The Circle Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The Circle - Essay ExampleThe images and sounds are equally pitiful and wonderful for the viewer.In quick summary, the movie begins with a miraculous event- the birth of a child. Unfortunately, the joy never follows because the child is a girl, even though the doctors told the family it would be a boy. Then the viewers meet Arezou and Nargess who have escaped from prison. They try to find their way to what they hope might be a country paradise. Another woman, Pari, is pregnant, barely since her husband has been executed, she cannot get approval for an abortion. She is trying desperately to get one anyway. Yet other woman is trying to abandon her young daughter with the hopes that another family will take pity on her and give her a happy home. A prostitute, a luckily remarried woman, and a woman whose husband remarried while she was in prison round out the cast. It should be noted that the cast was not one of Hollywood starts, but of real set Eastern women. This lends a chance of authenticity and reality to the film.All of the women in director Jafar Panahis film suffer from two things their gender and their marital status. Single females in Iran are open to agonizing and demeaning treatment every day. Their dress, travel, work, and hobbies are all subject to male approval. Their struggles are incomprehensible to women in the western world who alternate between express dismay at their plight and conveniently avoiding it. For these reasons. Panahis film stings so deeply into the cores of viewers everywhere, especially women. Western society cannot understand, let alone justify, these treatments of women. Fortunately, two Middle Eastern women can provide explanations about the substance of this film as it relates to life for women in Tehran and the Middle East as a whole. Suad Joseph is currently a Professor of Anthropology of Women and Gender Studies and the Director of Middle East/South Asia Studies at the University of California at Davis. She is a nati ve of Lebanon and has washed-out years researching women, family and children in her native land. Her research focuses on their concepts of self, citizenship and rights. She has written several books on the subject including Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East and Intimate Selving in Arab Families. She is the founder of the crosstie for Middle East Women Studies and of four American universities in the Middle East. Shemeem Burney Abbas is a native of Saudi Arabia. She has taught at colleges in both Islamabad and in Texas. She spent the years from 1987 to 1992 at the University of Austin in Texas and then at the Allama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad from 1992-1999 and then a secure from 2002-2003. She has given lecture of her article The distaff Voices in Sufi Ritual An Ethnography of Speaking at the University of Texas, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. She currently holds a P h.D. in English Language. According to Joseph, in Gender Citizenship in the Middle East, an examination of the legal documents related to citizenship has revealed that citizenship is extremely gendered in all arenas, particularly the political, economic and cultural. Joseph argues that the struggle for women to gain a sense of self and identity through citizenship has been compromised by the nations struggles for identity themselves. The nations of the Middle East, on