Afterword

Abstract

Mersal’s exposure of some of the problems associated with a return to heritage imagery begs the questions with which this book must conclude: Is every vision of women’s emancipation, especially one that can include women of diverse ethnic backgrounds, reliant on romantic ideals? Is it the illusion of emancipation that drives the women’s movement? And, is there a way to drive the movement when the illusion of emancipation is exposed, as it is in Mersal’s work? Mattawa’s argument that Mersal’s work is “informed and emboldened by feminism” but “not feminist in any traditional sense” (ix) suggests that feminism needs the exposure of illusion present in Mersal’s work, yet Badran and Cooke, in the introduction to the second edition of Opening the Gates (2004), argue that the women’s movement also needs the illusion of emancipation, since it distinguishes literature devoted to addressing women’s advancement from literature that might be more broadly interested in women but not necessarily interested in their advancement (and even, perhaps, interested in regression to a time when women were less valued) (xviii). Third-wave theorists, Badran and Cooke argue, initially rejected the notion that feminism, “niswiyya” in Arabic, was necessary in the postmodern world, but many theorists now recognize that they “acted as feminists who [enjoyed] the gains for which their feminist foremothers had fought” (xviii). The notion of acting as a feminist, even as some women decide not to declare themselves feminists when asked, provides a way to acknowledge the role of feminism in the postmodern world, where one can expose the illusion of emancipation yet still use that illusion as a strategy to be employed in order to advance women’s cultural status.