Tyrannical Femininity" in Nawal El Saadawi's Memoirs of a Woman Doctor
The formation of feminist critical discourses is deeply fashioned by the political and tiffany key environment of their productions. improving women's condition and lifting them off the weight of patriarchy motivate the critical engagement of most women writers in the arab region, including Egyptian Nawal el Saadawi, algerian assia djebar, Moroccan Fatima Mernissi, and Lebanese Layla Baalbaki. oftentimes, their feminist ideologies clash with the Muslim background of their cultures. For these intellectuals, writing stands at the intersection of gender and religion, literary agency and social restrictions. Concern with gender equality makes them pen against radical and fundamentalist islamic politics, which exposes them time and again to threats from islamic fundamentalists. as Muslim and feminist, they confront willy-nilly the issue of islamic feminism, which has generated many controversies. The debate is centered on the compatibility of women's emancipation with islamic principles. Some support the thesis of compatibility while challenging traditional interpretations of the Qur'an (Badran and Cooke xxiv). on the contrary others claim that islamic feminism is an oxymoron because it cannot "abolish" patriarchy (qtd. in Mojab 131).
First used in Western literature in the 1990s, the concept gives rise to more theoretical obfuscation than illumination from Western and non-Western intellectuals alike who often manipulate and politicize it to the point where it becomes a rigid discourse inapplicable to the context and reality of Muslim women in the arab region. in an interview conducted by Shiva (November 1997), El Saadawi explains how the meaning of islamic feminism hinges on religious interpretations: "[T]here is tiffany necklace to islamic feminism (and Christian feminism) if those religions are interpreted in a progressive way so that God means justice, freedom and love and not a text" ("Problems"; emphasis added). The pristine islamic text becomes corrupted in the hands of men who are preoccupied only with the maintenance of patriarchal authority. El Saadawi is not against islam per se but is opposed to the various interpretations of it that empower men and oppress women.
El Saadawi's philosophy of justice and equality leads her to reject patriarchal grounds of religion and scorn totalized and totalizing discourses that impede individual and collective freedom. Pointing to gender disparities, her works become subversive "sites for the questioning of norms and for the construction of alternative visions" (Cooke 29). in her first novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1988), she challenges the cultural construction of women as invisible bodies appropriated by patriarchy. Critics come up with interesting reflections on the book by examining such issues as writing and dissidence, femininity, and autobiographical fiction, among others. The relationship between the feminist discourse of resistance and the dominant patriarchal discourse has not been dealt with hitherto. This paper analyzes the feminist discourse proposed by El Saadawi to unshackle women from patriarchal oppression. The absorption of cultural norms through socialization processes, i argue, tiffany necklaces intrapsychic anxieties that usher in women's self-oppression. how does this self-oppression unfold in the narrative? What are the strengths and weaknesses of El Saadawi's feminist discourse? These questions will be the principal foci of the paper.
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