Female Subjectivity and the Gothic: A Study of Arab Coming-of-Age Novels.

This feminist semiotic study explores the folkloric imaginary of the jinn in thecontext of children’s and young adults’ Arab Gothic literature. Across theMiddle East, the jinn is a common trope in literature, folklore and oralstorytelling who, in diegetic terms, can manifest as the Gothic figure of anaging female, deranged older woman or succubus (known as sa’lawwa inArabic). In this study, a novel feminist semiotic framework is developed toexplore the extent to which the Gothic female succubus either haunts orliberates Arab girls’ coming-of-age fictions. This issue is addressed via afeminist semiotic reading of the narratives of Middle Eastern woman author@Ranoy7, exploring the appeal of her scary stories presented on YouTube.Findings reveal tacit fears, ambivalences and tensions embodied within theArab Gothic sign of the aging female succubus or jinn. Overall, the researchdevelops feminist insights into the semiotic motif of the female jinn and itsrole in constituting Arab females as misogynistic gendered sign objects in thecontext of the social media story explored.