Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings

Middle East women’s active participation in resisting against socio-political impositions and constraints has received scant attention in the existing scholarship within the field. Much of the literature is focused on the socially victimized, subjugated and passive state of the female subjects in...

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Main Author: Asl, Moussa Pourya
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2019
Online Access:http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/1/30216-107977-1-PB.pdf
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/
http://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1212
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spelling my-ukm.journal.140882020-01-31T22:44:42Z http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/ Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings Asl, Moussa Pourya Middle East women’s active participation in resisting against socio-political impositions and constraints has received scant attention in the existing scholarship within the field. Much of the literature is focused on the socially victimized, subjugated and passive state of the female subjects in facing patriarchal authoritarianism and repression. In contrast, this article aims at exploring the subjected women’s investment in multifarious acts of resistance through their leisure time and practices. To this end, Foucault’s notion of “counter-conduct,” a mode of resistance to be governed differently, is used to examine women’s leisure activities in Jean P. Sasson’s (1992) Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia, Azar Nafisi’s (2003) Reading Lolita in Tehran and Manal al-Sharif’s (2017) Daring to Drive. The analysis of these narratives within the power/resistance framework underlines the shifting complexities of the female participants’ life course, and reveals that the subjugated women’s trajectory in the stories is a gradual progression from pure submissiveness towards an active engagement in social, cultural and political realities. Throughout the narratives, women use leisure time and activities such as driving, reading and bonding in parallel to dominant techniques of governmentality to produce alternative subjectivities. The study concludes that the life accounts do not merely provide an oversimplified depiction of Middle East women as passive victims of a misogynistic cultural tradition, but rather chronicle women’s active protests—i.e., individual and collective revolts of conduct, acts of opposition and violations of established norms—similar to the forms of counter-conduct theorized by Foucault. Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2019-08 Article PeerReviewed application/pdf en http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/1/30216-107977-1-PB.pdf Asl, Moussa Pourya (2019) Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings. GEMA: Online Journal of Language Studies, 19 (3). pp. 43-56. ISSN 1675-8021 http://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1212
institution Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
building Tun Sri Lanang Library
collection Institutional Repository
continent Asia
country Malaysia
content_provider Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
content_source UKM Journal Article Repository
url_provider http://journalarticle.ukm.my/
language English
description Middle East women’s active participation in resisting against socio-political impositions and constraints has received scant attention in the existing scholarship within the field. Much of the literature is focused on the socially victimized, subjugated and passive state of the female subjects in facing patriarchal authoritarianism and repression. In contrast, this article aims at exploring the subjected women’s investment in multifarious acts of resistance through their leisure time and practices. To this end, Foucault’s notion of “counter-conduct,” a mode of resistance to be governed differently, is used to examine women’s leisure activities in Jean P. Sasson’s (1992) Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia, Azar Nafisi’s (2003) Reading Lolita in Tehran and Manal al-Sharif’s (2017) Daring to Drive. The analysis of these narratives within the power/resistance framework underlines the shifting complexities of the female participants’ life course, and reveals that the subjugated women’s trajectory in the stories is a gradual progression from pure submissiveness towards an active engagement in social, cultural and political realities. Throughout the narratives, women use leisure time and activities such as driving, reading and bonding in parallel to dominant techniques of governmentality to produce alternative subjectivities. The study concludes that the life accounts do not merely provide an oversimplified depiction of Middle East women as passive victims of a misogynistic cultural tradition, but rather chronicle women’s active protests—i.e., individual and collective revolts of conduct, acts of opposition and violations of established norms—similar to the forms of counter-conduct theorized by Foucault.
format Article
author Asl, Moussa Pourya
spellingShingle Asl, Moussa Pourya
Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
author_facet Asl, Moussa Pourya
author_sort Asl, Moussa Pourya
title Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
title_short Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
title_full Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
title_fullStr Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
title_full_unstemmed Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings
title_sort leisure as a space of political practice in middle east women life writings
publisher Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
publishDate 2019
url http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/1/30216-107977-1-PB.pdf
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14088/
http://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1212
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score 13.211869