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Women Working Conditions in Raja Alem’s the Dove’s Necklace
Abstract
Raja Alem’s the Dove’s Necklace (2014) raises awareness of empathy towards others, specifically working women. The aim of my paper is to explore the agony of lower-working-class women in this Saudi novel. The main objective is to examine the suffering of women in general and non-Saudi working-class women in particular in a society controlled by men as depicted in Alem’s novel. Of these women is Umm al-Sa’d, whose brothers have imprisoned her to deprive her of her inheritance, and when she has escaped, she has suffered from poverty until she starts buying and selling national stocks on the behalf of her neighbours. Another character is the female Sri Lankan servant who works as a slave, since she is not allowed to have an annual vacation to travel and see her family for ten years. She discovers that her husband has remarried and has had children on her earnings. Furthermore, the Turkish seamstress lives in the basement of a very poor building, where the sewage leak. To achieve my goal, I apply qualitative research relying on Judith Butler's concept of precarity (2004), which states that “certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (p. 26). This concept is used as a theoretical framework to give a broader understanding of how discrimination and oppression are deployed on Muslim women. The contribution of my paper focuses on how the society in the novel is depicted as being highly religious; however, it abuses and exploits not only foreign female labourers but also poor native women.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Saudi Arabia
Sub Area
None