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Interlacing:
A Feminist Mode of Embodied, Layered Research

Abstract

 

This research investigates how gender, nature, and spirituality are entangled in the symbolic and material expressions of Indigenous Persian cosmologies. Motivated by the systemic erasure of women and land-based knowledge from dominant Iranian historical narratives, the study critically engages with the ways patriarchal, religious, and colonial epistemologies have marginalized embodied, ecological, and plural spiritual worldviews. Rather than treating Persian heritage as a static archive, this project foregrounds its relational and evolving nature by analyzing mythic, poetic, and ritual forms as living repositories of Indigenous knowledge.

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Drawing from feminist, decolonial, and land-based methodologies, I develop a research framework called Interlacing—inspired by the tactile, generational labor of Persian rug weaving. This methodological approach integrates interpretive and experimental methods: historical and documentary research, semiology, hermeneutics, diffracting, figurationing, and notating. Each is treated not as an isolated technique but as a thread that, when woven together, holds space for complexity, contradiction, and embodied meaning. The project does not seek to synthesize or resolve, but to trace how knowledge persists in entangled, often obscured, forms—through ritual gesture, poetic meter, symbolic figures, and visual iconography.

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By interlacing these multimodal strands, this research reclaims undervalued epistemologies and contributes to ongoing conversations about cultural sovereignty, gender justice, and the ethics of knowledge production. It centers Indigenous Persian cosmologies not as lost traditions, but as vibrant, evolving practices that resist domination and continue to shape spiritual and ecological imaginaries within and beyond Iran.

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Introduction

 

This research explores the entangled relationship among gender, nature, and spirituality in Indigenous Persian cosmologies. Drawing from Persian myth, poetry, ritual, and visual culture, it addresses the epistemic erasure of women and land-based knowledge systems in dominant historical narratives. The project is grounded in an ethical, multimodal, and decolonial methodology that seeks to reanimate marginalized traditions while questioning the institutional logics that have delegitimized them.

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Statement of the Problem
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Women and nature-based traditions have been systematically erased from Iranian historical narratives. This erasure is not incidental; it reflects entrenched patriarchal, religious, and colonial structures of power. From the institutionalization of Zoroastrianism to the rise of Islam and the later dominance of Western academic frameworks, successive regimes have suppressed the entangled expressions of gender, spirituality, and the natural world within Indigenous Persian culture. Embodied, land-based epistemologies—once central to these cosmologies—were recast as irrational, heretical, or primitive, displacing alternative ontologies rooted in spiritual pluralism, relationality, and kinship with the earth.

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Reclaiming these suppressed ways of knowing is essential to resisting dominant systems of knowledge production. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) asserts, history and storytelling can serve as “spaces of resistance and hope” (p. 4). The deliberate erasure of women and ecological knowledge from Iran’s historical consciousness is not merely a loss of memory—it is a restructuring of cultural authority that fractures the deep interconnections among land, body, and spirit in Indigenous Persian traditions. This delegitimization continues to shape how Iranian identity, knowledge, and cultural value are constructed and constrained in the present.

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Falcón (2016) observes that “modernist ontologies rely on dualisms” and that Western paradigms devalue “spirituality and favor individual methods of knowing over collective or spiritual knowledge” (p. 179). To decolonize knowledge, Falcón asserts, “knowledge production is collective, and we must strive to retain that collective spirit in the organization of our research” (p. 180). This research takes up that call by engaging with symbolic and material cultural forms—myth, poetry, archaeological remains—as living repositories of knowledge that are relational, embodied, and rooted in land.

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Carlson (2017) deepens this critique, warning that when decolonial theory is severed from material and relational contexts, it “risks metaphorizing its constitutive ground” (p. 496). In Iran, this metaphorization has manifested through the disconnection of feminine-symbolic and eco-spiritual traditions from their territorial and communal roots. Carlson emphasizes that “anti-colonial research resists and subverts settler colonialism in process, dynamics, and outcomes” (p. 501). While Iran has not experienced settler colonialism in the conventional sense, its lands have long been shaped by successive empires, followed by the religious coloniality of Islam and, more recently, the cultural colonization of the West through modernization.

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This research aims to resist layered imperial formations—shaped by successive empires, religious authority, and Western modernity—by restoring relational ontologies embedded in Indigenous Persian expressions of gender, nature, and cosmology. This is not to claim that earlier epistemologies are inherently more legitimate than those that followed. Culture, especially in a region as historically layered and contested as Iran, emerges through a continual interplay of belief systems, institutions, and worldviews. Yet epistemologies that have been systematically marginalized—particularly those grounded in land, embodiment, and spiritual plurality, warrant renewed attention. Recovering these erased traditions is essential for broadening what is recognized as knowledge and for imagining more plural, just cultural futures.

Chalmers (2017) reinforces the necessity of this intervention, noting that academic research has long “privileged Western epistemologies, value systems, and institutions while marginalizing Indigenous ones” (p. 101). In Iranian studies, this has meant the dominance of elite, religion-centered, and masculinist narratives at the expense of plural, ecological, and land-based worldviews. Chalmers (2017) emphasizes that Indigenous knowledge emerges from relationships grounded in land and place—an orientation that resonates with this project’s approach to reanimating the entanglements of gender, the natural world, and cosmology through multimodal methodologies that move beyond established academic conventions.

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By grounding the work in poetic, embodied, and relational modes of inquiry, this research not only critiques epistemic erasure but also contributes to restoring Indigenous Persian knowledge traditions that hold transformative potential for gender justice, cultural sovereignty, and environmental thought.

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Shaping the Question
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Over the course of this research process, my initial inquiry—focused on uncovering ecofeminist perspectives in Persian mythology—has undergone a profound transformation. What began as a question rooted in personal passion has evolved into a more ethically responsible, culturally grounded, and theoretically nuanced investigation. This evolution has been shaped by iterative reflection, sustained engagement with interdisciplinary methods, and meaningful conversations not only with my instructor Rebeccah but also with my peers during weekly discussions.

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In Week 1 of Unit 1, I began with a question that was ambitious but relatively narrow in scope:


How can a multimodal analysis of Persian mythology, as depicted in artistic and cultural expressions, uncover ecofeminist perspectives rooted in Persian heritage?


At the outset, I was eager to bring together my background as an ecofeminist artist with my academic interests in mythology and symbolic anthropology. I envisioned bridging feminist ecocriticism with Persian cultural forms such as miniature painting, music, dance, and poetry. However, as I engaged more deeply with ethical and methodological considerations, I began to question my use of the word “uncover.” It implied not only that these perspectives were hidden or lost, but also that research is a singular, objective process of revelation—one that positions the researcher as an authoritative interpreter. This conflicted with the collaborative and situated methodologies I was beginning to embrace, which emphasize meaning as emergent through context, multiplicity, and interpretive engagement.

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The readings by Ackerly and True (2008) helped me see that research questions are not neutral. They are shaped by the positionality of the researcher and can reproduce power hierarchies if they fail to reflect on the structures they inhabit. This insight prompted me to shift from “can” to “might,” adopting a more open and exploratory stance. As Smith (1999) argues in her foundational work on decolonizing methodologies, the framing of a research question must respect the epistemologies and values of the cultures it engages with. I began to see the need for a decolonial approach—one that suspends assumptions and allows meaning to surface through engagement, rather than imposing predefined frameworks.

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This growing awareness led me to reconsider the usefulness of the term ecofeminism in the Persian context. While I continue to identify as an ecofeminist, I came to see that applying this framework uncritically could flatten the rich, culturally specific spiritual and ecological knowledge embedded in Indigenous cosmologies rooted in the land now known as Iran.

Influenced by Chalmers (2017), who reminds us that knowledge is relational and situated within land, history, and community, I refined my question to:


How might a multimodal analysis of Persian mythology illuminate nature-centered perspectives rooted in Persian heritage?

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At this stage, Rebeccah’s thoughtful and affirming feedback marked a turning point. I had begun to feel unsure whether my attempt to hold both gendered and nature-based perspectives in one question made my scope too broad. Rebeccah’s response, grounded in relational theory, encouraged me to see the very entanglement of gender and nature as a strength, not a limitation. Her use of the phrase “dynamic effervescence” resonated deeply with my own poetic sensibilities and reaffirmed my intuition that these themes are fundamentally interconnected. This gave me the confidence to embrace the intersectional and entangled approach I had been striving for without feeling pressure to artificially disentangle them for clarity’s sake.

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Peer discussions in Week 14 also helped me address the vagueness in the phrase “Persian heritage and cultural expressions.” My peers encouraged me to be more specific about the forms and temporal scope of my analysis, which led me to initially focus on Persian myths, poetry, sculpture, and archaeological remains. This narrowing gave my project clearer grounding while still honoring the layered complexity of my materials and my interest in how symbolic and material expressions carry intergenerational knowledge.

As I continued to refine my thinking, however, I began to question the use of the term pre-Islamic to describe this focus. While it initially seemed to offer historical specificity, I came to see that it imposed a rigid boundary that misrepresents the fluid, overlapping nature of Persian cultural expression. This framing risks suggesting a clean rupture between belief systems, when in reality, spiritual and cosmological worldviews have always been in flux—shaped by land, power, and historical context. It also unintentionally reinforces the very binaries my research aims to challenge: ancient versus modern, spiritual versus rational, Islamic versus non-Islamic. Crucially, the marginalization of land-based, relational, and feminine knowledge systems has not been unique to Islam. Zoroastrianism, too—when institutionalized and aligned with state power—played a role in displacing plural, embodied, and ecological ways of knowing. By relying on a term like pre-Islamic, I risked obscuring the fact that suppression of alternative cosmologies has occurred across religious and political regimes. Belief systems are never fixed; they adapt, overlap, and transform as they move across geography and time. Religion itself changes form depending on the cultural and territorial contexts in which it takes root.

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In response to these realizations, I now use the term Indigenous Persian cosmologies to refer to symbolic and material worldviews grounded in land, spiritual plurality, and relationality. This language better reflects the scope and purpose of my project: to engage with cosmologies that resist domination—not only by acknowledging what has been erased, but by illuminating what continues to live and evolve outside institutional narratives.

This brings me to the current iteration of my research question:


How are gender, nature, and spirituality entangled in the symbolic and material expressions of Indigenous Persian cosmologies?

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This final version reflects not just a linguistic revision, but a deeper transformation in my research ethos. It moves from extraction to relation, from assertion to inquiry, from certainty to curiosity. It honors my personal and cultural commitments while remaining open to what the material may reveal. Most importantly, it treats the act of research not as a linear pursuit of answers, but as a process of interlacing histories, voices, and meanings.

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Research Methodology
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This research is guided by a methodology I call Interlacing, which draws inspiration from the intricate, embodied process of Persian rug weaving. Rather than adhering to a single disciplinary approach or aiming for neat theoretical synthesis, interlacing allows for diverse forms of knowledge—historical, symbolic, performative, affective—to exist in tension. Like the construction of a rug, where vertical and horizontal threads are knotted together over time, my methodology brings together rigorously grounded interpretive methods with experimental, multimodal practices. Some methods provide the structural backbone; others introduce texture, disruption, or movement.

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The following sections outline the approaches I work with—historical and documentary research, semiology, hermeneutics, diffracting, figurationing, and notating—not as isolated techniques but as interwoven practices. Together, they form a flexible, evolving research framework grounded in feminist, decolonial, and land-based epistemologies. Each method contributes differently to the final fabric of the work, and it is through their entanglement—rather than their resolution—that meaning is made.

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Historical and Documentary Research
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Ben Gidley’s (2018) framework for historical and documentary research provides a vital base for working with dispersed, decontextualized materials like mythic texts, poetic fragments, and visual archives. Gidley insists that historical sources are “socially produced within particular historical and cultural contexts” (p. 628), shaped by the technologies of preservation and fragmentation over time. This view enables me to approach Persian heritage not as a coherent or recoverable archive, but as a fractured terrain shaped by colonization, Islamization, and state-sanctioned erasures.

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Importantly, Gidley positions archival work as an ethical endeavor that can “restore fractured narratives” and amplify “marginalised voices and forgotten histories” (p. 609). In this way, I use documentary research not only to recover lost content but also as a decolonial gesture. These vertical threads form the warp of my methodological loom—anchoring my analysis in time, space, and structure, while leaving space for the improvisations of interpretive labor.

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Semiology
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The epistemic tightness of the warp is further reinforced by Paul de Man’s (1973) semiological approach, which helps me engage with the rhetorical opacity and multiplicity of Persian mythic and poetic language. De Man writes that “rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration” (p. 30), emphasizing how meaning in literary texts cannot be reduced to singular, referential truths. Instead, language works by excess, through metaphor and metonymy, performing meanings that resist closure.

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This resistance is critical in my research, which examines poetic and spiritual symbols not as signs to be decoded, but as figures that activate emotional, historical, and ecological resonances. De Man’s insistence that literature leaves behind a “residue” that cannot be fully decoded (p. 27) aligns with my effort to preserve ambiguity and tension in meaning—qualities that also characterize the best Persian rugs, where intentional asymmetries signify human presence and craft.

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Hermeneutics: Dialogue as Weaving
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Hermeneutics, particularly as articulated by Gadamer (2004), provides the philosophical grounding for understanding cultural materials as dialogical rather than static. Gadamer’s concept of the “fusion of horizons” (p. 305) is central to my methodology: I do not attempt to objectively decode the past but seek to understand it through my own historically situated gaze. Regan (2012) elaborates on this dialogical aspect by describing interpretation as “more like a real conversation between the author and reader” (p. 297)—a view that reinforces the relational dimension of interlacing.

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This dialogical approach also affirms the researcher’s positionality and the ethical imperative to “listen, observe, reflect, and test” while being in relation with others (Regan, 2012, p. 292). Like a weaver whose hands follow memory and improvisation as much as a pattern, I engage with cultural material as an ongoing negotiation—not a closed artifact. Grondin (2021) extends this logic further, suggesting that understanding is “a universal aspect of philosophy” (p. 5), thus legitimizing my multimodal analysis of language, art, performance, and ritual.

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Diffracting
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Diffracting, as articulated by Leila Dawney (2018), is a research method that rejects the notion of coherence as a goal. Instead, it invites the researcher to attend to complexity, relationality, and interference. Borrowed conceptually from the physics of diffraction—where waves bend and spread as they encounter obstacles—this method emphasizes the productive role of difference and dissonance in research. Dawney explains that “diffracting lets the world be messy and complex” and seeks to “make visible the complexity, messiness and instability of research objects, and their excess to knowing” (p. 110). Rather than viewing instability as a problem, diffraction treats it as a source of insight.

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For my research on Persian cultural expressions, diffracting offers a crucial methodological intervention. It allows me to trace the layered, sometimes contradictory, meanings that emerge when myths, poetic lines, and rituals move across different media, times, and social contexts. Dawney notes that diffracting involves “thinking with disjuncture; thinking about where data rubs up against data and what that exposes” (p. 110). This is particularly resonant in my work, where meanings shift depending on whether a figure appears in a pre-Islamic poem, a contemporary women’s chant, or an oral tale recited in exile.

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In this way, diffracting becomes one of the most essential knots in the interlacing method I am developing. It offers a way of reading that welcomes inconsistency and relational interference rather than ironing them out. By engaging with contradictions—such as the tension between archival silence and embodied memory, or between state-sanctioned history and feminist re-imaginings—I can generate richer, more situated interpretations of Persian cosmologies. Rather than seeking to resolve these tensions, diffracting helps me dwell in them, tracing the ripples they create across cultural, temporal, and epistemological domains.

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Ultimately, diffracting supports my broader commitment to feminist and decolonial knowledge practices by decentering mastery, control, and linear progression. Like the irregularities in a handwoven rug—often seen not as flaws but as signatures of authenticity—disjuncture in research becomes a space for reflection, receptivity, and epistemic humility. Diffracting invites me to stay close to the frayed edges, to read through distortion, and to allow patterns of meaning to emerge unevenly, through layered contact rather than clear boundaries.

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Figurationing
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Figurationing, as developed by Dawney (2018), offers a way to engage mythic, poetic, and material figures not as fixed symbols but as active, evolving presences. In this research, figurationing helps me trace how paintings, sculptural and archaeological forms carry meaning across time and space—not only through their original contexts, but through their reinterpretations, reanimations, and continued presence in cultural memory.

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Figures in Persian cosmology—whether carved into stone, molded in clay, or preserved in ritual—are not static representations. They “convey meaning and have material substance and world-making effects” (Dawney, 2018, p. 112). Figurationing allows me to attend to the layered meanings these forms carry, and how they resonate with bodily, spatial, and spiritual experience.

Dawney emphasizes that figures operate through their encounters with bodies and histories of use (p. 114). This perspective allows me to approach artifacts not as isolated objects, but as participants in ongoing cultural processes—shaped by land, memory, and the imaginative work of those who made, held, and transmitted them.

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Notating: Capturing Movement and Affect
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The third strand I loop through the loom is notating, as theorized by Wedell (2018). Notating addresses the problem of representing cultural expressions that are performative, sonic, or embodied. Wedell describes it as operating across “graphic (spatial), symbolic (referential), and operational (performative)” dimensions (p. 116), enabling me to attend to how Persian cultural knowledge moves across bodies, rituals, melodies, and gestures.

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Wedell also acknowledges the epistemic power of notation: it is both “a practice which informs what we note” and a way of making visible what might otherwise remain unrecorded (p. 119). For me, this includes poetic meters that carry cosmological rhythms, ritual movements that encode ancestral memory, or vocal inflections in storytelling that animate meaning. Notating, then, becomes a vital tool for preserving the richness of multimodal knowledge without flattening it into text.

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Interlacing: A Feminist Mode of Embodied, Layered Research

Bringing these methods together, Interlacing becomes more than the sum of its parts—it is a practice of inquiry shaped by texture, rhythm, and relation. Like the intricate labor of Persian rug weaving, each method I engage—whether interpretive, figural, historical, or embodied—acts as a knot in a larger, evolving composition. Some threads form the structural warp; others introduce color, tension, or movement. Together, they create a surface that does not seek symmetry, but holds asymmetry, contradiction, and multiplicity as epistemic strengths.

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Interlacing does not aim to resolve or synthesize. It refuses linearity and embraces the temporal, affective, and material complexities of engaging with Indigenous Persian cosmologies.

By letting archival fragments, symbolic forms, and embodied practices sit beside one another, I cultivate a methodology that resists extraction and instead invites co-presence. This approach is attuned to what remains hidden, felt, or entangled—offering space for emergent meaning to unfold across time and medium. In this way, interlacing is not only a methodological design but an ethical stance: one that honors care, positionality, and the unfinished nature of knowledge. It allows me to move with and through complexity rather than master it, weaving a research practice that listens, lingers, and remembers.

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Ethical Consideration
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Ackerly and True’s (2008) feminist research ethics offer a critical foundation for this project. They argue that ethical inquiry must move beyond procedural norms to interrogate how power operates through research itself. Drawing on Harding and Norberg (2005), they caution that “research processes themselves [re]produce power differences” (p. 694), including hierarchies between ways of knowing. In response, this project seeks to make visible the exclusions and silences that scholarship can perpetuate. As Ackerly and True also note, the ethical challenges facing feminist-informed researchers often stem from the “multiplicity” of the researcher’s identity—particularly when they are situated across roles such as artist, advocate, and academic (p. 698). As a diasporic Iranian scholar, I occupy a complex position—connected to the cultural materials I study, yet shaped by the epistemic structures of Western institutions. This requires sustained reflexivity, which I engage through journaling, iterative questioning, and methodological transparency.

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Soedirgo and Glas’s (2020) concept of active reflexivity further supports this orientation by emphasizing that positionality is “inherently contextual” (p. 528) and “dynamic, continual, and fluid” (p. 529). This framework foregrounds the shifting nature of identity and the need for constant attention to context, particularly when engaging knowledge systems shaped by spiritual, symbolic, or land-based traditions. While I am drawn to ecofeminist frameworks for their emphasis on embodiment and interconnection, I recognize that ecofeminism is a Western theoretical construct. Rather than applying it uncritically to Persian materials, I treat it as a dialogic lens—one that remains open to the relational logics already present in Persian cosmology. Reflexivity, then, is not only personal but also institutional: it involves examining how knowledge is shaped, legitimized, and sometimes constrained by academic systems (p. 530), demanding cultural specificity and ethical humility throughout the research process.

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These commitments culminate in an ethic of interpretive restraint and selective disclosure, particularly when engaging with cosmological, symbolic, or land-based knowledges. As Tuck (2018) warns, “There are some forms of knowledge that the academy does not deserve. The university is not universal; rather, it is a colonial collector of knowledge as another form of territory” (p. 156). Placing sacred or relational knowledge within institutional frameworks can amount to “removal, not respect” (p. 156). This research therefore does not seek total visibility or explanatory closure. Instead, it holds space for what must remain obscured, metaphorical, or embodied. Refusal, in this sense, is not a withholding of value but a practice of care—an ethical stance that protects the integrity of knowledge systems shaped by and rooted in place. By resisting extractive academic logics and honoring the epistemologies being engaged, this research foregrounds an ethics of cultural specificity, relational accountability, and respect for what exceeds academic legibility.

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Conclusion
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This proposal puts forth a feminist and decolonial research design rooted in relationality, land-based knowledge, and multimodal inquiry. Rather than recovering a singular truth, it seeks to dwell in ambiguity, hold open the space for Indigenous epistemologies, and practice research as an act of care. By interlacing interpretive and embodied methods, this project aims to foreground Persian cosmologies not as vanished pasts but as living, evolving practices with relevance for cultural memory, gender justice, and ecological thought today.

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References
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