Battles with Desire: Centering the Body in the Personal Narratives of Doria Shafik and Latifa El-Zayyat

Abstract

As two key figures of Egyptian feminism, Doria Shafik (1908-1975) and Latifa El-Zayyat (1923-1996) are well-known for their public activism. In this paper, however, I am interested in re-reading Shafik’s biography Doria Shafik an Egyptian Feminist: a Woman Apart (Nelson, 1996) and El-Zayyat’s autobiography The Search: Personal Papers (1996) with an eye on the position of the body in their battles for equality and freedom. Although the “body” and “sexuality” are not part of the feminist and literary narratives about these women, I focus on their intimate reflections on femininity, love, and marriage. I intend to show how their female bodies remained particularly relevant, as their appearances and their desires were used against them, even when they did not explicitly transgress sexual and gender norms. In fact, Shafik and El-Zayyat themselves were able to confront political repression more readily than the suppression of their own bodies and sexuality. However, despite it being the locus of external and internal oppressions, the activists discussed here transformed their bodies into a tool of resistance at later stages of their lives, especially through their experiences of imprisonment. I situate this argument within the context of the post-colonial nation to emphasize that women’s bodies were not automatically freed with national independence, despite the post-colonial project’s revolutionary credentials and emancipatory promises for women.