ABSTRACT
Repetition in Nawal El-Saadawi fiction makes possible emotive and powerful elaborations of the activist and public stances she has taken—for instance, in her address to the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, the feminist organization she headed until its recent dissolution by the state. Repetition leads to a critique of the closed subject, creating a space in which that subject is least at home and bringing to crisis powerful interpellating categories such as identity and gender. Repetition in Saadawi's fiction also brings about a disclosure of the processes by which power recycles itself. In Saadawi's fiction, categories such as gender and the self are pried loose from the naturalizing rhetoric in which they have gained currency and are instead presented as ideological constructs through which subjects think their worlds. In a 1986 interview, Saadawi said that she is increasingly troubled by the fact that "the Arabic language, like the English language, is very male-oriented".
