Women, Gender, and Women's Fiction: the United States

Abstract

Arab and Arab American women writers today are embedded in a political, social, and ethical complex that, whether explicitly or not, affects their writing. Using the metaphor of invisibility to describe the state of their existence and that of their work, their efforts are directed toward writing themselves and their experiences into visibility. Uniquely positioned as transnational subjects, their subjectivities are forged across multiple, often global vectors of identification, providing them with multiple consciousness. Their writing thus not only to attests to their presence, but also critiques and questions what exactly it means to be Arab, American, and Arab American. The works and experiences of Laila Lalami, Samia Serageldin, Suheir Hammad, Dima Hilal, Nathalie Handal, Mohja Kahf, Diana Abu-Jaber, and Susan Abulhawa can serve as examples of how Arab American women explore the multiplicity of subjectivity as they are uniquely formed in the U.S. landscape.