ABSTRACT

The opportunity of attending a 'gathering' of Arab women researchers organised by the Lebanese Women Researchers Group, which has as its purpose the establishing of a network to bring together the dispersed and scattered work and effort of women researchers in the Middle East. In a variety of Arab women's texts, escape/flight/movement is embedded in various ways. In a sense, the idea of 'homelessness' which is activated in post-modernist discourses is already simultaneously articulated in Arab female experiences of conflict with home. The articulation of a critique of home for Arab women and men has to begin with an examination of the totalising nature of nationalist discourse which can tolerate no different articulation and operate from a singularly monolithic construction of an Islamic/Arabic homeland which asks for the submergence or silencing of gender, sexuality or any other ideological stance or identity position which is not subsumed under pure or authentic Islam or Arabism.