Introduction

This book joins other recent interventions (Gauch 2007; Grace 2004; Hillauer 2005; Lloyd 1999; Suhair Majaj et al. 2003; Valassopoulos 2007) in focusing upon a range of postcolonial feminist creative texts by women affiliated to Maghrib, Mashriq,1 and other Arab Muslim contexts.2 With reference to an eclectic body of work produced between 1962 and 2005, I specifically address ways in which women deploy voice and vision in transformations of discursive and scopic paradigms that have attempted to apprehend ‘the Arab Muslim woman’ and continue to do so today. My title flags up constructed categories that are claimed, critiqued, deconstructed, and reformulated by the women discussed here.3 As Tina Sherwell reminds us,

women are found in a multitude of different circumstances and their identities tempered by religious beliefs, class backgrounds, the social contexts in which they find themselves, and personal experiences . . . identities do not have a fixed essence but rather are always made and remade [and] power relations are an important part of identities . . . Thus such a broad label as Arab women may at times also encompass conflicting and antagonistic identities and experiences.