TRAUMA AND GENDER TRANSGRESSION IN ABULHAWA’S AGAINST THE LOVELESS WORLD AND HEMINGWAY’S GARDEN OF EDEN
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Date
2023-07-12
Authors
Bayan Khader Abdullatif Khader
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Abstract
This thesis argues that Nahr, the Palestinian refugee aftermath the Nakba in Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World, and Catherine, the American expatriate aftermath WW1 in Hemingway’s Garden of Eden (1986), transgress their gender roles to reconstruct their traumatized lives in the aftermath of the Nakba and WW1. This thesis draws on psychoanalytic feminism outlined by de Beauvoir, Irigaray, Butler and Said’s contrapuntal theory. Through the lenses of the feminist refugee epistemology (FRE) theory which derives from transnational feminist studies, Nahr’s transgression of the Palestinian social and sexual norms is her bold mechanism to transcend the trauma of her forced refuge in Kuwait after the Nakba. Contrapuntally, and through the self-initiated expatriation (SIE) theory, Catherine, from her expatriation in the French Riviera, transcends WW1 trauma by rebelling against her husband, David. Her rebellion is manifested in her deconstruction of gender roles in the sense that she switches her sexuality and subsequently that of her husband. This gender transgression is also punctuated with changes in her appearance, sleep, clothing and writing. Catherine’s disturbing transgression of gender norms is a rewriting of the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan as both events pave the way to new eras. In Foucauldian terms, Nahr and Catherine are stigmatized as mad women on account of their rebellion against moral restraints and regulations of conformity in their patriarchal societies.
Keywords: Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World; contrapuntal theory; gender transgression; Hemingway’s Garden of Eden; psychoanalytic feminism; transcendence.