Situating Arab women's writing in a feminist 'global gothic
Madness, Mothers and Ghosts
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4367472 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Roxanne Douglas (0000-0001-5981-8147, The University of Warwick, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 454-472 |
| Publication date | 2023-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/14647001211019188 |
| OpenAlex | W3170319861 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 14 |
This article sketches a new way of approaching some contemporary Levantine (Egyptian and Lebanese) feminist texts. Extending Glennis Byron's notion of the 'global gothic', I examine Hanan Al-Shaykh's The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin's Maryam's Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad's The Seamstress' Daughter (2019) as examples of an Arab feminist Gothic approach, which serves as a framework to theorise difficult and pressing questions that feminism poses regarding women's rights. Arab feminist Gothic writers use the jahiliyyah period, or the 'time of ignorance', as a folkloric referential backdrop for texts which theorise the female condition under contemporary patriarchal society. The presence of ghosts, madness, doubles in the form of the folkloric qarina spirit-doubles and dreams can be read as part of a local Gothic feminist mode. This as-yet unacknowledged Arab feminist Gothic tradition, while emerging from debates over statehood and postcolonial subjectivities, delves into the intensity of personal traumas through the lens of women's relationships to other women, especially mothers and daughters. Taking Arab feminist fiction as its focus, this article models how feminist scholarship can use genre, particularly the Gothic, to trace artistic feminist theorising in non-western contexts
Art · Feminism · Feminist theory · Folklore · Ignorance · Literature · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Gender Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Marriage and Sexual Relationships · Philosophy
The Madwoman in the Attic
Arab Feminisms
Jacques Lacan
Title unavailable
Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East
Israel Oriental Studies
Contemporary Women's Gothic Fiction
Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions
Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband
Erotic Dreams And Nightmares From Antiquity To The Present
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |