Location
Stewart Center 318
Session Number
Session 18: TERRORISM, FICTION, AND THE EVERYDAY: HISTORY, GENDER, POLITICS
Start Date
9-9-2011 3:15 PM
End Date
9-9-2011 4:45 PM
Abstract
In The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi asserts that instead of processing the events of 9/11 – what they might reveal about our culture, how we might thoughtfully grieve them and respond to those who perpetrated them – Americans reverted to a 1950s style domesticity, with the media representing men as heroic rescuers and women as victims of terrorists, in need of rescuing. This is ironic in that the majority of that day’s casualties were men, and the attacks themselves were perpetrated within our commercial and governmental centers. Yet much of the literary fiction that has emerged from 9/11 can be said to echo this media revision in its focus on domestic narratives and disruption of the family. I will argue, though, that close examination of the female characters of an array of 9/11 novels reveals that while women are often submissive, they are so of their own accord. I will focus on acts not of victimization, then, but of self-destruction. Specifically, I will explore female characters in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday in terms of a conflation of primary identifiers (gender and an always already gendered nationhood) governing identity. I claim that in each of these novels, because of this dual centrality of gender and citizenship, women repeatedly sacrifice themselves in ways that are tied to the political moves of their nation, that they participate willingly in such sacrifice, and that acknowledgment of this complicity subverts the Subaltern-like status normally attributed to submission, and the media-driven notion of women as the victims of terrorism.
Included in
Cultural History Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other English Language and Literature Commons
Female (Em)Bodied Justice: Terrorism, Self-Sacrifice, and the Joint Primacy of Gender and Nationality
Stewart Center 318
In The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi asserts that instead of processing the events of 9/11 – what they might reveal about our culture, how we might thoughtfully grieve them and respond to those who perpetrated them – Americans reverted to a 1950s style domesticity, with the media representing men as heroic rescuers and women as victims of terrorists, in need of rescuing. This is ironic in that the majority of that day’s casualties were men, and the attacks themselves were perpetrated within our commercial and governmental centers. Yet much of the literary fiction that has emerged from 9/11 can be said to echo this media revision in its focus on domestic narratives and disruption of the family. I will argue, though, that close examination of the female characters of an array of 9/11 novels reveals that while women are often submissive, they are so of their own accord. I will focus on acts not of victimization, then, but of self-destruction. Specifically, I will explore female characters in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday in terms of a conflation of primary identifiers (gender and an always already gendered nationhood) governing identity. I claim that in each of these novels, because of this dual centrality of gender and citizenship, women repeatedly sacrifice themselves in ways that are tied to the political moves of their nation, that they participate willingly in such sacrifice, and that acknowledgment of this complicity subverts the Subaltern-like status normally attributed to submission, and the media-driven notion of women as the victims of terrorism.