Sirens in command: the criminal femme fatale in American hardboiled crime fiction

This thesis challenges the traditional view of the 'femme fatale' as merely a dangerous and ravenous sexual predator who leads men into ruination. Critical, especially feminist, scholarship mostly regards the femme fatale as a sexist construction of a male fantasy and treats her as an expression of misogyny that ultimately serves to reaffirm male authority. But this thesis proposes alternative ways of viewing the femme fatale by showing how she can also serve as a figure for imagining female agency. As such, I focus on a particular character type that is distinct from the general archetype of the femme fatale because of the greater degree of agency she demonstrates. This 'criminal femme fatale' uses her sexual appeal and irresistible wiles both to manipulate men and to commit criminal acts, usually murder, in order to advance her goals with deliberate intent and full culpability. This thesis reveals and explains the agency of the criminal femme fatales in American Hardboiled crime fiction between the late 1920s and the end of World War II in the works of three authors: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. The criminal femme fatales in the narratives of these authors show a subversive power and an ability to act - even though, or perhaps only if, this action is a criminal one. I show that these criminal femme fatales exhibit agency through their efforts to challenge not only the 'masculine' genre and the criminal space that this genre represents, but also to undercut the male protagonist's role and prove his failure in asserting control and dominance. Hammett's narratives provide good examples of how the criminal femme fatales function on a par with male gangsters in an underworld of crime and corruption. Chandler's work demonstrates a different case of absent/present criminal women who are set against the detective and ultimately question his power and mastery. Cain's narratives show the agency of the criminal femme fatales in the convergence between their ambition for social mobility and their sexual power over the male characters. To explain how these female characters exhibit agency, I situate this body of literature alongside contemporaneous legal and medical discourses on female criminality. I argue that the literary female criminal is a fundamentally different portrayal because she breaks the 'mad-bad' woman dichotomy that dominates both legal and medical discourses on female criminality. I show that the criminal femme fatales' negotiations of female agency within hardboiled crime fiction fluctuate and shift between the two poles of the criminalized and the medicalized women. These criminal femme fatales exhibit culpability in their actions that bring them into an encounter with the criminal justice system and resist being pathologized as women who suffer from a psychological ailment that affect their control. The thesis concludes that the ways in which the criminal femme fatales trouble normative socio-cultural conceptions relating to docile femininity and passive sexuality, not only destabilize the totality and fixity of the stereotype of the femme fatale in hardboiled crime fiction, but also open up broader debates about the representation of women in popular culture and the intersections between genre and gender.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Cartographies of identities : resistance, diaspora, and trans-cultural dialogue in the works of Arab British and Arab American women writers

The purpose of this thesis is to compare the works of contemporary Arab British and Arab American women novelists with a view toward delineating a poetics of the more nascent Arab British literature. I argue that there is a tendency among Arab British women novelists to foreground and advocate trans-cultural dialogue and cross-ethnic identification strategies in a more pronounced approach than their Arab American counterparts who tend, in turn, to employ literary strategies to resist stereotypes and misconceptions about Arab communities in American popular culture. I argue that these differences result from two diverse racialized Arab immigration and settlement patterns on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter One looks at how Arab British novelist Fadia Faqir's My Name is Salma and Arab American novelist Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz define Arabness differently in the light of the precarious position Arabs occupy in ethnic and racial discourses in Britain and in the United States. Chapter Two examines how Arab British women writers Ahdaf Soueif and Leila Aboulela valorize trans-cultural and cross-ethnic dialogues and alliances in their novels The Map of Love and Minaret respectively through engaging with the two (interlocking) strands of feminism in the Arab world: secular and Islamic feminisms. In Chapter Three, I demonstrate how the two novels of Arab American women writers Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent and Laila Halaby's West of the Jordan explore the contradictions of Arab American communities from within and employ strategies of intertextuality and storytelling to subvert stereotypes about Arabs. As this study is interested in exploring the historical and socio-political contexts in which Arab women writers on both sides of the Atlantic produce their work, the conclusion investigates how the two sets of authors have represented, from an Arab perspective, the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror in their novels.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceUniversity of JordanGBUnited Kingdo

The aesthetics and politics of ‘reading together’ Moroccan novels in Arabic and French

This paper attempts to break down the common practices of reading multilingual Moroccan novels, particularly Moroccan postcolonial novels in Arabic and French. I argue that dominant reading practices are based on binary oppositions marked by a reductionist understanding of language and cultural politics in Morocco. They place the Moroccan novel in Arabic and French in independent traditions with the presupposition that they have no impact on each other, thereby reifying each tradition. They also ignore the similar historical, social and cultural context from which these novels emerge, and tend to reinforce the marginalisation of the Moroccan novel within hegemonic single-language literary systems such as the Francophone or Arabic literary traditions. I advocate ‘reading together’ – or an entangled comparative reading of – postcolonial Moroccan novels in Arabic and French, a reading that privileges the specificity of the literary traditions in Morocco rather than language categorisation, and that considers their mutual historical, cultural, geographical, political, and aesthetic interweaving and implications

Re-configurations of gender in the cultural experience of Arab women

This thesis engages with the concept of gender as a learned performance in order to locate subversive action, or “performative moments” in the cultural production of Arab women. The relationship between contemporary western feminism and Arab feminism is examined to show that enabling mediation is possible and can be fruitful for both parties. I advocate the viewpoint that we can locate performative situations in local contexts and intervene at the theoretical level in order to render these situations useful in a widely encompassing understanding of feminism. Also, it is my contention that gender theory is the most useful standpoint from which to examine the possible direction of today’s feminisms. In other words, only through closely examining how persons understand and perceive themselves as gendered beings can there then follow a committed and fruitful feminist direction, whether on the political or the personal level. The first chapter centres on the event of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot’s clinic in late nineteenth century Paris. I explore the phenomenon of hysterics housed at the clinic and question their confinement and diagnoses that were based on their supposed excessive femininity. This examination reveals that it is possible to induce gender requirements in the interest of an official discourse or figure of authority. This reveals the underlying unnaturalness of the oppositional dual status of gender and discloses gender as a fiction that requires repetitive performances in order to survive. Chapter two exposes how medical discourse can enslave perceptions of one’s gender, especially in the absence of other enabling discourses. I look at the early novels of Egyptian novelist Nawal El Saadawi that centre on the experiences of women physicians who try to come to terms with the ways in which they are invoked as women and what is expected of them through this invocation. The third chapter examines the possibilities of music to create a feminine space where it becomes possible to experience emotions not acknowledged in official discourse. The music of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum is considered for its regenerative qualities insofar as it seeks to provide for an imaginary domain where a physical reality can be experienced. Finally, chapter four endeavours to reveal how catastrophic events such as war can instigate a deliberation on how gender categories are constraining and debilitating. The context of war provides for a space where women can evaluate and recreate their experiences