Men in the Sun: A Literary Analysis of Ghassan Kanafani's Existential and Political Allegory

This study examines the mechanisms of women's marginalization in Ghassan Kanafani's novel "Men in the Sun" through a critical analysis that combines feminist perspectives with postcolonial analysis. The study demonstrates that the novel reduces female characters to stereotypical roles such as "the weeping mother" and "the victimized wife," while historical reality points to the active participation of Palestinian women in resistance and community organizing during the Nakba. The study relies on a theoretical framework that combines Judith Butler's theory of gender performance, Gayatri Spivak's concept of "silencing the subaltern," and postcolonial discourse analysis. The main findings reveal a complete absence of the inner female voice in the narrative, the confinement of women's dialogue to a small portion of the text, and the use of women as symbols of the usurped land rather than as political actors. Comparison with other literary texts (such as Kanafani's "Return to Haifa" and Yanar Mohammed's "The Queue") reveals a notable development in the representation of women in subsequent Palestinian literature. The study recommends developing reading methodologies that recover marginalized voices, documenting the oral history of Palestinian women, and rereading classic texts with critical awareness. The study concludes that the absence of women as actors in the novel is not merely a literary choice but rather the product of a complex historical context in which literary representation was employed as an ideological tool in the struggle over national identity.