Women Who Dissent: Boundary-Breaking Narratives of Resistance in the Writing of Fatḥiyya Dabiš

Abstract

This paper examines the intersection of literature and feminist resistance through an analysis of Fatḥiyya Dabiš’s Ṣamt al-nawāqīs (The Silence of the Bells, 2018) and Mīlānīn (Melanin, 2019). Using boundaries – textual, generic, social, and identity-based – and dissident writing as the guiding analytical framework, the first part reads Ṣamt al-nawāqīs as an experimental work of short prose that exposes and subverts some constraints imposed on women’s voices and bodies through its refusal of any fixed genre classifications and its development of fragmented, boundary-breaking forms. The second part looks at Mīlānīn , analyzing how Dabiš extends this dissident practice by challenging rigid notions of identity, belonging, racialization, and homeland, while shedding light on some racial and social taboos. Through genre-crossing, fragmentation, and metafictional self-reflection, this novel turns the narrative form into a site of critique, using hybrid writing to negotiate in-betweenness and to reclaim marginalized subjectivities.