Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door, 2000; orig. Ar. 1960 al-Bab al-Maftuh) and Malika Mokeddem’s Century of Locusts (orig. Fr. 1992 Le siècle des sauterelles) are postcolonial Arab feminist novels that locate women’s agency in a liberatory resistance narrative through critiques of colonialism and patriarchy. Through struggles against, to varying degrees in each of the two novels, colonialism and patriarchy, agency rises in the female protagonists. Saba Mahmood’s Foucault- and Butler-informed exploration of alternate types of agency brings fruitful questions to bear on the argument among these novels. Mahmood says that a liberatory narrative pre-supposes “that human agency primarily consists of acts that challenge social norms and not those that uphold them” (The Politics of Piety, 2005:5); such a narrative is at play in the Zayyat and Mokeddem novels. The Man Booker-awarded novel from Oman, Jokha al-Harthi’s Celestial Bodies (2019, orig. Ar. 2010 Sayidat al-Qamar), delineates a different kind of agency, one that does not presume a resistance narrative or radical break with tradition as a necessary condition for female agency. Multiple characters in the Omani novel marshal social wisdom across generations and traditional women’s alternate forms of knowledge to create increased spheres of agency for themselves. Here, “agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms” (Mahmood 2005:14). In productive conversation with each other, then, these three novels render the development of their protagonists’ agency quite differently at the crux of multiple systems of power specifically including class, colonialism, and the Arab slavery system with its legacy of Arab anti-blackness. Three Arab feminist novels from different regions and decades thus emplot contrapuntal themes about the nature of agency. Perhaps Sayidat al-Qamar intervenes in older Arab feminist conversations, which tended to be mashreq-and-Maghreb-dominated, from its different experiential base in Oman, within the larger context that more and more Gulf novels are introducing new paradigms and lexicons into these longstanding conversations. Or maybe region is an inadequate explanation for the difference Sayidat al-Qamar brings into the conversation; maybe that difference simply marks a place of dynamic counterpoint in the ongoing Arab feminist conversation.