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.