Practices of counter-conduct as a mode of resistance in Middle East women’s life writings
Middle East women life writings have been downplayed for their oversimplified representations of female subjects as purely passive, submissive and unresisting. This article explores the allegation in three contemporary memoirs by Jean P. Sasson (1992) (the ghostwriter of Saudi princess Sultana), Z...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2018
|
| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/12896/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/12896/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/12896/1/21719-78379-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | Middle East women life writings have been downplayed for their oversimplified representations of female
subjects as purely passive, submissive and unresisting. This article explores the allegation in three
contemporary memoirs by Jean P. Sasson (1992) (the ghostwriter of Saudi princess Sultana), Zainab Salbi
(2005) and Manal al-Sharif (2017) who recount similar observations on subordinated women’s daily
experiences in phallocentric Arab communities, and whose stories have similarly been the subject of much
controversial criticism. In the present study, I aim to examine the practices exercised by marginalized Arab
women to destabilize the patriarchal status quo and redefine the established ways of being. To do so, I draw on
Michel Foucault’s notion of counter-conduct, often associated with the issues of women and their socio-political
and religious position, to identify acts of defiance that are exercised simultaneously with strategies of
governmentality through practices of moral self-reflection, or what Foucault describes as the art of being
governed differently. The article concludes that in creatively documenting their life stories and through tactical
elements such as counter-history, counter-society and reversed obedience, the so-called passive women
interrogate the totality of prevailing hierarchies of power, and resist against the unequal society as well as the
operating practices of subjugation. |
|---|