#pulpnonfiction

If survivors of forced marriages or domestic violence don’t tell their own stories, will someone else?  Can these autobiographical pulp nonfiction authors tell their stories in a way that doesn’t lead others to blame culture or sexualize Muslim women?

“The fiction that any of us can ‘choose freely’ is maintained by conjuring up those in distant lands who live in bondage with no rights, agency, or ability to refuse or escape sex or violence” (Abu-Lughod 111)

Credits:

Joseph Rut 

Simon&Shuster

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Caged-Virgin-Muslim-Womans/dp/1416526234

“The sharp debate within feminist circles about whether women share enough to constitute a singular category (’woman’) has implications for the subject of this book. Should we be working with the similarly homogenized category of the “Muslim woman? (12)” 

I found this quote particularly noteworthy considering Afsaneh Najmabadi’s commentary on the historical construction of gender in different Muslim societies. In “Beyond the Americas,” she recounts how the use of gender as a marker of difference has a genealogy of its own. She cites its analytical implementation as “a very modern imperative” that was “first developed for the European context” (14, 18). Najmabadi’s contrasts this point with the fact that many forces in the “Islamicate world” believed “that man and woman were of the same essence” (17). Given this history, I would have liked to read how Abu-Lughod examines not only the categorization of “Muslim” in “Muslim women,” but also the contextual construction of the category “women." That being said, it bears stating that the producers of “Pulp Nonfiction” operate within a particular conception of female identity. Abu-Lughod’s use of “women” may therefore have to meet these authors on their own terms in order for her to best critique the ideas about Islam they put forth.