Overview

Although there is a history of rich, complex, and variegated representations of female illness in Western literature over the last two centuries, the sick female body has traditionally remained outside the Arab literary imagination. Hamdar takes on this historical absence in The Female Suffering Body by exploring how both literary and cultural perspectives on female physical illness and disability in the Arab world have transformed in the modern period. In doing so, she examines a range of both canonical and hitherto marginalized Arab writers, including Mahmoud Taymur, Yusuf al-Sibai, Ghassan Kanafani, Naguib Mahfouz, Ziyad Qassim, Colette Khoury, Hanan al-Shaykh, Alia Mamdouh, Salwa Bakr, Hassan Daoud, and Betool Khedair. Hamdar finds that, over the course of sixty years, female physical illness and disability has moved from the margins of Arabic literature - where it was largely the subject of shame, disgust, or revulsion - to the center, as a new wave of female writers have sought to give voice to the “female suffering body.”

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Reviews

A rich and provocative work that makes a much-needed intervention in the fields of Arabic literature and disability studies and fills an epistemological gap.--International Journal of Middle East Studies A richly detailed and engaging analysis of an assortment of short stories and novels published by fifteen authors since 1950.--Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Hamdar's critical engagement with the concepts of 'illness, ' 'sickness, ' and 'disability' in the introduction lays out the groundwork for understanding the politics of illness and the poetics of the illness narrative that emerged in Arab male and female writing from the early 1950s to the present.--Center for Medical Humanities A brilliant and original study . . . bringing together insights from literary criticism, sociology and anthropology of health and illness. Hamdar convincingly argues that the narrative shift from textual silence on female suffering bodies in earlier texts to self-expression and narration of illness in contemporary women's writing reflects the journey of women from invisibility to visibility, and from marginalization to narration of their subjectivity.--Hoda Elsadda author of Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892-2008 Hamdar has made a significant contribution to the critical literature about Arabic language fiction literature. She has provided us with a thoughtful analysis of several novels spanning several countries, and has demonstrated the evolution of Arab writing about the disabled female body.--Ellen J. Amster author of Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 Her reading of texts proves nimble and insightful, and provides an imminently useful corpus of decoding. It represents the type of scholarship that can expand people's understanding of the Arabic literary tradition in its complexity and depth, while providing an important perspective on the image of women within that tradition.--Al Jadid The Female Suffering Body provides a fascinating and significant intervention in the field of modern Arabic literary studies.--Journal for the Society of Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World

Hamdar has made a significant contribution to the critical literature about Arabic language fiction literature. She has provided us with a thoughtful analysis of several novels spanning several countries, and has demonstrated the evolution of Arab writing about the disabled female body.--Ellen J. Amster author of Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

Hamdar has made a significant contribution to the critical literature about Arabic language fiction literature. She has provided us with a thoughtful analysis of several novels spanning several countries, and has demonstrated the evolution of Arab writing about the disabled female body.--Ellen J. Amster author of Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877 1956

Author Information

Abir Hamdar is a lecturer at Durham University in Durham, England. She has published several articles in such journals as Feminist Theory, Journal of Cultural Research, and Al-Raida.

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