Masculinity as Violence in Arab Women’s Fiction

Feminist literary theorists have, until recently, focused on the treatment of women as Other in texts written by men. Although this is an extremely important project for feminists, especially because of the weight that men’s writing continues to have in the canon, I feel that in order to decentre men’s writing and to understand the roles men play in women’s lives, it is also important to analyze how women authors are representing men. In this paper, I have examined some of the writings by Arab women authors who have managed to be accepted into the Arabic literary canon and how men and masculinity are represented in their texts.