ABSTRACT
Here, I would like to sketch out the ways in which Arab women’s writing has
been critiqued, discussed and engaged with in order to map out where we are
now in terms of current debates, modes and approaches to reading con-
temporary writing. Rather than assume the prominence and inevitability of a
feminist approach, I want to outline the varying concerns of several key critics in
this area, and then trace the eventual and perhaps predictable development of a
feminist methodology used to critique Arab women’s writing. My aim is not to
reveal that a certain critical response has facilitated the emergence of a parti-
cular framework; this would be too uncomplicated. Rather, I will explore the
diverse ways in which critical contexts herald literary productions. A 1997 arti-
cle by Amal Amireh posed crucial questions of how best to approach the field of
Arab women’s studies more generally. She argues that ‘despite new develop-
ments in feminist scholarship, obsolete paradigms and categories of analysis
persist and even dominate when the subject of study is Arab women’.3 While I
do acknowledge this tendency and intend to tackle it, I here want to begin by
looking at how critical discussions of Arab women’s writing have been con-
ducted, at what point these ‘obsolete paradigms and categories of analysis’
emerge and what these new ‘developments in feminist scholarship’ are that
permit us to move forward. I have often wondered to what extent these para-
digms were seen to be necessary in order to facilitate a debate that had no
precedent and was therefore destined to be mired in preconceptions and pre-
figured attitudes. Whether or not certain methods and approaches to critiquing
and presenting Arab women writers arose out of an uncertainty or concern
about how the topic would be received by the wider critical community is a
question that interests me. Feminism as an academic and public discourse, with
its occasional focus on political action, perhaps provided a legitimising and
authenticating set of communicative tools and language with which to discuss
Arab women’s writing.4 Discussing the writing in a feminist frame may have
facilitated the foregrounding of women’s issues and indeed provided a legitimate
platform for many early critical responses. Nevertheless, investigating how a
predominantly fixed and unproblematic understanding of feminist (and sometimes
nationalist) hypotheses came to the fore in the first critical responses to Arab
women’s writing and how these were later challenged or reproduced in critical
works and anthologies will give us a clearer picture of how the reaction to Arab
women’s writing has been articulated and made intelligible.