Bordered imaginations

The burgeoning efforts of postcolonial, transnational, black and intersectional feminists who have increasingly pushed for an acknowledgement of ‘differences’ of women’s gendered experiences based on their class, race, nationality and religion have highlighted the importance of paying more attention to the voices of marginalised women. This has resulted in an increasing inclusion of women’s voices and their literature from the Global South in the intellectual spaces located in the Global North. The politics of this inclusion, however, I will argue, have been significantly informed by the global inequalities between the Global South from/about where these literary texts are originating and Global North in where these texts are received and consumed. Drawing on postcolonial as well as transnational feminist scholarships, and through examining the case of Iranian women writers published mostly in the US and also in Western European countries, this chapter investigates how gendered and racial borders in transnational spheres affect the politics of reading and reception of these literary texts.