Les autres voleuses: Writing the feminine in diasporic spaces

Les autres voleuses is a study about écriture : the textual construction of identity through writing, language and voice; more specifically, it is a study about a “feminine language”: a strategic concept used as a trope for writing against hegemonic and mainstream constructions of identity. I analyze écriture as mediated by desire, memory, métissage, hybridity, coercion and convergence, anxiety, hysteria, discord and violence. My dissertation shows how writing and language are shaped by what has been defined as Other within hegemonic discourse making and story-telling, and how writing is inscribed into the sites where sex/gender, race/ethnicity, class/caste and religion/tradition intersect and collide. Through an analysis of various films and novels, I explore how writing the feminine manifests itself in selected narratives by women, and examine the paradox of a simultaneous inside/outside and hybrid location from which diasporic female speakers are able to productively re-construct and employ “the feminine” to strengthen pan-cultural and feminist constructions of identity. I analyze two films, Trinh T. Minh-hà\u27s Reassemblage and Laleen Jayamanne\u27s A Song of Ceylon, and two novels, Emine Sevgi Özdamar\u27s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei and Assia Djebar\u27s L\u27amour, la fantasia as discourses which subvert the Western patriarchal imaginary of the “exotic” Other by introducing hybrid perspectives. I show how the practice of writing the feminine exhibits close ties with diasporic writing: both work with and within dominant language to resist hegemonic structures of domination and “give voice” to marginalized perspectives; both seek to decenter truthtelling by stealing from master narratives to create alternative versions of story-telling which re-appropriate set definitions of identities and histories. Here, I argue that the “feminine” can be declared as a political tactic which maintains a kind of body memory in diasporic locution from a distinctly self-reflective and ad hoc position. The displacement of language and identity resulting from a writing of the feminine serves to critique feminist discourses as well, and, paradoxically, deconstructs itself in dissolving the dualistic mode of thinking so prevalent in masculinist fabrications of such concepts as Self and Other, femininity and masculinity, and colonizer and colonized