Persepolis is the story of Satrapi’s unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming—both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.
Book Discussion Notes
Introduction & Context
Persepolis is the autobiographical graphic novel by French-Iranian artist and writer Marjane Satrapi, first published in French in 2000 and translated into English in 2003. It tells the story of her childhood and adolescence in Tehran during and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, her teenage years alone in Vienna, and her eventual return to and final departure from Iran. It became an international phenomenon, was adapted into an award-winning animated film in 2007, and remains one of the most widely read and discussed works of autobiographical comics in the world. Its extraordinary global reach opened a window into a culture that many in the West had encountered only through news coverage and political rhetoric — and, in doing so, revealed how much more we share across those apparent distances than we are usually led to believe.
The book opens with Marji as a young girl in a loving, secular, politically engaged family. Her parents are progressive intellectuals; her grandmother is a woman of fierce dignity and moral clarity; her uncle Anoosh is a revolutionary who becomes one of her most formative influences. Into this world comes the Islamic Revolution — and with it, the rapid transformation of public life, the imposition of compulsory veiling, the censorship of art and music, and the beginning of a brutal war with Iraq. Marji watches her country change around her, and watches the adults she loves navigate fear, resistance, compromise, and loss.
What makes Persepolis so powerful is the tension between the enormity of the political events it depicts and the intimacy of the perspective through which we see them. Satrapi does not give us a history of the Islamic Revolution — she gives us a child’s experience of it: the confusion, the anger, the dark humour, the grief. The graphic novel format, with its stark black-and-white drawings, amplifies this: it strips the story down to its emotional essentials, making visible what prose might overexplain.
As a feminist text, Persepolis operates on multiple levels. It is centrally concerned with what it means to be a woman (and specifically a girl becoming a woman) under a theocratic regime that treats female bodies as sites of political control. The veil, dress codes, public behaviour, and the surveillance of women’s lives are not background details in the book; they are part of its very subject matter. At the same time, Satrapi resists reducing Iranian women to victims of oppression. The women in Persepolis (her mother, her grandmother, her friends) are complex, funny, courageous, and contradictory. They find ways to live, resist, and even flourish within systems designed to diminish them.
The book also raises urgent questions about intersectionality. Marji’s experience of the Revolution is shaped not only by her gender but by her class, her family’s political history, and her secular upbringing. Her exile in Vienna exposes her to racism and the particular loneliness of being a refugee whose homeland has been caricatured by the Western imagination. And her return to Iran confronts her with the limits of belonging — she is too Western for home, too Iranian for Europe, caught between worlds that neither fully claim her.Persepolis asks what it costs a woman and a girl to grow up free in a world determined to limit her. It is a book that stays with you, and one that feels particularly urgent to read now, as Iran finds itself once again on the frontline of US aggression, a reminder that behind every headline there are people whose stories deserve to be heard, understood, and remembered.
Discussion Questions and answers for Persepolis
Opening Reflections
- What part of the book stayed with you the most? Was there a moment, image, or scene that you keep coming back to?
- Did reading a graphic novel change how you engaged with the story compared to a traditional text? Did the visual format make certain things easier—or harder—to sit with?
- Did the book challenge or complicate any assumptions you had about Iran?
We discussed several images and moments that stayed with participants after finishing the book. Some were struck by the fact that Marji, coming from what is almost an aristocratic family, ends up homeless in Europe — the fall is so steep. Others were moved by something more quietly painful: the weight of family expectations when you are living abroad. You miss home, but you haven’t fulfilled what your family hoped for you, and that makes returning feel complicated, even impossible. In a group as international as ours, this resonated with many.
Several participants were drawn to the book’s exploration of self-identity and belonging — and the loss that comes with it. The experience of leaving home and returning to find that it no longer feels like home sounded familiar, especially among those in the group who are themselves living abroad, which is the vast majority. Places may stay the same, but you no longer feel the same in them. What makes Marji’s story so striking is that her exile works in two directions at once: being away from Iran erodes her sense of herself as Iranian, while simultaneously sharpening it. She becomes more proudly, more consciously Iranian precisely because she is no longer surrounded by it. Many in the group found that tension familiar and how relatable when she talks about being a stranger at home and in a new country.
Equally striking for several participants was how much the book dismantled their prior assumptions about Iran. For those who had encountered the country primarily through Western news coverage, the revelation of how progressive Iranian society had been (and in many ways remains) came as a genuine surprise. Marji’s grandmother, having divorced in the 1930s (and three times in total!), her mother’s fierce political engagement, the family’s cultural life and intellectual openness: none of this fits the image that tends to circulate in Western media. The women in Persepolis are talented, open-minded, and full of conviction, and seeing them so clearly represented felt both inspiring and overdue.
This led to a conversation about what is currently happening in Iran. A participant with many Iranian friends noted that some Iranians, including those whose families are living through bombardment, are responding with something closer to hope than despair, preferring the uncertainty of war to the certainty of the current regime. Some are even expressing gratitude toward Trump, believing he may help bring the regime down. Older generations who grew up during the Iran-Iraq war speak of conflict and repression with a kind of matter-of-factness; for them, it is not exceptional, but the background against which life has always been lived. This is reflected in the book itself. The desensitisation is not numbness; it is a form of endurance. Participants also noted that the book makes visible the long history of foreign intervention in Iran — a reminder that what is happening now is not new, and did not emerge in a vacuum.
The Veil and the Politics of Women’s Bodies
- In the West, debates about the veil often frame it purely as a symbol of oppression, ignoring the voices of women who wear it by choice. Are there other ways to interpret and experience the veil that go beyond oppression? And when a woman says she chooses to wear it, how free is that choice really?
*Additional notes on the veil to spark the conversation:
Those who support the veil argue that it is a Quranic injunction that, when chosen freely, can be an act of devotion, identity, and even resistance against Western objectification of women’s bodies. For them, a woman choosing to veil herself on her own terms is an expression of agency, not oppression.
Those who are critical of it argue that the veil has been so thoroughly weaponised as a tool of patriarchal control — enforced by states, families, and communities — that it is impossible to fully separate it from that history. Fatima Mernissi, one of the most prominent Islamic feminists, was quite critical of the veil, arguing that it is fundamentally about controlling women’s sexuality and presence in public life, and that it has no strong basis in the Quran itself — the word “veil” does not actually appear there. The relevant verses call for modesty, which she argued is a principle that applies equally to men and women.
- The regulation of women’s appearance — what they wear, how they move, who can see them — is presented in the book as a form of state control. Do you see parallels with more subtle forms of that same control in Western societies today? Are women’s bodies ever truly free from political regulation?
The discussion opened with the legal regulation of the veil in countries like France and Canada, where it has been restricted in certain public contexts under the banner of secularism. Several participants pointed out the inconsistency: other religious symbols are tolerated, and the intensity of political debate around Islamic dress specifically is hard to explain without acknowledging that what is really being targeted is Islam. The group agreed that these two observations alone reveal that the debate is not truly about women’s freedom; there is racism here, and the selective concern for Muslim women’s autonomy is a form of it.
The book itself complicates any easy reading of the veil as straightforwardly oppressive. Marji’s friends who have adopted a Western appearance still judge her harshly for having slept with multiple men. The question one participant raised stayed with the group: Who is more repressed, in the end? You can dress without a veil and still be deeply oppressed in your thinking.
A participant shared the example of a well-educated, outspokenly feminist Bengali friend who wears the hijab by choice, as an expression of her religious identity, something that makes her feel like herself. This prompted the group to draw an important distinction: acknowledging the racism and paternalism embedded in Western attitudes (and in many white feminists) toward veiled women with the assumption that they must be oppressed, that they couldn’t possibly have chosen this themselves. And yet, once we acknowledge that, we should also be able to ask honestly whether the veil, and religious dress codes more broadly, are oppressive in their origins and effects. The group was divided on this and sat with that division rather than resolving it.
The conversation broadened to the many reasons a woman might wear a head covering that have nothing to do with religious obligation. In parts of Africa, covering one’s hair might be a social and cultural practice. In India and Nepal, it can be part of a meditation or spiritual practice. Some women describe the veil as offering a sense of safety or even resistance — a way of moving through public space without being watched and sexualized. That too might be understood as a form of freedom, even if it is a freedom born of necessity, and it points to something the group felt strongly: people are taught that it is acceptable to observe women, comment on their bodies, and make them feel uncomfortable. We need to challenge that, not adapt to it.
This brought the group to the question of choice more broadly. Are women in the West truly free not to wear makeup, not to shave, not to dress in particular ways for a job interview, for example? The social and professional costs of non-compliance may be less visible than a law, but they are real. Choice does not exist in a vacuum, and we are all, to varying degrees, shaped by the systems we live inside. The group felt it was important not to lose sight of this when judging others’ choices; we often don’t know why someone is making the decision they are, and assuming we do is its own form of arrogance. Muslim women in particular are too often spoken about rather than listened to, presumed to be passive or without their own convictions. Centring their voices — in all their diversity and contradiction — is not just a courtesy; it is the minimum that honest feminist solidarity requires.
Religion, Patriarchy, and Oppression
- Religion is frequently used to naturalise and legitimise the oppression of women — presenting patriarchal structures as divinely ordained rather than socially constructed. Is this specific to Islam, or do we see the same dynamic across other religious traditions?
- Marji has a personal, almost conversational relationship with God as a child, which she gradually loses as the Revolution progresses. What does this arc say about the difference between personal faith and institutionalised religion? Islamic feminism argues that oppression is not inherent to religion itself, but to the patriarchal institutions and interpretations that have controlled it. But given that most major religions as we know them today were written down, interpreted, and institutionalised by men, is it possible to separate the faith from that history? Can any religion, as we understand and practise it now, truly be feminist — or to put it more simply: can you be religious and feminist at the same time?
*Islamic feminism is a movement that draws on Islamic scripture to argue for women’s equality, challenging the idea that oppression is inherent to Islam rather than to its patriarchal interpretations. Islamic feminists argue that the Quran has been interpreted for centuries almost exclusively by men, and that stripping away those layers reveals a far more egalitarian message — one that does not mandate the control of women’s bodies, but has been used to justify it. Read more here.
Some members reflected that religion (as distinct from the subjective spiritual experience of connection with a superior being or energy) is, after all, a cultural product, and therefore, almost entirely mediated by men: its rules written, interpreted, and institutionalised by men, and benefiting men. This means that adhering to the norms of most major religions involves, almost by default, accepting structures that are at least partially misogynistic. For example, if men and women of all backgrounds were required to cover their heads equally, there would be nothing to object to, but that is never the proposal. This is not specific to Islam; it runs across traditions. From this perspective, religious dress codes and other practices that treat women as inferior (specific rules imposed only on them, exclusion from positions of religious authority) are symptoms of a deeper patriarchal architecture, not isolated rules. That said, the group was careful not to let this collapse into a ranking of oppressions: a woman wearing a hijab can be equally or less oppressed than a Western woman navigating a different but equally demanding set of beauty practices.
Others held open a more hopeful position: that being religious and being feminist are not mutually exclusive, and that institutions can change. The example of Buddhist temples in Taiwan now allowing women entry for the first time was cited as evidence that these structures, however slowly, are capable of change. The question the group sat with was whether the path forward is to reinterpret and reinvent religion from within — reclaiming its more egalitarian possibilities, as Islamic feminism attempts to do — or whether to disregard it altogether. A few participants noted, with some vulnerability, that they had felt reluctant to admit to feminist friends that religion plays a meaningful role in their own lives — that it had helped them through genuinely difficult periods — for fear of being laughed at or judged as a bad feminist. We were reminded that this is a safe, non-judgmental space, and we are grateful to those who shared their experiences and feelings.
White Feminism and the Limits of Western Solidarity
- Mainstream Western feminism has historically centred the experiences of white, middle-class women — focusing on issues like workplace equality, reproductive rights, and individual autonomy — while claiming to speak for all women. Yet women in the Global South, women of colour, and women living under imperialism, poverty, or religious persecution are not only facing those (and even worse) struggles, but are often targeted doubly or triply by intersecting systems of oppression. How does Persepolis expose the blind spots of that mainstream feminism, and what does it ask of a Western feminist reader that white feminism has consistently failed to deliver?
- What responsibility does feminism have to actively seek out and centre the perspectives of women from cultures it has historically overlooked or misrepresented?
- When Marji arrives in Vienna, she encounters a Europe that has strong opinions about Iran and about Muslim women, but little genuine curiosity about their actual lives. Have you ever felt that your experience was being spoken for rather than listened to?
Several participants shared their own experiences of having their identity reduced, stereotyped, or dismissed in the Western countries they had moved to.
One participant, originally from Eastern Europe, described the particular stereotype that attaches to Slavic women in Western Europe — the assumption that they are looking for a wealthy husband, that they want to stay at home, that their ambitions begin and end with domestic life. A caricature that leaves no room for the actual person.
Others shared more visceral experiences. One participant recognised the scene where Marji is told to “go home” in Vienna — she had been told the same. Another had been walking in London after Brexit when a stranger crossed the road specifically to push her and tell her to go back to her country. A participant from Costa Rica described the gap between the way her country is imagined abroad — paradise, idyll, pure nature — and the reality of crime, high costs, low wages, and the daily logistics of simply getting home safely at night. She also noted the frustration of watching her country absorb foreigners who enjoy its resources without contributing to its tax base; a dynamic that complicates any simple narrative about who the victims of inequality are.
The group also touched on the complicated relationship between Colombia and Venezuela — two countries with a shared history that has nonetheless produced deep anti-immigrant rhetoric — as a reminder that the logic of exclusion is not a uniquely Western phenomenon. It operates wherever borders exist and wherever fear can be mobilised against those who cross them.
The supermarket scene after the Iraq war breaks out particularly resonated as an example of how quickly immigrants become politicised or treated as suspicious outsiders.
What connects all of these experiences to the book’s feminist argument is the question of who gets to be seen as fully human. When Marji arrives in Vienna, she encounters a Europe full of opinions about Iran and Muslim women, but with very little genuine curiosity about their actual lives. Western feminism has too often replicated this
Class, Privilege, and Who Gets to Resist
- Marji’s family is secular, educated, politically progressive, and relatively wealthy. How does this shape her experience of the Revolution compared to women from poorer or more religious backgrounds? Does the book acknowledge its own class position? How does this complicate any single narrative about what Iranian women experienced or wanted?
- Resistance in Persepolis — listening to forbidden music, wearing make-up, hosting parties, accessing Western culture — is largely possible because of the family’s class position. What does this tell us about who can afford to resist, and at what cost?
- We have discussed in previous sessions how access to healthcare, creative freedom, and education are shaped by class. Persepolis adds another dimension—the ability to physically escape danger. Is freedom of movement the ultimate class privilege?
Several participants drew parallels with Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — another novel that traces the experience of leaving home, navigating a country that misreads you, and returning to find that home has changed too. The resonance between the two books is strong.
The group also reflected on the class dimension that runs through Persepolis: the ability to send children abroad to study, to access education and safety, is itself a form of enormous privilege — one that Marji’s family has, and that even some members of the Iranian government have used for their own children. Freedom of movement, we noted in a previous session, may be the ultimate class privilege, and Persepolis illustrates that quietly but clearly. Participants also shared several recommendations for further reading and viewing: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, about a secret book club run by women in Iran; Embroideries, another graphic novel by Satrapi; and Woman, Life, Freedom, a book that emerged from Iran’s recent protest movement.
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