Practices of Counter-Conduct as a Mode of Resistance in Middle East Women’s Life Writings
Abstract
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.
Keywords: Jean Sasson; Zainab Salbi; Manal al-Sharif; Michel Foucault; Counter-Conduct
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Ahmad, D. (2009). Not yet beyond the veil Muslim women in American popular literature. Social Text. Vol. 27(299), 105-131.
Al-Sharif, M. (2017). Daring to drive. London: Simon & Schuster.
Ameri, F. (2012). Veiled experiences: Rewriting women's identities and experiences in contemporary Muslim fiction in English. (Ph.D.), Murdoch University, Murdoch, Australia.
Amy, L. E. (1999). Contemporary travel narratives and old style politics: American women reporting after the gulf war. Women's Studies International Forum, 22(5), 525-541. doi:10.1016/S0277-5395(99)00060-6
Armstrong, A. Michel Foucault: Feminism. Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.iep.utm.edu/foucfem/
Armstrong, N. (1987). Desire & domestic fiction: A political history of the novel. Oxford University Press.
Asl, M. P. (2018). Fabrication of a desired truth: the oblivion of a Naxalite woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. Asian Ethnicity. Vol. 19(3), 383-401. doi:10.1080/14631369.2018.1429892
Asl, M. P. & Abdullah, N. F. L. (2017a). Circulation of the discourse of American nationalism through allegiance to consumer citizenship in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies. Vol. 17(2), 54-68. doi:10.17576/gema-2017-1702-04
Asl, M. P. & Abdullah, N. F. L. (2017b). Practices of (neoliberal) governmentality: Racial and gendered gaze in Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction. 3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies. Vol. 23(2), 123-140. doi:10.17576/3L-2017-2302-10
Aziza, S. (2017). [Review of the book Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening by Manal al-Sharif, Simon & Schuster, 2017]. Muftah Retrieved from https://muftah.org/book-review-daring-drive/#.Wglb-Yhx3IU
Bahramitash, R. (2005). The war on terror, feminist Orientalism and Orientalist feminism: Case studies of two North American bestsellers. Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies. Vol. 14(2), 221-235.
Batmanghelichi, K. S. (2017). [Review of the book Foucault in Iran: Islamic revolution after the enlightenment, by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, 272 pp., $27.00 US]. Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (April, 2017), 1-8.
Binkley, S. (2009). The work of neoliberal governmentality: Temporality and ethical substance in the tale of two dads. Foucault Studies. Vol. 6, 60-78. doi:10.22439/fs.v0i0.2472
Buss, H. M. (2002). Repossessing the world: Reading memoirs by contemporary women. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Davidson, A. I. (2011). In praise of counter-conduct. History of the Human Sciences. Vol. 24(4), 25-41.
Death, C. (2016). Counter-Conducts as a mode of resistance: Ways of “Not Being Like That” in South Africa. Global Society, 30(2), 201-217. doi:10.1080/13600826.2015.1133566
Deveaux, M. (1994). Feminism and empowerment: A critical reading of Foucault. Feminist Studies. Vol. 20(2), 223-247. doi:10.2307/3178151
Faqir, F. & Eber, S. (1998). In the house of silence: Autobiographical essays by Arab women writers: Garnet Pub Limited.
Fierke, K. M. (2013). Political self-sacrifice: Agency, body and emotion in international relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foucault, M. (1997a). The ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom (R. Hurley, Trans.). In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. Essential works of Foucault 1954–84 (Vol. 1, pp. 281-302). New York: New Press.
Foucault, M. (1997b). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress (R. Hurley, Trans.). In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. Essential works of Foucault 1954–84 (Vol. 1, pp. 281-302). New York: New Press.
Foucault, M. (2000). Interview with Michel Foucault (R. Hurley, Trans.). In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power: Essential works of Michel Foucault (Vol. 3, pp. 239-295). London: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (2001). Un plaisir si simple (A. I. Davidson, Trans.) Dits et e´crits 1976–1988 (Vol. 2, pp. 777–779). Paris: Gallimard.
Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (D. Macey, Trans. M. Bertani, A. Fontana, & F. Ewald Eds.). New York: Picador.
Foucault, M. (2007). The politics of truth (L. Hochroth & C. Porter, Trans. S. Lotringer Ed.). Los Angeles: Semiotext.
Foucault, M. (2009). Security, population, territory: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78 (G. Burchell, Trans. M. Senellart Ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (2010). The government of self and others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982-1983 (G. Burchell, Trans. F. Gros Ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gorman, H. R. (2015). Captivity and conflict: A study of gender, genre, and religious others. (3702995 Ph.D.), Temple University, Ann Arbor. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1687757130?accountid=14645 ProQuest Central; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global database.
Hasan, M. M. (2015). Seeking freedom in the “Third Space” of diaspora: Muslim women's identity in Aboulela's Minaret and Janmohamed's Love in a Headscarf. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. Vol. 35(1), 89-105.
Heyes, C. J. (2013). Foucault Studies Special Issue: Foucault and Feminism, September 2013. Foucault Studies. Vol. 16, 3-14. doi:10.22439/fs.v0i16.4114
Latifa. (2002). My forbidden face. London: Virago.
Lilja, M. & Vinthagen, S. (2014). Sovereign power, disciplinary power and biopower: Resisting what power with what resistance? Journal of Political Power. Vol. 7(1), 107-126. doi:10.1080/2158379X.2014.889403
Lorenzini, D. (2016). From counter-conduct to critical attitude: Michel Foucault and the art of not being governed quite so much. Foucault Studies. Vol. 21(June), 7-21. doi:10.22439/fs.v0i0.5011
Majid, A. A. (2015). The practice of faith and personal growth in three novels by Muslim women writers in the Western diaspora. (Ph.D.), Monash University, Monash, Australia.
McNay, L. (1992). Foucault and feminism: Power, gender and the self. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
McWhorter, L. (2013). Post-liberation feminism and practices of freedom. Foucault Studies. Vol. 16, 54-73. doi:10.22439/fs.v0i16.4117
Medina, J. (2011). Toward a Foucaultian epistemology of resistance: Counter-memory, epistemic friction, and Guerrilla pluralism. Foucault Studies. Vol. 12, 9-35. doi:10.22439/fs.v0i12.3335
Nafisi, A. (2003). Reading Lolita in Tehran: A memoir in books. United States of America: Random House
Nash, G. (2007). The Anglo-Arab encounter: Fiction and autobiography by Arab writers in English. Bern: Peter Lang.
Newns, L. (2017). Renegotiating romantic genres: Textual resistance and Muslim chick lit. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (January 28, 2017), 1-17. doi:10.1177/0021989416686156
Said, E. (1986). Foucault and the imagination of power. In D. C. Hoy (Ed.), Foucault: A critical reader (pp. 149-155). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Salbi, Z. & Becklund, L. (2005). Between two worlds: Escape from tyranny: Growing up in the shadow of Saddam. New York: Penguin.
Sasson, J. (1992). Princess: A true story of life behind the veil in Saudi Arabia. London and New York: Bantam Books.
Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Shehabat, A. K. A. (2011). Contemporary Arab-American and Middle Eastern women's voices: New visions of "Home". (Ph.D.), Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. (Paper 464)
Stenslie, S. (2011). Power behind the veil: Princesses of the house of Saud. Journal of Arabian Studies. Vol. 1(1), 69-79. doi:10.1080/21534764.2011.576050
Thompson, K. (2017). Foucault's folly: Iran, political spirituality, and counter-conduct[Review of the book Foucault in Iran: Islamic revolution after the enlightenment, by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, University of
Minnesota Press, 2016, 272pp., $27.00 US]. Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (March, 2017), 1-8.
Whitlock, G. (2005). The skin of the burqa: Recent life narratives from Afghanistan. Biography. Vol. 28(1), 54-76.
Zembylas, M. (2017). Affect and counter-conduct: Cultivating action for social change in human rights education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (09 Mar 2017), 1-13. doi:10.1080/01596306.2017.1300573
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2018-2402-15
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
eISSN : 2550-2247
ISSN : 0128-5157