Gender and beyond: mappings of war and subjectivity en The Women´s contemporary narratives Reading Lolita en Tehran, We are on our own, and Goodbye Sarajevo

Abstract

This thesis examines Azar Nafisis Reading Lolita in Tehran, Miriam Katins We Are on Our Own, and Atka Reid and Hana Schofields Goodbye Sarajevo to shed light on the relationship between war and constructions of identity in these narratives. I argue that war acts upon theself because it affects the relations between subject positions and power in a given narrative of space and time. Studies about the literature of war written by women tend to privilege gender in analyses of characters subjectivity, minimizing or disregarding aspects of identity lying beyond the borders of this category. By contrast, based on the theory and criticism of womens literature of war, locational feminism, and contemporary cartographies of identity, this thesis develops mappings of the various social positions occupied by women characters at different contexts defined by the course of wars. This approach mainly follows Susan Stanford Friedmans discussion about the discourses of the multiplicity, relationality, and situationality of the axes of identity. In this sense, my mappings disclose the effects of conflicts on the portrayed spaces, systems of power, and displaced subjectivities. I also regard the grafting of the characters hybrid identities as an extended consequence of war, as it motivates the geographical and metaphorical movements that provoke cultural encounters and superimpositions. I conclude that, according to Homi Bhabhas theorization, this thesis performs a move beyond in the study of war literature and womens writings, crossing theboundaries of gender as a standpoint for investigations of identity in order to account for postmodern notions of subjectivity as multiplicity and a locational approach to feminist critical practice.