Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings

Middle East women’s active participation in resisting against socio-political impositions and constraints has received scant attention in the existing scholarship within the field. Much of the literature is focused on the socially victimized, subjugated and passive state of the female subjects in...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author:	Asl, Moussa Pourya
Format:	Article
Language:	English
Published:	Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2019
Online Access:	http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/1/30216-107977-1-PB.pdf

id	ukm-14088
recordtype	eprints
spelling	ukm-140882020-01-31T22:44:42Z http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/ Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings Asl, Moussa Pourya Middle East women’s active participation in resisting against socio-political impositions and constraints has received scant attention in the existing scholarship within the field. Much of the literature is focused on the socially victimized, subjugated and passive state of the female subjects in facing patriarchal authoritarianism and repression. In contrast, this article aims at exploring the subjected women’s investment in multifarious acts of resistance through their leisure time and practices. To this end, Foucault’s notion of “counter-conduct,” a mode of resistance to be governed differently, is used to examine women’s leisure activities in Jean P. Sasson’s (1992) Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia, Azar Nafisi’s (2003) Reading Lolita in Tehran and Manal al-Sharif’s (2017) Daring to Drive. The analysis of these narratives within the power/resistance framework underlines the shifting complexities of the female participants’ life course, and reveals that the subjugated women’s trajectory in the stories is a gradual progression from pure submissiveness towards an active engagement in social, cultural and political realities. Throughout the narratives, women use leisure time and activities such as driving, reading and bonding in parallel to dominant techniques of governmentality to produce alternative subjectivities. The study concludes that the life accounts do not merely provide an oversimplified depiction of Middle East women as passive victims of a misogynistic cultural tradition, but rather chronicle women’s active protests—i.e., individual and collective revolts of conduct, acts of opposition and violations of established norms—similar to the forms of counter-conduct theorized by Foucault. Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2019-08 Article PeerReviewed application/pdf en http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/1/30216-107977-1-PB.pdf Asl, Moussa Pourya (2019) Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings. GEMA: Online Journal of Language Studies, 19 (3). pp. 43-56. ISSN 1675-8021 http://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1212
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Local University
institution	Universiti Kebangasaan Malaysia
building	UKM Institutional Repository
collection	Online Access
language	English
description	Middle East women’s active participation in resisting against socio-political impositions and constraints has received scant attention in the existing scholarship within the field. Much of the literature is focused on the socially victimized, subjugated and passive state of the female subjects in facing patriarchal authoritarianism and repression. In contrast, this article aims at exploring the subjected women’s investment in multifarious acts of resistance through their leisure time and practices. To this end, Foucault’s notion of “counter-conduct,” a mode of resistance to be governed differently, is used to examine women’s leisure activities in Jean P. Sasson’s (1992) Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia, Azar Nafisi’s (2003) Reading Lolita in Tehran and Manal al-Sharif’s (2017) Daring to Drive. The analysis of these narratives within the power/resistance framework underlines the shifting complexities of the female participants’ life course, and reveals that the subjugated women’s trajectory in the stories is a gradual progression from pure submissiveness towards an active engagement in social, cultural and political realities. Throughout the narratives, women use leisure time and activities such as driving, reading and bonding in parallel to dominant techniques of governmentality to produce alternative subjectivities. The study concludes that the life accounts do not merely provide an oversimplified depiction of Middle East women as passive victims of a misogynistic cultural tradition, but rather chronicle women’s active protests—i.e., individual and collective revolts of conduct, acts of opposition and violations of established norms—similar to the forms of counter-conduct theorized by Foucault.
format	Article
author	Asl, Moussa Pourya
spellingShingle	Asl, Moussa Pourya Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
author_facet	Asl, Moussa Pourya
author_sort	Asl, Moussa Pourya
title	Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
title_short	Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
title_full	Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
title_fullStr	Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
title_full_unstemmed	Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
title_sort	leisure as a space of political practice in middle east women life writings
publisher	Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
publishDate	2019
url	http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/1/30216-107977-1-PB.pdf
first_indexed	2023-09-18T20:06:19Z
last_indexed	2023-09-18T20:06:19Z
_version_	1777407181829701632

Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings

Similar Items