Overlapping Agencies: The Collision of Cancer, Consumers, and Corporations in Richard Powers’s Gain

Richard Powers\u27s 1998 novel Gain establishes a complicated relationship between its two main characters, a corporation called Clare International and suburban mom named Laura Bodey. Readers, assuming the malignity of such corporations, mistake the hints Laura encounters that Clare is responsible for her ovarian cancer for facts. Such readings overlook the science of ovarian cancer as well as how Powers depicts Laura\u27s relation to her disease. I analyze Laura\u27s understudied half of the novel, framing it as a cancer narrative that reworks conventions of that genre. In placing her cancer in broad social and environmental contexts, Powers eschews the individualist strain that characterizes many illness narratives. In so doing, the novel demands engagement with consumer agency and bodily frailty in the face of corporate dominance

Situating Arab women’s writing in a feminist ‘global gothic’ : madness, mothers and ghosts

This article sketches a new way of approaching some contemporary Levantine (Egyptian and Lebanese) feminist texts. Extending Glennis Byron’s notion of the ‘global gothic’, I examine Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) as examples of an Arab feminist Gothic approach, which serves as a framework to theorise difficult and pressing questions that feminism poses regarding women’s rights. Arab feminist Gothic writers use the jahiliyyah period, or the ‘time of ignorance’, as a folkloric referential backdrop for texts which theorise the female condition under contemporary patriarchal society. The presence of ghosts, madness, doubles in the form of the folkloric qarina spirit-doubles and dreams can be read as part of a local Gothic feminist mode. This as-yet unacknowledged Arab feminist Gothic tradition, while emerging from debates over statehood and postcolonial subjectivities, delves into the intensity of personal traumas through the lens of women’s relationships to other women, especially mothers and daughters. Taking Arab feminist fiction as its focus, this article models how feminist scholarship can use genre, particularly the Gothic, to trace artistic feminist theorising in non-western contexts