Unvacant Vessels: Women's Oppression in "Persepolis" and in Recent Nonfiction Anonymous 11th Grade

The roles of women in Middle Eastern culture have varied throughout the decades, ranging from being delicate creatures in need of protection to becoming blind soldiers suddenly dedicated to a misleading cause. This is most noticeably depicted in the graphic novel Persepolis, in which author Marjane Satrapi illustrates her own memoir while recalling certain events during her childhood. As demonstrated in Persepolis as well as in an article about radical Islam by Rola El-Husseini, called Radical Islam's War on Women, women in the Middle East are marginalized through policies like being forced to wear the veil, not being allowed to obtain a decent education, and being manipulated into performing acts of terror, all because Islamic extremists and fundamentalists want to use women as vessels for whichever cause or philosophy they deem convenient during that period of time.

First, women in the Middle East are forced to wear the veil to cover themselves while in public. For instance, when Marjane Satrapi was once caught in her adolescence by the Guardians of the Revolution, she explains that the job of this fundamentalist women’s branch was “to arrest women who were improperly veiled” like herself (Satrapi 132). To the Satrapi family...