In this article, Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women without Men and its film adaptation by Shirin Neshat have been studied to underline the shift from Iranian to diasporic Iranian feminism as instanced by the journey of the story from Iran in late 1980s to the United States in 2009. The journey is also a journey in time, from the pre- to the post-911 world. Neshat’s overtly political allegory and bold religious themes typify the post-9/11 tendency in the West to explain all Iranian issues, including women’s lives, in religious and political terms. Parsipur’s own ironic acting in Neshat’s reworking of her short novel instances the heavy loss involved in self-translation by women of the Iranian diaspora in the post-9/11 era. The novelist/actress’s journey from a national to an international stage allows us to raise the question of translatability in literature on Iranian women by Iranian women.
