Prison of course references the author's and her husband's imprisonment for their political and social activism, but it also suggests the forces that will try to constrict Firdaus and the lives of ...many women like her; it is represented by people like her father, her husband, her sexual exploiters and environments like her father's and uncle's homes; the room in which Bayoumi, one of her male exploiters, tries to keep her; her repulsive and aged husband's house; and a pimp's cramping influence. The novel is, in fact, firmly held together by repeated clusters of images, symbols and motifs such as that of the prison, and others such as the rings and circles that surround the eyes of individuals, rings and circles that could be benevolent or hostile; sexual encounters that are similarly described but have differing significances; similar introductory conversations; the all important symbol of the protagonist's school leaving certificate that should have been her passport to prosperity but proves hopelessly ineffectual; and epiphanies during which her eyes are gradually opened to the world's hostility and wickedness and the real forces upon which it turns. ...the truth about them was revealed only after their death, and as a result I discovered that history tended to repeat itself with a foolish obstinacy. ...they decide on what seems to both of them a highly agreeable solution; they will marry her off to the sixty-year old Sheikh Mahmoud, a deformed and repulsive widower, and they rejoice as they make elaborate plans for using the dowry for their own benefit.
In Memoriam
The Massachusetts review,
07/2021, Letnik:
62, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
An obituary for teacher and poet Donald Junkins is presented. Junkins was, beginning in 1966, director of the creative writing MFA at UMass for many years, an expert on the works of Ernest Hemingway, ...Robert Francis, and D. H. Lawrence, an early poetry editor for the Massachusetts Review, and the author of over twenty books, including a dozen collections of poetry. A lifelong Democrat, Junkins campaigned for Bobby Kennedy in 1968 and introduced the senator to thousands at the Concord, California airport on the day before he was shot.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Ancient cultures such as pre-classical Greek and Roman often described women as “leaky vessels.” This feminine tendency to leak—to transgress physical, emotional, and vocal boundaries—compels male ...subjects to control women’s behavior. The first chapter of this inquiry investigates how the displacement of shame acts as a source of patriarchal control. Particularly, how it is used against sexual leakage to dictate a specific ideal of womanhood, one that is chaste, dutiful and pure, and to erase any divergence from that ideal. The second chapter turns our attention to vocal leakage. Arab women who vocalize the need for change are heard through qualified hearing: they are only heard when they translate their experiences to the language of the oppressive system. Here, vocal leakage becomes an important pedagogical tool that reveals the intricacies of the systems we come up against. Lastly, the third chapter is a critical memoir that joins vital conversations on the importance of leakage for self-actualization with a personal narrative on coming up against disciplining devices. In this piece, I explore the importance of embracing our leaky selves, especially since it allows us to find others who leak similarly and show us that our concerns and experience are shared. All three explorations dive deeply into female transgressions in Arab culture and how this tendency to leak poses a threat to the gendered hierarchy, and by embracing leakiness rather than eradicating it we learn what is stopping us from becoming and we become.
El-Saadawi’s God Dies by the Nile and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus have been widely and independently explored from varied perspectives. Such liberated critique is however surprising since the two texts ...can be found to have ethical and political confluence – the motif of the death of God. Drawing on the notion of travelling theory, this paper argues that the death of El-Saadawi’s and Adichie’s protagonists is a contestation and a disruption of the norm and a signification of the novels anticipatory sensibilities. The paper also examines how the different textual utilization of the motif of the death of God contributes to our understanding of the circulation of motifs in literary production and contextual interpretations. The paper makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on El-Saadawi and Adichie.
The 6th World Conference on Women's Studies (WCWS) took place online for the first time in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the way we, a global community, gather. The pandemic has also ...highlighted many issues gendered in nature, some of the effects of which will be lasting, while others call attention to persistent problems in need of intervention: domestic abuse and violence sharply increased during lockdown and, in parallel, there are copious accounts of women bearing the weight of increased domestic duties, with a contagion impact on their career progression. Considering gender in the labour force, women make up 70% of health and social workforce workers, yet only 30% of leaders in the global health sector are women. Discussions of structural inequality have been brought to the forefront as a result of the pandemic and the broad spectrum of issues women face shows no sign of narrowing.The Women's Studies conference focused on women's ongoing marginalisation and subordination, the articles within this journal very much reflect that the conference was attentive to the need for change. The range of genres, topics, and author profiles is indicative of the inclusive and international community JIWS cultivates. The geographical spread emphasises the global and cohesive need to address both marginalisation and subordination, in their numerous forms. Whilst some articles argue for measures which generate greater inclusivity in arenas where women seek to take on more active roles, demonstrating a liberal feminist approach, we also see authors advocate for a transformation and overhaul of systems, a more radical approach.The articles in this journal edition are broad in scope and richly diverse, each making a contribution to global feminism. A number of articles reflect on women's history and give a voice to women, preserving their stories of abuse and trauma: all of which need to be documented in and acknowledged by history. The journal issue contains contributions to: gender in education and politics; women in the labour force; the marginalisation of Roma and Indian Dalit 'lower' caste women; and reflections on great feminist literature by the late Nawal El Saadawi.
This article examines the male-female gender dichotomy in Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero. Firdaus, the woman protagonist in the novel, after a careful observation of her own life and the ...status of women in her patriarchal society, postulates that men are criminals and women are prostitutes. Firdaus' dichotomy of the male and female gender into criminals and prostitutes respectively is the focus of the discussion in this article. This paper analyzes Firdaus' life of captivity by the forces of oppression right from childhood to womanhood and eventually to prison awaiting execution for committing murder. It applies Nawal El Saadawi's strand of feminism, particularly the theory's main tenet of the links among patriarchy, class, and religion, to examine the systems responsible for women's oppression. The focus is on class oppression, male hegemony, and deception. Using Frantz Fanon's theory of violence, the article discusses Firdaus' use of women's liberative violence to extricate themselves from men's captivity. Firdaus kills Marzouk, the pimp, to free herself and achieve total liberation. Consequently, her refusal to live and her fearlessness of death when sentenced to die by the Egyptian court of law symbolize her resolve to achieve freedom and dignity not in her phallocentric society but in death. In this article, I argue that the male oriented justice system criminalizes Firdaus and gives her the maximum sentence of death to permanently silence her and thwart her struggle for liberation through physical and moral attacks on the male hegemony and religious idiosyncrasy of her society.
This article aims at presenting a cross-cultural examination of uncle-niece incest through the theoretical scope of feminist psychoanalysis in literary studies. The paper is thus centered on two ...novels: Woman at Point Zero (1975) by Nawal El Saadawi and Uncle Vampire (1993) by Cynthia Grant. The main contribution in this article is to highlight the cultural differences found in eastern and western literary studies in relation to escaping or ending incest. The cultural differences are addressed in relation to parental assistance and institutional assistance. The article is thus structured around the exploration of two main research questions: ‘What is the role of parents in helping a victim of uncle-niece incest to end her abusive experience?’ and ‘what is the role of official institutions in assisting a victim of uncle-niece incest to terminate her abusive experience?’. A central concern to the researcher in this article is to voice the victims’ ‘particular’ struggle and efforts to escape the incestuous relationship in which she is trapped.
Nawal El Saadawi is a prolific writer who has received both praise and criticism for her focus on women's victimization and exploitation in patriarchal Muslim cultures. Her works are living ...testaments to her crusade against repression, inequality, and injustice meted out by the patriarchy. Amidst her efforts to bring about change in the status of women in Egypt she faced a lot of criticism, particularly during Anwar Sadat's rule when she established The Arab Women's Solidarity Association which was later banned in 1991. Feminism is a controversial and challenging subject to address in the Islamic world partly owing to it being a concept of the Western world imposed upon the Middle East and North Africa by imperialism. El Saadawi faced strong backlash from Egyptian society for the publication of her feminist work Women and Sex (1972) due to rising religious fundamentalism within the state.
Among Arab feminist activists, only a few have dedicated their life to fighting against women's injustices and to protesting against women's oppression. The most widely acknowledged of these Arab ...feminist activists is Nawal El Saadawi. As one of the most widely translated contemporary Arab feminist activists and the first to attract a broad international recognition, she has been an inspiration to many young liberal Arab women activists. By investigating Nawal El Saadawi's views and findings on the origins of injustice against Arab women, the following essay sheds light on her contribution to enlightening contemporary women regarding gender equality in the Arab world.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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