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I N T R O D U C T I O N Long before the taking of hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran in , the United States and Iran had a complicated relationship . Until Uncle Sam’s ill-fated friendship with the Shah, most Americans hadn’t even heard of Iran.Those who had,knew it as“Persia,” a vague spot on the globe associated with carpets and cats. Few Americans knew that the CIA had instigated a military coup d’état in  that ousted and imprisoned the popularly elected Mohammad Mossadegh,who in only a year went from being Time magazine’s“Man of theYear” to being cast on the scrap heap of history by the U.S. government .The  revolution that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic, however, would make Iran a household name for many Americans. The images and headlines of the s—angry protesters, fistwaving students, bearded ayatollahs, captors and hostages, war— increased the distance and animosity between the two countries. Iran became a place largely defined by its restrictive political and religious identity,and in the eyes of Americans who had seen their society transformed by the free speech movement, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution, it seemed nothing short of otherworldly.While Americans were experiencing the effects of American feminism,Iran’s post-revolutionary Islamic identity was being rigidly defined by perceptions about women and their appropriate social and sexual conduct. While Iran expressed its post-revolutionary ideology in part through its policies toward women, Americans became fixated on the veil as an icon of the essential identity of Iranian women.While women in Iran were limited in their opportunities and in their ability to vocalize dissent ,Americans too participated in their silencing by assuming that they had little or no agency and were uninvolved in dissent. Ironically,one of the most interesting by-products of Iran’s revolution has been the explosion of women’s writing both in Iran and abroad.While women in Iran may have been confined to a less public role, they have sought quieter places to express their individual identities ,aspirations,and resistance.Women have developed successful and clever ways to respond to and maneuver around the forbidden spaces xix drawn by their government and society.Writing has been one of the public arenas to which they have been drawn. Even while they have had to endure harsh government censorship,Iranian women have,since the s,written and published in unprecedented numbers.Over the past decade, Iran’s best-selling fiction lists have been dominated by women. According to Majid Eslami, a critic and editor of the literary and art magazine Haft,“Women writers have become the avant-garde of Persian literature” (NewYorkTimes, June , ). This outpouring of written expression has extended to women in the Iranian diaspora as well. My first encounter with this phenomenon occurred when I compiled and edited the first-ever anthology of writing by Iranian Americans,AWorld Between:Poems,Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. The number of submissions that my coeditor and I received for the book was phenomenal in itself—but we were surprised to find that  percent of the submissions came from women authors. On more than one occasion,I have been asked why so few Iranian men in America have been published. Perhaps in conforming to the expectations of their parents and the exigencies of immigrant life, they have been too busy becoming engineers and doctors to write poetry and memoirs. But it is more likely that the dramatic increase in the number of women writing and publishing outside of Iran is an outgrowth of Iranian women’s specific experience;they have felt compelled to respond to the view of Iranian women purveyed by both the Islamic Republic and theWestern media.Women writers of the Iranian diaspora have had an experience parallel to that of their counterparts living in Iran—they have found themselves having to reshape their identities to fit the new reality of their lives.In Iran,after the revolution,that meant women confronting a system that disenfranchised them and also made available new opportunities through education (a by-product of segregated educational institutions) and self-sufficiency after the devastating effects of the eightyear Iran-Iraq War. Women who were part of the post-revolutionary immigration or were born in theWest have also felt a need to reshape and define themselves .Writing is a way to wrestle with and name the chaotic experiences...

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