This article offers a new reading of female silence and explores its essential connection(s) with the readers’ conceptual understanding of women’s subjectivity in Alifa Rifaat’s short fiction. Instead of positioning silence as a consequential subordination and confirmation of male speech in Arabo-Islamic communities, the article argues that female silence in Rifaat’s fiction can also be viewed as a normative quality or a distinct discursive practice that does not have to be juxtaposed within the binary framework of patriarchal speech. While the female protagonist in Rifaat’s “Distant View of a Minaret”, for example, fashions a system of silent signs to register a certain experience of women’s sexual frustration and dissatisfaction inside patriarchal houses, Samia and Gazia, Rifaat’s female characters in “Another Evening at the Club”, also invite readers to reconsider the comprehensive meaning(s) of female subjectivity, authenticity and resistance they frequently produce through the vast geography of the unsaid/unheard. 

Title

Women's Studies

Publisher

Taylor and Francis

Publisher Country

United Kingdom

Indexing

Thomson Reuters

Impact Factor

0.3

Publication Type

Both (Printed and Online)

Volume

--

Year

2024

Pages

1-25