Opposite sides of a hyphen : becoming my Iranian-American identity through autobiographical performance
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Having one parent from Iran and the other from the US, I learned from an early age that I was wedged between two distinct cultures. As an adolescent, following my parent's divorce, I thought that the words on opposite sides of my hyphen--Iranian-American--were incompatible. This dissertation aims to illuminate my experience as a hyphenated Iranian-American in relation to three identity facets: ethnicity/nationality, race/racialization, and sexual orientation. By illustrating my personal experience, I challenge cultural stereotypes of Iranian-Americans and argue that I was not born but became Iranian-American through performances in my everyday life. Using an autoethnographic methodology, I wrote thirteen autobiographical performance scripts to interpret how I perform my hyphenated Iranian-American identity. I argue that I became Iranian-American when I built binaries because I was living between two different households and two distinct cultures after my parent's divorce, when I experienced tensions that made me believe I could only exist on one side of my hyphen, and when I embraced moving through my hyphen to exist on both sides. These findings indicate the need to center more stories of Iranian-Americans on US theatre stages and the vastness of the Iranian-American diasporic community.
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Ph. D.