How Female Singers in Iran Challenge Restriction by Retrieving Collective Memory: Their Genre, Visual Representation, and Different Implications for the National and International Audience

Abstract

On the Iranian calendar, it is the year 1401. A new century has just started, and it means the country has been recently involved in a fin-de-siècle air which is sometimes also dubbed “Renaissance” to suggest the change many Iranians have sought through a series of widespread protests during the last months and even earlier than that, during the last few years. It has been in vogue to review what went on in the just-finished century in the country. Many video clips, photo collections, and essays have been released to show in synopsis which leader succeeded who, what wars and violent acts killed which people, how the environment was treated, when and how women were granted or denied their rights, and in general what it has come to mean to live in this part of the world at the turn of the century. Among these fashionable efforts to write contemporary history in first person (Poole and Nienass 94), this paper is not going to create one more to comply with the boom, but it intends to delve into the recent politics of memory-making specifically when practiced by Iranian women in order to seek some insight into the issues they try to tackle, the strategies they develop to tackle them, and the consequences that arise. Without a doubt, one of the most significant contemporary turns of events in Iran was the Islamic Revolution in 1979 which led to not only regime change in political terms but also a huge amount of lifestyle changes in social and cultural terms. While those new norms were to some extent voluntarily adopted at the beginning, they have failed more and more to be exercised freely. And as norms have always and everywhere in the world had a tighter hold over women than men (Muñoz Boudet et al. 39), Iranian women have