Current Research Bulletin

Gendered violence has inspired a substantial body of literary fiction that draws attention to its severity and to the mechanisms that normalize it, yet the forms this attention takes differ sharply across literary traditions. This article develops a comparative framework for gender-based violence in the novel by reading three Western texts: Constance Maud’s No Surrender, MargePiercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys, alongside three Arabic novels:Muhammad Husayn Haykal’sZaynab, Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone, and Najwa Barakat’s Oh, Salaam! Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s theory of the subaltern and Judith Butler’s account of gender performativity, the analysis argues that gender-based violence in these texts exceeds the physical, encompassing psychological, institutional, and discursive forms of harm, and that the Western and Arab female characters respondto that harm in patterned but divergent ways: the former largely resist and speak, the latter largely submit and are spoken for. Situating these readings against epidemiological and survey data on gender-based violence in the United States, Egypt, Morocco, and Lebanon, the article contends that the relative marginality of gender-based violence within the Arabic novel’s plot structures reproduces, rather than interrupts, the subaltern woman’s silence, and it proposes that a literature attentive to this dynamic has an unrealized role to play in naming that violence rather than absorbing it into the texture of ordinary life.

gender-based violence, subaltern studies, gender performativity, comparative literature, Arabic novel, feminist literary criticism.

1. Abudi, D. (2011). The Centrality of the Family in Arab Societies. Mothers and Daughters in Arab Women’sLiterature: The Family Frontier. Brill, Leiden, 27-34.
2. Barakat, N. (1999). Oh, Salaam!.
3. Beauvoir, S. de. (1989).The Second Sex. Translated by Howard M. Parshley. Louis Braille Productions.
4. Butler, J. (1989). GenderTrouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, London.
5. Caine, B. (1982). Feminism,suffrage and the nineteenth-century Englishwomen’s movement. Women’sStudies International Forum, 5(6), 537-550.
6. Choukri, M. (1972). For Bread Alone.P. Owen, London.
7. Douki, S., Nacef, F., Halbreich, U. and Khalaf,M. (2003). Violenceagainst women in Arab and Islamic countries. Archives of Women’s Mental Health, 6(3), 165-171.
8. El Feki, S., Heilman, B. and Barker, G. (Eds.). (2017). Understanding Masculinities: Results from the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES) – Middle East and North Africa. UN Women.
9. El-Sherif, M. (2013). Reclaiming Tangier: Mohammed Choukri’s Al-Khubz Al-Ḥāfī and subaltern citizenship in urban literature. Research in African Literatures, 44(3), 101-117.
10. Foucault, M. (1967). Madnessand Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.Routledge, London.
11. Foucault, M. (1976). The Birth of the Clinic:An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Tavistock, London.
12. Gangoli, G., Gill, A. and Anitha,S. (2012). Understanding forced marriage: Definitions and realities. In Forced Marriage: Introducing a Social Justice and Human Rights Perspective, 25-45. Zed, London.
13. Harding, K. (2015). Asking for It: The AlarmingRise of Rape Culture—and What We Can Do aboutIt. Da Capo Lifelong, Boston.
14. Haykal, M. Ḥ. (1913).Zaynab: Manāẓir Wa-Akhlāq Rīfīyah. Dar Al-Miṣrīyah Al-Lubnānīyah.
15. Kennedy, M. (2016). Moroccanstate TV shows women how to hide domestic violence. The Guardian, 27 November 2016.
16. Kilpatrick, H. (1992). The Egyptian novelfrom Zaynab to 1980. Modern Arabic Literature, edited by Muhammad M. Badawi, 223-269. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
17. Lebowitz, L. and Roth, S. (1994). “I felt like a slut”: The culturalcontext and women’sresponse to beingraped. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 7(3), 363-390.
18. Maciunas, B. (1992). Feministepistemology in Piercy’sWoman on the Edge of Time. Women’sStudies, 20(3-4), 249-258.
19. Maud, C. (1911). No Surrender. CreativeMedia Partners.
20. Minico, E. D. (2019).Spatial and psychophysical domination of women in dystopia:Swastika Night, Woman on the Edge of Time and The Handmaid’s Tale. Humanities, 8(1), 38-53.
21. Oates, J. C. (1996).We Were the Mulvaneys. Penguin,New York.
22. Piercy, M. (1976). Woman on the Edge of Time. FawcettCrest, New York.
23. Romito, P. (2008). A Deafening Silence:Hidden Violence againstWomen and Children.Policy Press, Bristol.
24. Rudy, K. (1997). Ethics,reproduction, utopia: Genderand childbearing in Woman on the Edge of Time and The Left Hand of Darkness. NWSA Journal, 9(1), 22-38.
25. Scarduzio, J. A., Carlyle, K. E., Harris, K. L. and Savage, M. W. (2016). “Maybeshe was provoked”: Exploring gender stereotypes about male and female perpetrators of intimate partner violence. Violence Against Women, 23(1), 89-113.
26. Shank, N. (2017). Narrating underrepresented minds: Traumain Joyce CarolOates’s We Were the Mulvaneys. South Central Review, 34(1), 93-125.
27. Spivak, G. C. (1988).Can the subaltern speak? Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271-313. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.
28. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2019). Global Study on Homicide: Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls. UNODC, Vienna.
29. Usta, J., Antoun, J., Ambuel, B. and Khawaja, M. (2012). Involving the health care system in domestic violence:What women want. The Annals of Family Medicine, 10(3), 213-220.
30. Williams, J. E. (2007).Rape culture. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, editedby George Ritzer.Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA. doi:10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosr019.
31. Wingerden, S. A. van. (2002). The Women’s SuffrageMovement in Britain,1866-1928. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
32. World Health Organization. (2013). Global and Regional Estimates of Violence against Women: Prevalence and Health Effects of Intimate Partner Violence and Non-Partner Sexual Violence. World Health Organization, Geneva.
33. Yusuf, U. (2018). The Perplexity of a Muslim Woman: Over Inheritance, Marriage, and Homosexuality. Translated by Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD.