Abstract

The article discusses A novella:  Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur, an Iranian woman writer (originally published in Persian in 1989) based on the gender-sensitive approach. The novella (56 pages in Farsi) is structured around the motif of the journey. The five female protagonists we encounter in chapters named after them leave Tehran and congregate in a garden in Karaj. They want to stand outside the dominant masculine social conventions.

The first chapter of the analysis focuses on women’s modesty, virginity, and obedience in the relationship between brother and sister. In fact, the article critically examines not only the repression of the post-revolutionary era in Iran but also long-standing and unchanged cultural assumptions that had been created and continue to maintain fixed and oppressive gender roles. In other words, “Just home is safe” (Ahmed, 2014) and the concept of fear, have a central role in these women encountering others.In the second section, the “tree” metaphor portrays an eternal metamorphosis and detachment from the patriarchal system and masculine hegemony as a conceptualization of the body (Mahdokht as an unmarried woman). The article presents a content and discourse analysis method, in a qualitative approach, based on analyzing the text as a resistant reader. (Fetterley, 1978).

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