances rather than guaranteed. The term itself is used in a variety of contexts: capital-S “Survivor,” situated historically, may refer to a person who survived the Holocaust; in popular contemporary culture, the term refers to a reality game show franchise where contestants must “survive” in seemingly difficult and “exotic” settings. Ranging from the profound to the superficial, “survival” is multiply inflected in contemporary culture, and more often than not, these inflections overlap and contradict one another. Survival is marked by precarity and persistence, two qualities that also mark the text under analysis in this article.

With these permutations in mind, in this paper I explore the multiple modalities of survival in Marjane Satrapi’s “autographic” memoir, Persepolis (2003/4). Influenced by Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1996) and David B.’s Epileptic (2002), Satrapi’s comic skillfully addresses difficult subjects through an iconic visual style. Like both Spiegelman and B., Satrapi uses the comic form to explore the relationship between personal memories and cultural history. In this respect, I suggest that Persepolis significantly contributes to feminist cultural histories, because Satrapi’s story is told through a female and Iranian perspective, two descriptors that have been—at least historically—infrequently linked within Western discourses, including feminist conversations.¹

Narrating Women’s Lives

I use the term “autographic” in reference to Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti’s neologism in a special issue of Biography. Leveraging Leigh Gilmore’s conceptual term “autobiographics” in her landmark study on feminist self-representation (1994), Whitlock and Poletti broadly define “autographics” as “[l]ife narrative fabricated in and through drawing and design using various technologies, modes, and materials” (2008, v). As one mode of autographic writing, comics offer what I call here a “frame of recognition” for the subjects they portray. By “frame of recognition,” I mean first the physical frame—usually in the form of a line—that encloses images and words in comics, and second, the way that these frames are figuratively deployed to redress overdetermined narratives of marginalized subjectivities, including women’s lives. In women’s life writing, the work of comics is particularly significant because of the personalized field of vision that the form promotes. As Hillary Chute suggests, “The types of challenges we see in women’s graphic narrative are not found anywhere else—or anywhere else in a post-avant-garde horizon,” and part of the political significance of these images lies in their complexity and avoidance of an “obviously ‘correct’ feminist politics” (2010, 4–5, emphasis in original). The reader can observe the subtleties of narrating womanhood in Persepolis with its careful unraveling of cross-cultural codes and expectations.

Since the 1970s, women’s life writing has gained richness and depth from the production of graphic memoirs such as the underground anthology, Wimmen’s Comix Collective (1972–1992), and more recently, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic (2006), Julie Doucet’s My New York Diary (1999), and Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love (2007). These works demonstrate the ability of visual narratives to agitate, inform, and unsettle assumptions about women’s lives and their histories, while representing those histories in new and visually arresting ways. Bechdel, for example, meticulously traces over old diary entries to re-historicize her childhood, while Kominsky-Crumb utilizes a mixed-media format to chart the conflicting messages she received as a young woman about femininity and...