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What does it mean to survive, and when, and how, does survival matter? As the editors of this special issue have suggested, "To survive is messy, elaborate, layered," contingent as it is on biological, political, and material conditions that support life or liveliness. The claim for the renewed centrality of survival in modern times rests on the recognition of widespread threats to human life, social, and physical environments brought about by political violence, social persecution, and ecological crises. Domestic violence, the right to abortion, and equal pay are only a few of the additional issues that disproportionately impact women's lives. Survival is always contingent on the unfolding of an event's horizon and is shaped by evolving circumstances rather than guaranteed. The term itself is used in a variety of contexts: capital-S "Survivor," situated historically, may refer to a person who survived the Holocaust; in popular contemporary culture, the term refers to a reality game show franchise where contestants must "survive" in seemingly difficult and "exotic" settings. Ranging from the profound to the superficial, "survival" is multiply inflected in contemporary culture, and more often than not, these inflections overlap and contradict one another. Survival is marked by precarity and persistence, two qualities that also mark the text under analysis in this article.
With these permutations in mind, in this paper I explore the multiple modalities of survival in Marjane Satrapi's "autographic" memoir, Persepolis (2003/4). Influenced by Art Spiegelman's Maus (1996) and David B.'s Epileptic (2002), Satrapi's comic skillfully addresses difficult subjects through an iconic visual style. Like both Spiegelman and B., Satrapi uses the comic form to explore the relationship between personal memories and cultural history. In this respect, I suggest that Persepolis significant-ly contributes to feminist cultural histories, because Satrapi's story is told through a female and Iranian perspective, two descriptors that have been-at least historically -infrequently linked within Western discourses, including feminist conversations.1
Narrating Women's Lives
I use the term "autographic" in reference to Gillian W hitlock and Anna Poletti's neologism in a special issue of Biography. Leveraging Leigh Gilmore's conceptual term "autobiographics" in her landmark study on feminist self-representation (1994), Whitlock and Poletti broadly define "autographics" as "[l]ife narrative fabricated in and through drawing and design using various technologies, modes, and materials" (2008,...