International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Growth Evaluation

Women's Voices in Post-2003 Iraqi Literature: A Review of Contemporary Scholarship

Hussein Mohammed ABDULRIDHA AL-GBURI¹

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Abstract

This review article seeks to discuss a number of existing studies on women's voices in post-2003 Iraqi literature by examining how Iraqi female authors have referred to gender, war, patriarchy, agency, and resistance in reply to the country's socio-political changes. Thus, the review analyzes different academic attitudes that accentuate the varying role of women as narrators, observers, and agents of cultural confrontation in contemporary Iraqi fiction. In this context, Al-Ali and Pratt (2008) inspect women's involvement and gendered experiences thru the post-invasion epoch, while Hanoosh (2013) focuses on the development of fresh literary voices that exceed conservative stories of war to concentrate on average survival and cultural resilience. Maki (2013) is mainly obsessed with the representation of war in Iraqi feminist novels and its mental aftermaths for women, while Abdullah (2014) is largely concerned with women's war fiction through testimony, memory, and the conservation of historical experience. More lately, Abou Rached (2023) explores the increasing discernibility of Iraqi women's writing in English translation and its influence in transnational feminist literary discourse. Based on what is debated, the present review is going to conclude that Iraqi female writers play an important role in contemporary Iraqi literature due to transforming women from disparaged individuals to imperative narrators of war, memory, and societal rising.

Keywords: AgencyContemporary Iraqi FictionGenderIraqi Women WritersPatriarchyPost-2003 Iraqi LiteratureResistanceWar

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Licensed under CC BY 4.0.