This presentation deals with the trajectory of Afghan women's fiction. A century ago, modern literature emerged in Afghanistan with the publication of novels and short stories. Due to cultural and historical limitations, women’s fiction emerged 30 years later, in the 50s. These first tentative steps were followed by women writers’ significant presence in the 60s when they were able to carve out a place for themselves. In this decade, when realist literature had reached its peak, women writers focused more on the representation of phenomena that constrained them in society. In the 70s, when government censorship limited freedom of speech and literature turned to mythic and symbolic, women still wrote about the prohibitions they faced in their lives. In the 1980s, when the former Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, socialist literature became popular, and some women tried their hand at propagandist fiction, albeit without success. At the same time, some women began articulating resistance and writing anti-war literature. When the Mujahideen took power and a civil war ensued, women were once again subjected to repression. Later, when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, the pressure and strictness on women became more intense, and fiction writing also faced stagnation inside the country. But abroad, a literature of diaspora, with significant representation by women, began to take shape. After 9/11, Afghanistan entered a new phase and women had more opportunities to participate in cultural and social activities. Women writers in this period wrote stories that are examples of feminist literature. After the fall of Afghanistan, a second time to the hands of the Taliban, most writers left the country. There is still no accurate assessment of what has been written in exile. Time will tell in which direction the new trend will move. Keywords: Afghan fiction, women writers, feminist writing, feminine feelings.

The stories of “wiles of women” are frequently found in Persian texts of all sorts; exegetical, narrative tales, and even didactic literature. Although prevalent and significant, they are still understudied in Persian literature, especially in texts of Indian origin. This research paper aims to look at two Persian texts from the 14th century CE, both translated from the same Sanskrit source, the Śukasaptati. The Ṭūṭi-nāma by Ḍīyā’ ud-Dīn Naḫšabī and the Ǧawāhir al-asmār by ʿImād Ibn-Muḥammad Ṯaġarī were both written in the style of embedded narratives to simultaneously entertain and educate. In the production of these texts, each writer/translator has carefully chosen how to recount the frame narrative, and the stories and inner-tales to include and exclude, as well as pulling variants from parallel sources to add to his own version. Having the same frame narrative and stories in common, these two texts provide an excellent opportunity to see the amount of influence a writer of Persian literary tradition has when dealing with the same topic and the same story, and how big of a role the common perceptions and literary traditions of the time played. To do so, we will focus on the frame narrative and inspect how differently a similar story can unfold and in what manner of words it can be retold. We will analyze the texts by comparing them to each other, to other prominent wiles of women stories, such as the One Thousand and One Nights, and by searching for the observance of patterns previously established by scholars researching the same literary topos. The paper concludes that although different in their approach and choices, the writers still follow the same attitude towards women and their trickery, although to different extents. The underlying mechanisms behind the stories are then explained through textual analysis and it is shown how they operate on the same playing field but with different strategies to utilize the stories of the guiles used by women to warn men and prescribe what a good woman should be.

This paper targets creating its own concepts against the underestimation-based meta-discourses on women’s criminal acts (especially serious offenses) and their repetition as a notion in the language of Turkish literary productions. The feminist-criminological approach will be driven to explore Ottoman women and crime relationships which have overwhelmingly depicted passive, downtrodden, and incompetent women self-defenders and victims in the published pieces of late Ottoman and early republican Turkish literature. This also resulted in having mainly two types of female delinquents’ representations victims and cruel offenders (doers) by using special formulaic languages, discourses, and repetitious vocabularies for the depiction of women criminal characters in fictional narratives. In this regard, this presentation will initially navigate the true definition of Ottoman women’s criminality and revolutionary approaches to their delinquency with feminist works that criticize the mundane discourses hiding their criminal potential regarding their motherly and nurturer positions and lower numbers in penal institutions. Not only underestimation against women’s perpetrations but also depersonalization and dehumanization by identifying them as wild tigresses, deviant witches, and cruel villains as a way of rejecting women’s criminal competency, especially in serious offenses, have overwhelmingly invaded literary works. It is crucial to note that I will provide many examples from the late Ottoman and early republican literature such as The Woman with a Dagger: A Strange Story, Bloody Fairy, Grasshopper Zehra, Fox Leman, Selma and her Shadow that all will help to trace the ways of displacement of female criminals and powerful women villains with the attribution of the passive and vulnerable characteristics that enhanced the losing agency of women in fictional narrations.

This paper presents a comparative study aimed at exploring the portrayal of women’s rights through political cartoons by women cartoonists from Turkey, Iran and Egypt. It seeks to uncover both the universal and unique ways in which these rights are communicated, delving into the dialogues that cartoons facilitate across different cultural landscapes. By employing Mieke Bal’s concepts of “focalization” defined in terms of “selection,” “vision or gaze” and “presentation,” this research intends to investigate how cartoons act as a medium for translating the untranslatable of women’s rights, emphasizing the local and cultural specificities that global narratives often overlook (2006). These cultural specificities are portrayed through a unique emphasis on the portrayal of who perceives the events within each cartoon, rather than on the symbols and literary tropes used or who the cartoonist as narrator is. The core question guiding this investigation asks how political cartoons by women in these countries portray women’s rights and what these portrayals reveal about the untranslatable aspects of women’s struggles and achievements within these societies. To approach this inquiry, the study will utilize a comparative qualitative analysis of political cartoons, informed by Bal’s theoretical framework. This involves analyzing cartoons by Doaa Eladl (Egypt); Seida Sardashti, Mana Neyestani, and Firooza Muzaffari (Iran); and Ipek Özüslü, Hilal Özcan and Menekşe Can (Turkey), focusing on how women’s rights are depicted within distinct cultural contexts. These cartoons, characterized by their use of humor, satire, and symbolism, juxtaposed with a unique take on focalization provide commentary on both the advancements and challenges in the pursuit of women’s legal and social rights, personal freedoms and gender equality. The anticipated conclusion of this paper is that political cartoons transcend mere artistic expression, serving as critical ‘focalized’ bridges between the global concepts of women’s rights and their local, untranslatable dimensions. Highlighting the distinct perspectives of women cartoonists from Turkey, Iran, and Egypt in depicting focalization, this study aims to contribute to a better understanding of the global struggle for women’s rights. It will underline the significance of considering cultural context in feminist discourse and advocate for recognizing political cartoons as a significant form of a Deleuzian “fold” for social and political commentary with legal relevance (1988). Through this comparative lens, the research seeks to enrich the discourse on art, politics, and women’s rights, demonstrating the value of cartoons in shaping and reflecting public discourse on gender equality and justice.