Stereotypes In Persepolis By Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis, published completely in October of 2007, is a graphic memoir which encompasses the childhood and adolescence of Marjane Satrapi in Iran during and following the 1979 Islamic Revolution and her teenage years spent in Austria. Satrapi uses her life experiences from living in these two contrasting societies, as portrayed in the graphic memoir, to break the many stereotypes that those reading from a Western perspective may or may not have by showing them women’s roles, Iranian culture, youth culture, and the everyday action of the average citizen of Iran. Throughout the entire book, we see Satrapi constantly rebelling against the rules put in place by the Islamic regime, starting out when she was only ten. We see Satrapi and many of the other girls are using the veil to jump rope with, use as a monster mask, and basically everything but its intended purpose (3 / 5). We see this motif of the fight against the veil further extrapolated upon later in the memoir, with Satrapi and her mother taking part in protests being held against the veil being portrayed (5/ 1) and (76 / 4-5), as well as the subtle ways that women fought against it, such as Satrapi’s wearing of a denim jacket and nikes(131/ 4) and the wearing the veil in more and more revealing ways, stating on (293 / 6) “Year by year women were winning and ⅛ of an inch of hair and losing an ⅛ of an inch of veil.” All of these combat the common Western assumption that absolutely everyone in the middle east can be