Literary Representations of Female Identity

The essay examines the texts of the two women writers - Leila Abouzeid (from Morocco) and Nawal El Saadawi (from Egypt) - as offering two female perspectives within what is commonly referred to as "feminine" writing in the Arab Muslim world. My main interest is to explore the various disc...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Safoi Babana-Hampton
Format: article
Language:EN
Published: International Institute of Islamic Thought 2002
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doaj.org/article/bff1b2f7626849c99b7ae2181e84f05d
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The essay examines the texts of the two women writers - Leila Abouzeid (from Morocco) and Nawal El Saadawi (from Egypt) - as offering two female perspectives within what is commonly referred to as "feminine" writing in the Arab Muslim world. My main interest is to explore the various discursive articulations of female identity that are challenged or foregrounded as a positive model. The essay points to the serious pitfalls of some feminist narratives in Arab-Muslim societies by dealing with a related problem: the author's setting up of convenient conceptual dichotomies, which account for the female experience, that reduce male-female relationships in the given social context to a fundamentally antagonistic one. Abouzeid's novel will be a case study of a more positive but also realistic and complex perspec­tive on female experience ...