Resistant Feminist Representation of Rape in the Palestinian Context in Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World and Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail

Narratives and metaphors of rape have been dominant in the Palestinian narrative both fictional and non fictional, as well as in the political discourse on Palestine in general. Rape has been a fact of the decades long genocidal war against the Palestinian people, and has also become imaginatively a metaphor for the appropriation of the land by the Zionist settler colonizer. Traditionally the metaphor has been utilized within patriarchal contexts that overlooked details relating to the subjectivity and bodies of women. Recent feminist theories of rape have focused on the subjectivity of women in the representation of the experience of rape away from victimization and eroticization of previous particularly male representation of rape. (McPhail 2016; Whisnant, 2021; Gunne and Thompson, 2010) The two novels analyzed here present narratives of rape that subvert the traditional patriarchal vision of taking the female body as the symbol of the homeland while at the same time connecting the realistic preoccupations of women with issues of Palestinian freedom and independence. The two novels engage differently with the history of Palestine and the place of women in that history. Both Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World and Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail open with the presentation of the stereotypical representation of Palestinian and Arab women from the point of view of the colonizer, only to subvert that image throughout the narrative by introducing a decolonial feminist point of view deconstructing the previous narrative and reconstructing an alternative one.