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Abstract
This dissertation deconstructs how the Muslim Feminine is personified, presented and perceived in works of contemporary fiction written in French, claiming the existence of these women’s unambiguous identities, not just from a woman’s point of view but from a feminist viewpoint. My study centers on the subject positions Muslim women are assigned and resultant contemporaneous negotiations of their status in fiction. My research intends to accentuate how Muslim women’s own telling of stories that evoke unequivocal resistances by Muslim protagonists connotes feminist performativity. I explore how such performativity enables Muslim women to claim substantial subject statuses as well as the acknowledgement due for literary enactments of agency as both writers and protagonists. Exploring embodied resistances represented in the works of contemporary Muslim women is fundamental to my work.Since the emergence of the headscarf controversy as a contentious political issue in the 1990s, Muslim feminism has risen assertively in France. This was also when literary fiction written by and descriptive of Muslim women began to bourgeon. Feminist paradigms posit that the Feminine- hence the Muslim woman (or any fiction constructed around her) is not homogeneous, and that cultural identities are fluid and hybrid. In studying this hybridity, I elucidate what Muslim women choosing to write in French in the 21st century have in common and detail what distinguishes their work as a genre apart. While they still incorporate postcolonial debris in the fiction they generate, they are also distancing themselves from repackaged Orientalism, tackling varied contemporary themes in their writing like intricate variants of feminism, urbanism, cosmopolitanism, individualism, and womanism. The books I study have been written at the dawn of the new century and millennium and underline the (r)evolutionary character of this modern-day fiction by a novel collective of Muslim women writers.
I theorize on how positioning this literature as a rejoinder to xenophobic nationalist discourse may contribute to the establishment of a more tolerant transnational approach towards both this fiction and the political realities associated with it. My research analyzes why and how a comprehensive reconceptualization of literature penned by and on the contemporary Muslim woman is imaginable.