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Narrating Revolution: Contesting Masculinities
Abstract
In the aftermath of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, writing without fearing censorship became possible for Amel Mokhtar, Fethia Hechmi and Messaouda Boubakr. Hence, narrating the politics of post-Revolutionary Tunisia became a theme of these women’s texts. The titles of their works suggest the political nature of their writings: Messaouda Boubakr’s adhal ahki (I Continue to Narrate) and Fethia Hechmis’ al-shaytan ya‘ud min al-manfa (Satan Returns from Exile) appeared in bookstores in 2012 and Amel Mokhtar published dukhan al-qasr (Smoke of the Palace) in 2013. This paper argues that Mokhtar, Hechmi and Boubakr narrate contested masculinities in their fiction, mirroring their discontent with dictatorship and their anxieties toward the new socio-political debates that have taken place since the Revolution. They contribute to post-Revolutionary socio-political and gender-centered debates. When state-sponsored feminism ceased to exist after the Revolution, the question of women’s status became pressing for these authors. Rather than gaining more constitutional rights after the Revolution, women’s 1957 rights became subject to social and political debates. In parallel with the appearance of new nationalist discourses evidenced by the existence of 167 different political parties in a country of eleven million people, a variety of feminisms arose. Tunisia witnessed the shifting away from the modernist-secularist-state-sponsored feminism model to an array of newly founded women’s identities. It became imperative for Tunisian women to narrate the Revolution and the post-Revolution era’s discontentment for which they chose a critique of Tunisian masculinities. This paper highlights three women’s narrative responses to what Homi Bhabha perceives as being part of the “justifications of modernity—progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past—that rationalize the authoritarian.” (4) In other words, Mokhtar, Hechmi and Boubakr demonstrate their disillusionment with equating the Revolution to improving women’s condition in Tunisia. Their narratives mirror men’s violence against women, polygamy, the illicitness of women’s bodies and women’s anxieties about the Revolution. All three works portray masculine representations from a female narrator’s viewpoint within Tunisia’s ‘nation-space’ in an effort to interpret the effects of the Revolution on Tunisian society. Instead of writing to be part of the normative nationalist discourse that existed prior to the Revolution, these women write to contest the inequality between genders in a nation that formerly made a plea to modernity through women’s rights and gender equality mottos. The Revolution has allowed masks to fall and for new narrative spaces to evolve.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
None
Sub Area
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