<p>I den här uppsatsen analyseras Nawal El Saadawis roman <em>Den stulna romanen</em> ur ett psykoanalytiskt perspektiv, inspirerat av Sigmund Freuds psykoanalys. Syftet med analysen är att nå djupare förståelse för romanen genom att analysera huvudkaraktärerna Bodour och Zakariyas personligheter. Genom detta perspektiv försöker vi fastställa huruvida Bodour och Zakariya lider av neuroser eller inte, och vad dessa i så fall kan bero på. Som inspiration inför analysarbetet har vi även tagit del av Diana Royers och Georges Tarabishis omfattande analyser av El Saadawis tidigare verk. Genom hermeneutisk metod och närläsning har vi läst och tolkat innehållet i <em>Den stulna romanen</em> med freudianskt inspirerade ögon. Av denna läsning drar vi slutsatserna att både Bodour och Zakariya lider av neuroser. Orsakerna finner vi i personliga trauman, men den huvudsakliga orsaken verkar vara en religiöst betingad samhällsnorm som förtrycker både kvinnan och mannens sexualitet.</p>

I den här uppsatsen analyseras Nawal El Saadawis roman Den stulna romanen ur ett psykoanalytiskt perspektiv, inspirerat av Sigmund Freuds psykoanalys. Syftet med analysen är att nå djupare förståelse för romanen genom att analysera huvudkaraktärerna Bodour och Zakariyas personligheter. Genom detta perspektiv försöker vi fastställa huruvida Bodour och Zakariya lider av neuroser eller inte, och vad dessa i så fall kan bero på. Som inspiration inför analysarbetet har vi även tagit del av Diana Royers och Georges Tarabishis omfattande analyser av El Saadawis tidigare verk. Genom hermeneutisk metod och närläsning har vi läst och tolkat innehållet i Den stulna romanen med freudianskt inspirerade ögon. Av denna läsning drar vi slutsatserna att både Bodour och Zakariya lider av neuroser. Orsakerna finner vi i personliga trauman, men den huvudsakliga orsaken verkar vara en religiöst betingad samhällsnorm som förtrycker både kvinnan och mannens sexualitet.

This thesis provides a critique of Nawal El Saadawi’s writings regarding the issue of women’s rights in Islam. The study’s goal is twofold: 1) to examine how Muslim women’s rights are viewed by Nawal El Saadawi, who is a prominent feminist scholar in the Middle East and is widely known for her fierce campaigns demanding equal gender rights in what she calls a male-dominated society, and 2) to discuss her arguments within an Islamic framework that includes two strands of interpretations of gender-specific verses of the Qur’an: traditional and modern. To this end, I use a content analysis approach to explore how the Arab feminist, Nawal El Saadawi, perceives five controversial issues -i.e., marriage, polygamy, and divorce, inheritance rights, and veiling- as opposed to the Islamic faith as presented by classical scholars (i.e., Muhammad ibn Jarir Al Tabari (839-923 CE) and Ismail ibn Umar Ibn Kathir (C 1300-1373) as well as contemporary Muslim feminists including Amina Wadud and Azizah Al Hibri. Findings display that Nawal El Saadawi's arguments contradict the classical readings of the Qur'an as demonstrated by Al Tabari and Ibn Kathir on the one hand, and the views of contemporary Muslim feminists on the other hand. While El Saadawi considers marriage in Islam, for example, as an oppressive institution that denies a woman's right to choose her partner and turns her life into a servant, traditional and modern scholars' interpretations of the Qur'an disagree with her and assert the opposite. Findings also show that El-Saadawi's claims not only contradict the views of classical and contemporary scholars, but also contradict each other. For instance, El Saadawi (2002) criticizes Islam for several issues such as marriage and divorce and accuses it of being behind the backwardness of Muslim women. However, she praises the era of the Prophet Muhammad and his early successors, which she described as the best era in which Muslim women were treated fairly.

Throughout the last three decades, the Arab region has attracted the unwanted attention of the rest of the world because of its spiralling political upheaval. This unrest has caused migration, economic and cultural changes, and eventually a spring of revolutions and protests in demand of reform. Arab countries are now in the spotlight of global current affairs, and all the imperfections regarding their cultural, social, and gender inequalities have surfaced to the foreground. Arab women novelists have been addressing feminist issues for centuries, chipping away at the stereotypical image of the meek and voiceless Arab woman that comes hand in hand with Orientalism. Through their fiction, writers such as Nawal El Saadawi, Hanan Al- Shaykh and Fadia Faqir have promulgated a bold brand of Arab feminist thought. This interdisciplinary thesis explores the Greater Syrian and Egyptian woman's novel written between 1975 and 2007. Through the in-depth analysis of Arab women's novels available in English, I attempt to uncover the many reasons behind today's gender inequality in Greater Syria and Egypt. By examining contemporary Arabic narrative styles and cultivating traditional Arab story-telling methods, the creative element of this thesis uses fiction to expose social and political injustice. The novel within this thesis challenges different forms of patriarchy that are dominant in the region, and endeavours to document a historical, on-going revolution.

NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS.... This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil.(English)

NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS.... This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil.(English)