Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Modern Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Politics of The Body Encounter: Representation of the Female Body in Najat El Hashmi is The Body Hunter, Naima B.Robert’s From My Sister’s Lips, And Laila Lailami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
Fatimazahrae Moutia
ABSTRACT:
The paper focuses on the representation of the female body in the writing of Arab writers: Laila lalami(2005) is famous for her literary blog, mooridhgirl.com which she started in October 2001. Moorishgirl features literary news, commentary, book reviews and author interviews as well as political and cultural debates. Najat El Hashimi (2011) is a writer and owner of the distinguished Ramon Llull Prize (2008) and the Prix Ulysse (2009). Naima.B.Robert (1977) is an author of multicultural literature and founding editor of the UK-based Muslim women’s publication, SISTERS Magazine. Their contemporary postcolonial writing manifests that the body becomes a site of cultural encounters, identity negotiation, women’s agency, and proof of the trauma of displacement. They explore the ways women’s bodies are, as I would argue, exiled socio-culturally and sexually controlled as well as their resistance to indigenous and colonial domination. This paper shall examine their works within a tradition of northward and eastward travel literature from Africa or the Orient to Europe and vice versa in terms of gender, femininity, sexuality, and the ways bodies are presenting and resisting the hegemonic discourses.
Keywords: Female body, orientalism, representation, resistance, cultural encounters, body politics.