Abstract
My pain is not fences around the pond but to live amongst fish that cannot imagine the ocean. Mohammad Mosaddegh, as cited in Sepideh (Madsen 2013) Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh uttered the above sentence when he was overthrown in the 1953 coup and jailed. The coup orchestrated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was meant to prevent the nationalisation of Iranian oil and the government's move toward a communist political system (Merica and Hanna 2013). The coup also shut down Mosaddegh's wilfulness to prevent foreign supremacy in his country. Mosaddegh's statement seems to encapsulate the failure of his opponents to imagine the future otherwise, to imagine a world besides Western capitalism. At times wilfulness needs to be concealed in order to become stronger, to affect deeper. The previous chapter has revealed that wilful women and wilful forms challenge the status quo at a micro-level. The aesthetic of Vendredi soir unveils spaces of activism, a wilfulness that persists beyond the gendered norms that the character has integrated over time. If Laure embodies gender as an unconscious performance, the young girl in Haifaa Al-Mansour's film Wadjda (2012) learns how to manage expectations imposed on her because of her female body. Her relative ignorance of norms and regulations takes form as both a wilful, mobile habitation of space and a necessity of appearing with, of masking wilfulness. This chapter explores how the characters' predicament and the visual see how wilfulness produces micro-instances of affirmation through filmic forms and characters' movements. Such forms and movements give shape to the spaces of Wadjda. As the first feature film directed by a Saudi woman, and one that required the director's wilful insistence to be produced (Al-Mansour directed the film from the back of a van in order not to appear in public with the men of the crew), Wadjda offers an excellent example of how wilfulness manifests as being both 'against' and 'appearing with' the patriarchal flow. Wadjda challenges some well-established sexist social norms in Saudi Arabia. By choosing a child protagonist, Al-Mansour was able to expose gender inequalities without seeming polemical. In interviews, the director asserts that telling the story from a child's, Wadjda's, perspective was a deliberate choice: the child's innocence and greater mobility allow her to comment on cultural issues without appearing to overtly criticise the culture (Pape 2013) . Akin with Al-Mansour's statement, Fatima Mernissi writes that girls and elderly women benefit from greater freedom of movement in heterosocial spaces, in contrast with young adult women who are regarded as 'sexual beings' (1975, (83) (84) . Al-Mansour notes that it is important not to appear angry or confrontational, so as 'to be accepted back home' (Premiere Scene 2013). Recognising her own limitations to 'freedom', and the importance of not appearing 'against', Al-Mansour explains that she chose a bicycle as Wadjda's mode of transportation because it is 'not frightening, it is a toy' (Pape 2013) , and it is only slightly subversive. The bicycle also functions as an analogy: it advocates for the right of women to drive cars in Saudi Arabia. Rather than focusing on the patriarchal norms that negatively affect women's mobility and habitation of the public space, the film takes wilful forms through Wadjda's lived body and the spaces she inhabits.
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