The Body in Pain and Pleasure

Abstract Women’s bodily experiences, radically stigmatized in Persian culture, have barely been approached in the literature of Iran. However, Rosa Jamali, an eminent postmodern poet in contemporary Iran, mobilizes her poetic palette with a phenomenological perception of pain and pleasure in the female body as a means of self-expression. For her, the female body can be portrayed via indirection and insinuation through which bodily dys-appearance (pain) and eu-appearance (pleasure) are invoked. Resonating with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of “body-subject” alongside Farzaneh Milani’s “neotraditional feminism,” Jamali’s oeuvre conceptualizes the body of a Persian woman in proximity to deeply entrenched values in Persian culture so as to transgress them. By displaying a poetic performance of intercorporeality, Jamali encounters the inscrutable female body and draws it within the contours of manifold intersomatic connections with the surrounding world, cultural memories, and archetypal images.