Unhomeliness of Bodies Beyond Borders: Exploring Personal and Collective displacement in Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi and Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad
Public Texts MA Thesis Defence - Maryam Barzanooni
Event Details
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Monday, September 22, 2025
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Traill College
Building: Wallis Hall
Room: 226
The English (Public Texts) Graduate Program is excited to announce the upcoming MA defence by Maryam Barzanooni of their thesis entitled Unhomeliness of Bodies Beyond Borders: Exploring Personal and Collective displacement in Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi and Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad
Examining Committee:
Andrew Loeb (Supervisor) and Charmaine Eddy
Internal Examiner: Concetta Principe
Chair: Kelly McGuire
Abstract
The search for a unified “home” has been a controversial topic in diaspora, with home understood as a contingent space shaped by physical realities of diasporic life, as well as by temporal and affective dimensions of nostalgia, imagination and emotion. This thesis examines two Iranian memoirs, Funny in Farsi and Lipstick Jihad, through close reading and theoretical frameworks of diaspora and homing desire to argue that unhomeliness emerges from simultaneous feelings of familiarity and estrangement across diasporic spaces and from ideological expectations intruding upon private lives, producing a collective disillusionment. Situating this community-wide displacement in the context of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the research investigates displacement across borders, with homing desire emerging through the awkward assimilation of unhomely bodies. Overall, the research shows that Iranian diasporic memoirs capture contested notions of home and associate them with self and community exploration, revealing how the search for belonging emerges from identity conflicts and feelings of unhomeliness.
Key Words: Unhomeliness, Homi Bhabha, Sara Ahmed, Svetlana Boym, Nostalgia, Fetishized Home, collective displacement, Funny in Farsi, Lipstick Jihad
Limited seating is available