ABSTRACT
Hoda Elsadda's awareness of women's rights issues came as a result of her reading of Arab women's literary narratives. She acknowledged the influence of Edward Said, whose book Orientalism foregrounded the politics of representation, a key issue in feminist theory. She became aware of the power of gendered discourses in perpetuating and maintaining the subordination of the "other" or the "marginalized" or the "weaker link" in society, including women. Her motivation was to encourage the inquiry into Arab and Islamic cultural history to challenge stereotypical representations about the assumed historical victimhood of Arab and Muslim women and to foreground women's agency and power. She was convinced that the patriarchal domination of "culture" had to be broken by feminist revisions and interpretations of Arab and Muslim culture. In an article about women's rights in Egypt, she described the efforts to modify the Personal Status Law as "a defining hallmark of women's rights activism.".
