Liv i marginalen - utmaning mot den falliska ordningen?

Abstract

In the artide "Liv i marginalen" (Life in the Margin) seven life stories by Arab women are analysed in some detail. Six of them are written in Arabic and one in English (Dreams of Trespass by Fatima Mernissi). In addition many other women's autobiographical accounts in Arabic are mentioned in passing. The purpose of this exposé of Arabic memoirs and autobiographies by women authors is to demonstrate that they have made a substantial contribution to the history of the genre. This is something which implicitly has been denied by male literary historians, both Arab and non-Arab ones, since they generally have failed to include texts by women in their canon. This situation seems parallel to the one in Anglo-American literature, where the same imbalance has prevailed and for similar reasons. The conflation of "male" norms and "human", universal norms has relegated life stories by women to the margin of critical discourse, since in the dominant engendered ideology women's "selfhood" has been associated with marginality in public life. Drawing among else on a theoretical study by Sidonie Smith (A Poetics of Women 's Autobiography, 1987) the artide tries to show how Arabic women^ autobiography, too, by breaking this cultural code of expected invisibility, represents a reaction against segregating practices in society and expresses a dream of liberty on both a personal and collective scale.