Practices of Counter-Conduct as a Mode of Resistance in Middle East Women’s Life Writings

Moussa Pourya Asl

doi:10.17576/3l-2018-2402-15

Abstract

Middle East women life writings have been downplayed for their oversimplified representations of female subjects as purely passive, submissive and unresisting. This article explores the allegation in three contemporary memoirs by Jean P. Sasson (1992) (the ghostwriter of Saudi princess Sultana), Zainab Salbi (2005) and Manal al-Sharif (2017) who recount similar observations on subordinated women’s daily experiences in phallocentric Arab communities, and whose stories have similarly been the subject of much controversial criticism. In the present study, I aim to examine the practices exercised by marginalized Arab women to destabilize the patriarchal status quo and redefine the established ways of being. To do so, I draw on Michel Foucault’s notion of counter-conduct, often associated with the issues of women and their socio-political and religious position, to identify acts of defiance that are exercised simultaneously with strategies of governmentality through practices of moral self-reflection, or what Foucault describes as the art of being governed differently. The article concludes that in creatively documenting their life stories and through tactical elements such as counter-history, counter-society and reversed obedience, the so-called passive women interrogate the totality of prevailing hierarchies of power, and resist against the unequal society as well as the operating practices of subjugation. Keywords: Jean Sasson; Zainab Salbi; Manal al-Sharif; Michel Foucault; Counter-Conduct

Highlights

Contemporary eyewitness testimonials describe the situation of Muslim women in Arab countries as socio-politically “enslaved and sexually victimized” (Amy 1999, p. 527)
The first describes the shocking human tragedies experienced by Sultana, a pseudonymous native woman of the royal family in Saudi Arabia; the second is a personal account of the author’s life under the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the third describes the high levels of discrimination that Saudi women suffer because of the strict and narrowminded teachings of religious fundamentalism
From a Foucauldian perspective, all these modalities of counter-conduct seek to refashion the relationship of the female subjects to themselves, because the struggle to be conducted differently, by other means and towards other objectives, involves the negation of prescribed modes of subjectivity that patriarchal governmentality forms and implants on the subjectivity of Arab women

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Contemporary eyewitness testimonials describe the situation of Muslim women in Arab countries as socio-politically “enslaved and sexually victimized” (Amy 1999, p. 527). This grim reality is reflected in the growing number of life narratives by both Middle East non/diasporic women writers and Western ghost-writers who are entrusted with local women’s life-stories. Many of these works, have been downplayed for their presumably oversimplified representations of female subjects as purely passive, submissive and unresisting. A counter-conduct approach is worthwhile not just in better interpreting these revolting narratives on their own terms, but in appreciating specific modalities of power in which they are entangled This means that a study of this kind will help to better understand the operating strategies of resistance in the so-called pre-deterministic life writings of Middle East women. The theories are applied on both works with a particular attention to the moral and formative ways of “becoming” as portrayed in the texts, and the way these works depict “the art of not being governed like that” within the contemporary socio-political discourse of the Middle East

LITERATURE REVIEW

CONCLUSION