Female Writings in Times of Crisis: A Transnational Feminist and Sociolinguistic Study

Introduction

In her Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) argues that women’s “life story-oriented written narratives” are a context to examine their identity and consciousness. Affirming that “written texts are not produced in a vacuum,” she studies women’s writings of various kinds; testimonials, life stories, and oral histories, as “a significant mode of remembering and recording experience and struggles” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 77). These female personal narratives become a space to examine women’s gendered reactions to different life experiences and crises. While their narratives reveal their personal identities, they present a new kind of subjectivity that women adopt to respond to life crises, to overcome pain, to express emotions, to create meaning, and to build communications and coalitions. Writing becomes an instrumental voice for these women to self-discovery, healing, and empowerment.

Within this context of studying women writings as self-revelatory, this chapter examines female writing practices in response to COVID-19 pandemic in contrasting cultures, ethnicities, social classes, and educational levels. It studies ten personal narratives by Arab and American women responding to the 2020 global Corona crisis in writing. While some differences appear between countries all over the world in terms of the crisis’ economic, political, and social impact, women of various cultures, social classes, ethnicities, and religions were exposed to the same measures of lockdown, quarantine, and curfew implemented in their countries. However, their responses vary and their narratives of crisis represent the heterogeneity and particularity of each woman’s life experience. The narratives are situated within the cultural, social, gender, economic, and religious exigencies of these women’s lives. While examining a global crisis as seen by female lenses, the researchers are not generalizing about all women and the selection of the ten personal narratives does not represent all Arab and American women. But their validity is justified because of their diversity in reflecting different cultural, social, ethnic, economic, and educational backgrounds. There is no doubt that the Arab and the American women writers in this study are inter-culturally and ethnically heterogeneous; however, each group is in itself intra-culturally various in terms of nationality, religious beliefs, gender-roles orientation, education, and economic status. Therefore, they offer the researchers the means to a wide examination of women writings of crisis. In this sense, a detailed examination of variables is provided and subjectivity is contextualized within larger heterogeneous cultures and ethnicities.

With the emphasis placed on how women use the power of writing and narrative to respond to crisis, this qualitative study tries to offer an understanding of the role of writing by women of various backgrounds in times of crisis, the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on women of different cultures, ethnicities, and educational levels as exposed in their self-narratives, and the relationship between crisis and writing as a gendered practice adopted by women for different purposes across a wide range of social environments. Relatively, the study argues that a transnational feminist examination and a linguistic discourse analysis of narrative texts produced by Arab and American women about their experiences during COVID-19 crisis show diverse gendered reactions, that reflect the cultural, social, ethnic, and economic heterogeneity of these women’s lives; develop a new autobiographic subjectivity that presents their personal identities as political; and reveal various patterns of language use.

As for analytical framework, this study uses a transnational literary feminist theoretical and sociolinguistic approach to deepen an understanding of female writing practices about crisis. Unlike western feminist modalities, such as, global sisterhood and international feminism, the transnational feminist approach enables the researchers to examine women’s lives as situated within larger “scattered hegemonies” as coined by Grewal and Kaplan (1994). While these female subjects are examined within their social, cultural, ethnic, racial, and gender exigencies, they explore a larger sphere of social relations among women across cultural and national borders. This transcendence of borders shows the similarities and differences between the Arab and American female voices within a multiplicity of global forces and historical constructs.