TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM AND THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBJECT IN RUM’S A WOMAN IS NO MAN

Abstract

This article examines Etaf Rum’s debut novel A Woman Is No Man (2019) through the intersecting lenses of transnational feminism and postcolonial theory. Drawing on the frameworks of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the study investigates how Rum constructs the Palestinian-American female subject as a site of competing patriarchal, diasporic, and neocolonial pressures. The article argues that the novel refuses both Western liberal feminist universalism and uncritical cultural relativism by articulating a feminist politics rooted in the lived specificity of Arab-American immigrant women. Through close textual analysis of the novel’s three narrative voices Isra, Fareeda, and Deya the article demonstrates how Rum mobilizes silence, storytelling, and intergenerational memory as modes of postcolonial feminist resistance. The analysis further explores how domestic space functions simultaneously as a site of patriarchal containment and potential liberation, and how diasporic displacement complicates the relationship between gender, culture, and agency. Ultimately, the article contends that A Woman Is No Man contributes a nuanced and politically engaged voice to the emerging body of Arab-American women’s literature, one that demands a decentering of Western feminist epistemologies.