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My little sister and her Barbies (plus Ken)

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Before I gifted these dolls to my sister, I remember a conversation with my father. He asked me why I had so many feminine dolls and just one Ken. I told him he was "just there to help the Barbies". From an early age, the idea of "doing gender" was apparent even in something as simple as play. While I wasn't aware of it, I was demonstrating a part of Lorber's work in "Social Construction of Gender" as I shifted the typical gender roles with my dolls based on my social upbringing. My Ken was a peripheral figure designed in my eyes to do housekeeping and driving the toy car while Barbie had several esteemed careers. Gender was clearly institutional as I grew up in a matriarchal household and it manifested in my allocation of privileges for toys.

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I grew up in a household of muslim women, but I never wore a hijab. I had the privilege of growing up outside a nation where I would be forced to wear one and view it not as a symbol of faith, but an institutional demand of gender display. In contrast, the older generation of women in my family always wore one out of being accustomed to it. Instead, they allowed me to experiment with fashion and my version of gender display. Regardless of whether or not I dressed traditionally feminine, masculine, revealing, or modest, I was always met with the same affirmation that it suited me and I was beautiful. The connotation of that word is typically feminine and in its application to me, my gender display was given freedom in a way that the other generations of Iranian girls and women were not usually granted.

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Duality of the American Perspective on Iranian Women

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The glasses present are reflective of my personal experience. On several occasions, I've been likened to a popularized Middle-Eastern sex worker strictly due to her glasses and our shared ethnic background. I recall receiving comments exoticizing myself and her, reducing the cultural aspects we shared into fantasies geared towards others. In contrast, the book is one of the few representations of Iranian women I've been able to connect to which represented us as we are in our current time. In Yamada's reading, she describes the Western stereotype and expectation of Asian women, one which white feminists perpetuate. In the way I felt compared to someone bolstering an orientalist view of Middle-Eastern women, I first learned about how my gender was being framed in connection to my race without regard for how I personally demonstrate my gender.

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Within my family, gold bangles are given to women once they marry. However, my mother decided to break this. Rather than creating a reward for marriage, she chose to give them to my sister and I for our graduations. The background image behind the bangles featured above is from Shahnameh, a Persian Epic of ancient Kings. This illustration is one of the few depicting a woman in a higher position above men. To me, this contrasts with my bangles in cultural association of gender shifting from the most ancient tales into something as simple as jewelry.

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I chose this as my final image for one reason: my education and aspirations would only be possible through the cultural changes in gender found over the span of generations. While I am able to pursue my degree freely, my recent women ancestors were confined to futures of homemaking and arranged marriage alone as they had no choice. It was the only norm for While I was unsure of what to do for this project, I found inspiration through the lived experience of my family and how my culture has shaped my gender expression despite having grown up in the United States apart from other Iranians. Kimberlé Crenshaw's term intersectionality and the reading from her have allowed me to see how my identities relate to each other and understand the complexity of my gender expression due to my gender, sexuality, etc.