Can the abject woman's body speak? Power and voice in Adab am Qillat Al-Adab by Nawal El Sa’dawi

Abstract

Although Nawal El Sa’dawi's novels have been extensively studied, the bodily and affective mechanisms of her short fiction remain largely unexamined. This gap matters because bodily shame, fear, and obedience often naturalize patriarchal authority more effectively than explicit coercion. This study closes that gap by analyzing how patriarchal morality, religious anxiety, class hierarchy, and racialized exclusion make women's bodies experience shame, sin, fear, obedience, and alienation in three short stories from Sa’dawi's Adab am Qillat Al-Adab, read through Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. The study employs a qualitative, psychoanalytic, literary-critical design, with data drawn from close reading and cross-story comparison of bodily signs. The findings show three connected patterns. First, women's speech about the body, money, sex, and the womb is treated as a threat to propriety in Adab am Qillat Al-Adab. Second, Hālat Fatāh min Daftar Aḥwāl 'Iyādatī turns piety, fatherly authority, and public gaze into bodily fear. Third, Laysa Lahā Makān fī al-Jannah presents the poor black female body as obedient, hungry, overworked, and excluded even from imagined paradise. Across the three stories, power becomes lived through bodily affect. These findings indicate that abjection in Sa’dawi's short fiction is not only a private feeling of disgust or guilt but a social process that converts women's bodies into morally suspect, economically valued, racially marked, and symbolically expelled bodies. The study contributes to Arab feminist literary criticism by showing how Sa’dawi transforms bodily shame into a critique of power, extending her literary legacy well beyond the novel form itself.