Bodies on the Border: Disability and Nationalism in Iranian Cinema, 1960-2010

This project is the first major study of disability in Iranian cinema as a critique of the relationship between ableism and nationalism.

In this study, disability is considered a differential material experience that is suppressed by historical discourses that deem some bodies more valuable than others.

The project will trace the ways that exclusionary narratives of nationalism contain the transgressive materiality of disability in Iranian cinema, as well as how this materiality subverts the discourse of nationalistic normativity.

To do this, I will conduct a close reading of a selected number of films from the period of 1960-2010, interrogating how cinematic techniques have been deployed to portray disability.

Then I will situate the images in both their broad and immediate historical contexts, in order to interpret them in the light of conceptual frameworks within historicist and new materialist approaches in critical disability studies.