Gendered Resistance in Selected Novels by Hanan al-Shaykh, Sahar Khalifeh, and Leila Aboulela: Everyday Agency, Narrative Politics, and Postcolonial Feminist Theory

Abstract

This article argues that Hanan al-Shaykh's Women of Sand and Myrrh, Sahar Khalifeh's Wild Thorns, and Leila Aboulela's Minaret theorize gendered resistance as situated, everyday practices rather than singular acts of overt defiance. Reading the three novels through Chandra Talpade Mohanty's decolonized feminism, James C. Scott's concept of everyday resistance, Homi Bhabha's third space, and Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, and framing these literary practices within the wider political-gender-theory tradition associated with Joan W. Scott and Anne Phillips, the paper shows that resistance in this fiction is enacted through narrative voice, calculated silence, memory, bodily discipline, and spatial negotiation. The study's original contribution is threefold: it offers a sustained comparative close reading of these three authors as a single corpus spanning Gulf, Palestinian, and Sudanese-diasporic contexts; it demonstrates that the novels' formal choices - fragmented temporality, multiple first-person narration, free indirect discourse - are themselves modes of political theorizing rather than incidental style; and it extends postcolonial feminist literary criticism by showing where political gender theory's account of power as constitutive of, and constituted through, gender difference clarifies what "resistance" means for subjects who cannot safely act in public. The paper's principal limitation is its exclusive focus on published, internationally circulated fiction, which leaves open the question of whether the same modalities of resistance appear in oral, vernacular, or unpublished Middle Eastern women's writing; it recommends comparative extension to additional authors and to non-literary "hidden transcripts" as a direction for future research.