| Summary/Abstract |
Through close textual analysis of Hidāya al-Sālim’s (1936–2001) “Kharīf bilā maṭar” (1972) and Najwā Hāshim’s (b. 1960) “Ḥumā fī layla sākhina” (1986), this article examines how literature has been used as a means of raising feminist consciousness in the Arabian Gulf region. I argue that these two short stories, among others, can be situated within the “authentic realist” literary corpus famously championed by the Anglo-American women’s liberation movement of the 1970s–80s. Enhancing the stories’ consciousness-raising features are the facts that they both were written in a historical period when the women’s liberation movement was gaining momentum across the world, and that each of them was first published in a local magazine/newspaper. Moreover, the authors depict not just the ways through which some women of their own generation in particular have been victims, but also, the necessity of female agency (individual and collective) in achieving liberation from patriarchal domination.
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