On Women’s Life Stories and Cultural Representations
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The Women and Memory group is particularly interested in collecting and documenting the life stories of Egyptian women from written records and oral sources. We consider this effort to be a form of resistance against processes of exclusion and marginalization from which women suffered in different historical periods. It is also an attempt to participate in the construction of cultural representations to complement or combat dominant representations. Needless to say, cultural representations have a marked impact on the collective consciousness in as much as they have the potential to guide and define expectations and ambitions. Representations of Arab women abound in books, media channels as well as in peoples’ gazes. They tell us how to live our lives and how to be.
They come with a heavy baggage of assumptions, even biases, about a group or a race or a nation or an entire civilization. Representations become dangerous when they become stereotypes that do not allow difference and diversity.
 
What is the relationship between women’s life stories and constructing cultural presentations? This approach to a project that hopes to revive and write a variety of women’s life stories is based on a number of practical and theoretical assumptions. First, writing life stories plays a role, be it direct or indirect, in defining and setting the geography of the self and its relationship to the outside world. In this sense, writing life stories at particular stages in history signals societal efforts to construct identities and shape as well as direct expectations and life styles. Second, recording and retrieving life stories are intrinsic components in the writing of history.Third, women’s roles have been marginalized in historical records in most parts of the world including the Arab world. Fourth, and as a consequence of the above, rewriting history from a gender sensitive perspective with an emphasis on the retrieval of women’s life stories became a goal for many researchers interested in the production of knowledge that could empower women. Fifth, constructing representations through writing life stories are practices that deliberately attempt to shape social memory. Similarly, commemorative events, including those which focus on the life of an individual, are pedagogical practices in as much as they incorporate a set of evaluations that structure what memories should inform our social imagination. Life stories that commemorate the lives of particular people, or a particular group of people, operate as social directives or indicators of values and memories we deem important or worthy of preserving as part of the social structure. Consequently, choosing a particular figure raises questions about the choice of subject matter and its relationship to the aim of the writer.
 
There is a need to write life stories of Arab women in present and past times. The challenge is: how to construct alternate representations of Arab women without falling in the essentialist trap of claiming to speak for the “real” Arab woman, or still to recover her “authentic” cultural identity suppressed in male discourses. Two constraints are implied in the use of the term Arab woman. The first has to do with the political uses of terms such as cultural identity and cultural specificity, which consequently carry a host of restrictive, even oppressive implications for women. The second constraint comes from feminist epistemology. Rethinking some of the achievements of feminist historiography has drawn attention to the risks involved in an exaggerated emphasis on women’s experiences, as the true expression of their identity as women. In other words, positing an essentialist category of “woman” -as a given- raises questions about perceived differences between women and the validity of assuming to speak for all women.
 
This issue of the Letters contains short articles that deal with different kinds of representations that touch upon our world. What do we expect from these representations? What are we searching for, as Omaima Abou-Bakr asks, is it the “ideal” or the “real”, and is either at all possible to attain? How do we react to or interact with specific representations we know have an impact on our relationship with the “other”? To what extent can a re-visioning of the figure of the Ghoula in Arab folktales subvert or deconstruct gendered stereotypes? How do we deal with representations that reduce our world and restrict it to narrow frames and definitions? Finally, how can we become effective participants in constructing representations without repeating the same old mistakes?

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