Middle East women life writings have been downplayed for their oversimplified representations of female subjects as purely passive, submissive and unresisting. This article explores the allegation in three contemporary memoirs by Jean P. Sasson (1992) (the ghostwriter of Saudi princess Sultana), Zainab Salbi (2005) and Manal al-Sharif (2017) who recount similar observations on subordinated women's daily experiences in phallocentric Arab communities, and whose stories have similarly been the subject of much controversial criticism. In the present study, I aim to examine the practices exercised by marginalized Arab women to destabilize the patriarchal status quo and redefine the established ways of being. To do so, I draw on Michel Foucault's notion of counter-conduct, often associated with the issues of women and their socio-political and religious position, to identify acts of defiance that are exercised simultaneously with strategies of governmentality through practices of moral self-reflection, or what Foucault describes as the art of being governed differently. The article concludes that in creatively documenting their life stories and through tactical elements such as counter-history, counter-society and reversed obedience, the so-called passive women interrogate the totality of prevailing hierarchies of power, and resist against the unequal society as well as the operating practices of subjugation.

Middle East women's active participation in resisting against socio-political impositions and constraints has received scant attention in the existing scholarship within the field. Much of the literature is focused on the socially victimized, subjugated and passive state of the female subjects in facing patriarchal authoritarianism and repression. In contrast, this article aims at exploring the subjected women's investment in multifarious acts of resistance through their leisure time and practices. To this end, Foucault's notion of "counter-conduct," a mode of resistance to be governed differently, is used to examine women's leisure activities in Jean P.

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With universals of translation budding into an interesting field in translation studies, discussing the nature of translation universals and explicitation as one of the universals of translation emerges as one important strand worthy exploring. In this paper, first of all, the notion of explicitation in translation is introduced, followed by the probable relations between expertise and explicitation discussed in two Arabic-English translations of the Holy Quran. First, a comparison was made between the original text and the translations in terms of explicitation regarding cohesion in context. Second, the translations were compared by studying cohesive markers. In the third step, the study investigated the relationship among features of cohesion, as verified by Halliday and Hassan's seminal work in this realm, with all instances of explicitation identified on this basis. The fourth stage of the study saw a comparison drawn between the frequencies of explicitation in the translations. The findings pointed to the application of explicitation, somehow affecting the behavior of cohesive markers. Finally, the results of the analysis supported the need for the reasons behind the rate of the relationship between expertise and explicitation in the Arabic-English translations of the Quran. Interestingly, the findings turned out to be in contrast with the hypothesis indicating that the translated texts converted by experienced translators would be more explicit than their original parallel versions. Further, experienced or inexperienced translators transferred most of the ellipsis and substitutions used in the source text in their original form. No clear relationship between the level of expertise of translators and explicitation in translation was discovered. Such detailed investigations of the instances of explicitation in corpora would be attempts to categorize, compare and contrast patterns of occurrence, and provide possible starting points for further similar research.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Refugees (2017) explores hardships and aspirations of non-Communist Vietnamese led between two contradicting geographical imaginations. This article draws upon Foucault's theories of "other spaces"-heterotopia, utopia and dystopia-to examine the socio-political constructs of space in the manufacturing and diffusion of desired knowledge(s) throughout the collection. It is argued that the particular arrangement of spaces together with the strategic monopolization of knowledge-producing practices throughout the stories produce the effects of regulatory and disciplinary power with the aim of naturalizing certain discursiveideological policies. The analyses of selected stories unravel the ways in which the Communist Vietnam is ideologically signed as a heterotopia, or a rupture of a decent society. The study also reveals that such negative depictions of the country are in compliance with mainstream epistemic perspectives in the West that aim to maintain a similar discursive regime. Hence, it is concluded that the juxtaposition of two irreconcilable spacesthe heterotopic representation of Vietnam in relation to the utopianised picture of America-feeds into the contemporary discourse of war on terror by reflecting the Cold War register of anxiety about an insidious Communist threat.