Home > Catalogue > Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale > 58 | 2022 > Writing Sexuality in the Autobiographical Form

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale | Vol. 58 | June 2022

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Research Article

Writing Sexuality in the Autobiographical Form

A Reflection of Mona Prince’s Novel So You May See

Miral Mahgoub    Arizona State University, USA    

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abstract

This article explores the representation of the female body and sexuality in modern Arab women’s writing in Egypt, focusing on the 1990s generation and the emergence of a new literary trend of explicit writing, or so-called kitābath al-jasad, which exposes bodily subjects using explicit sexual language, prohibited sensual themes, and erotic fantasies as tools of revolt against social and political taboos and as a means of challenging extremist Islamic religious rhetoric and the patriarchal authority. My representative example of this generation and this writing is Egyptian novelist Mona Prince. In her novel, So You May See (2011), experience connects to nakedness protest movements by using the body as a key vehicle to protest fundamentalist religious powers that oppose women’s liberation. In both contexts of body protest (clothed or unclothed), female sexuality is the tool par excellence to combat religious extremist rhetoric that amplifies hostility towards women.

Published
June 30, 2022
Accepted
June 13, 2022
Submitted
March 22, 2022
Language
EN

Keywords: Female body • Sexual explicitness • Women’s writing • Female sexuality • Taboos • Censorship • Mona Prince • Eroticism in Arab literature • Nakedness writing

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2022/01/006

Copyright: © 2022 Miral Mahgoub. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.