Becoming a Foreigner: Traveling Faces in Artworks by Anne Garréta, Marjane Satrapi, and Shirin Neshat

In their debuts, Anne F. Garréta, Marjane Satrapi, and Shirin Neshat, envision the experiences of female and non-binary protagonists as foreigners caught in-between the constraints of societal norms. Juxtaposing the works of these contemporary women writers and visual artists, this dissertation explores the themes of cultural hybridity, exile, migration, and multiculturalism by foregrounding these authors’ framing of liminality which defines the lives of ethnic, gender, and religious minorities in France and the United States. The existing scholarly discourse on these artworks often emphasizes their individual qualities and contextual backgrounds, inadvertently neglecting the possibilities for dialogue between them. Furthermore, there is a lack of investigation into the intricate interplay between the narrative content and the formal choices of storytelling in these artworks. By drawing on feminist psychoanalysis and feminist phenomenology, I argue that these cross-cultural and émigré artworks defy fixed categorizations of genre, form, and medium of expression to abate (orientalist and heteronormative) linear storytelling which once marginalized ethnicities, religions, and genders. Particularly, this dissertation examines this adverbial-infinite mode of becoming a foreigner, as an artistic construal of a threshold that connects the body of artwork to an embodied interpretation. The three chapters in this dissertation discuss experimental strategies used by these artists to situate their protagonists at a threshold between a fictionalized or real past and the present moment of reading, viewing, and interpreting. By focusing on the traveling faces of protagonists in a threshold, the result shows how artistic formal strategies give the audience affective immediacy to the liminal state of minority experiences.