This article probes the dynamics of covert female resistance as evident in Fatima Mernissi’s only fiction work entitled Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994). Mernissi’s memoir is a real account of her early childhood spent in a harem. The discussion explores the institution of the harem in terms of how it is believed to have disempowered/empowered its female inhabitants through history. With this in mind, it takes up a number of issues that surface in Fatima’s (Mernissi’s narrator in Dreams of Trespass) narrative, and which stand central to women’s situation in the harem of Fez. These include confinement and denial to spatial freedom to them, women’s desire to gain literacy and thus become intellectually enlightened, the potential of dreams, and one’s personal strength in transgressing the normative boundaries, and finally polygamy in the harem. The article argues how women’s disempowerment, designed by the patriarchal scheme of the harem life, ironically empowers them in specific ways. This view challenges the orientalist appropriations in relation to the female inhabitants of the place who are historically believed to be passive receivers of traditional patriarchy.

This article aims to undertake a study of The Holy Woman by Qaisra Shahraz in terms of how it brings forth the woman question by effectively reflecting on the dangerous chemistry of tradition and religion-a chemistry meant to legitimize ritualization of violence. This naturally entails discussion on the way tradition is made to conspire with religion against women with an exclusive theoretical underpinning of postcolonial feminism. The author has kept the focus of study limited to the issues of female sexuality, celibacy, and hijab. Evidently, the discussion dilates upon how religion is superseded by tradition. This unavoidably causes circumstances culminating in realities that stamp the destitute and dismay of women hailing from the third world postcolonial order.

A sequel to The Holy Woman(2001), Typhoon(2003) is Qaisra Shahraz’s second novel. This paper analyses how Shahraz continues problematizing female sexuality and the politics attached to it, especially in rural Pakistan. It dilates upon the discourse that surrounds the female body and sexuality in Pakistan society within and outside the framework of marriage. What is at stake is that women’s own sexuality becomes a burden for them. On the contrary, men take pride in their masculinity which gives authenticity to their voice. The cultural colonization of women’s lives (as it appears in Shahraz’s novel) is addressed under the theoretical rationale of Islamic feminism. This is done with the aim to locate the space granted to women in Islam, especially when it comes to the female body and its sexuality.

This article examines Claude Jutra’s 1981 film adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing in terms of its focus on female body, voyeurism and paranoia. The psychoanalytic perspective of the feminist film theory, with its emphasis on visual pleasure, narcissism, the male gaze, scopophilia, fetishization of the female, the oedipal nature of the narrative and female subjectivity, provides a pragmatic groundwork for the theoretical underpinning of this study. In the same way, the film apparatus, such as editing and camera work, provides a semiotic impetus to the spectator to identify with the perfect male, and not with the distorted female. With its focus on various scenes, generic codes and aspects of the film, the paper furthermore sees how Jutra’s production validates the prejudices of the classical film narrative in the context of the female image, sexual difference, female desire and stereotyped female paranoia. Despite its narrative focus on the quest of a female protagonist, Jutra’s film conforms to the traditional model of the classical cinema wherein the woman is no more than a signifier ‐ an entity that signifies things in relation to men only.

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