Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities ...

While the female body has been used as a site for the production of competing ideologies, most of which have resulted in women’s oppression and marginalization, that very body is reconfigured in these works as a site of resistance.

Any discussion of the female body raises the central question of what kind of feminism/s is/are appropriate for Arab American women: is feminism an inauthentic import from the West or does something such as Third World feminism, or more specifically Arab feminism, exist? Chandra Mohanty says that Western feminisms “appropriate the production of ‘the Third World Women’ as a singular monolithic subject” for a “discursive colonization.” The term “Third World” hence refers to that “stable, ahistorical something that oppresses most if not all of the women in Third World countries” (453). Recent scholarship by Arab American writers and critics has started to pull away from the pitfalls of essentialization by presenting a different picture of Arab women that focuses on the rich diversity of their experiences and struggles. These writers have created what they call Arab feminism, which they consider as necessary when studying the lives of Arab women as they confront gender-specific issues that differ from those faced by their First World counterparts. Miriam Cooke and Margot Badran’s Opening the Gates: A Century of ArabFeminist Writing (1990), Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam (1992), Valentine Moghadam’s Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (1993), Suha Sabbagh’s Arab Women: Between Defiance and Restraint (1996), Joanna Kadi’s Food For Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab American And Arab Canadian Feminists (1994), and Lila Abu Lughod’s Re-making Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (1998) exemplify contributions to this crucial endeavor.

However, critical discussions of Arab American literature remain limited, with much of it delegated to surveys. Arab American women writers such as Laila Halaby assert through their writings that the meaning of feminism for an American white woman fighting for equal pay in her job completely differs from the feminism of a Palestinian woman trying to find a safe corner to live where she can protect her children from gunfire.