Stolen Jouissance

Abstract

This chapter continues with Lacan by elaborating on some underdeveloped concepts from Chapter 4’s analysis of Close-Up. It does this by analyzing Marzieh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman (2000). Among the directors considered in this book, Meshkini is the only woman. As Hamid Dabashi puts it, “[b]y far the most critical aspect of the long history of Iranian cultural modernity is that its principal architects have been men. The masculine nature of the Iranian encounter with modernity is impossible to disregard. But to the rule of that masculinity there are crucial feminine exceptions, which ought to be taken equally seriously” (2001: 216).