Cover not available

In:Geopolitics and Activism in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Edited by Giuliana Fenech and Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 18] 2026
► pp. 92–103

Chapter 6
Negotiating space through playful resistance

Vignettes of Muslim girlhoods in Pakistani and Iranian narratives

This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
This chapter delves into the spatiality and geopolitics of Muslim girlhood within the narratives of Marzieh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman (2000) and Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Lahore with Love: Growing up with Girlfriends Pakistani Style (2010), against religio-patriarchal backdrops in Pakistan and Iran, offering a nuanced understanding of the agential and political potential of Muslim girlhood. By highlighting the protagonists’ playful engagement with hudood laws, it illustrates their navigation and subversion of these laws as both legal and metaphorical barriers, contextualizing play as a mechanism that both sustains and critiques geopolitical agendas and imaginations and offers resistance to examine “school” and “household” as dual spaces of confinement and liberation.
Article outline
  • Playfulness as resistance
  • The narrative “I”, qissa, and story-telling traditions
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (12)
References
Primary sources
Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. 2010. Lahore With Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style. New York: Syracuse University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mernissi, Fatima. 1994. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhoods. New York: Basic.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meshkini, Marzieh, director. The Day I Became a Woman. The Makhmalbaf Film House, 2000. (Film).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Secondary sources
Brussat, Mary Ann & Brussat, Frederic. 2017. The Day I Became a Woman Film Review. Spirituality and Practice. [URL].Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Campo, Juan Eduardo. 2009. Hudud. Encyclopedia of Islam, 174–175. New York: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Khan, Nyla Ali. 2011. Inevitable Multiplicity of Subject Positions in Fawzia Afzal Khan’s Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style. Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies 3 (2): 23–28.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lal, Ruby. 2013. Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness. New York: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Langford, Michelle. 2007. Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman in Marziyeh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman. Camera Obscura 22 (1): 1–41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mottahedeh, Negar. 2008. Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Naficy, Hamid. 2011. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Subramanian, Shreerekha Pillai. 2011. Diasporic Memories, Dissident Memoirist. Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies 3 (2): 6–22.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Utas, Bo. 2006. Genres in Persian Literature 900–1900. In Literary History: Notions of Literature across Times and Cultures, Anders Pettersson, Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, Margareta Petersson & Stefan Helgesson (eds), 199–240. Berlin: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue