Subverting the Binary Oppositions concerning Female Agency in Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman

Abstract

This study explores woman’s agency in Alameddine’s fiction, An Unnecessary Woman (2013) concerning the normative state of agency in a communal structure that controls women’s behaviors and wishes set by suppression. The current study uses the deconstruction theory of French post-structuralists Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, taken from a feminist perspective, which undermines gender dichotomies and interrupts “the unquestionable truth” in Western philosophy. In short, Rabih Alameddine’s fiction reveals the misconceptions about – and misrepresentations of – Arab women in contemporary Arab American fiction and disrupts the binary opposition which resembles the backbone of patriarchy.