Writing Through the Body. Iraqi Responses to the War on Terror

The 2003 Iraq invasion provoked an unprecedented phenomenon in the Iraqi literary scene: fiction exceeds poetry in production, critical reception, and market figures. New narrative genres, concerned with stories of wars and trauma, depict corporality and sexuality in their most material sense. Writing Through the Body argues that interest in the physical indicates a new perception of corporeality and, to show this, it traces a genealogy of the Iraqi body to uncover the complexity of its historical and socio-political discourses. Considering religious, social, and political factors, the body is examined in three semiospheres: Iraqi society and culture before 2003, the discourse of the war on terror as a semiotic interference, and contemporary Iraqi fiction as the result of the encounter between the two. This structure shows how corporeality was interrupted by and instrumentalised in war propaganda, and how new representations in fiction respond to the two spheres in conflict.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 11
Note on transliterations and sources 13
Introduction 15
Setting positionality: a note on “testimony” 31
I. This is a man’s world. Corporeality in Iraqi society and fiction before 2003 33
The body as a problem 34
Sexual difference in the Qur’an 35
Male supremacy in Iraqi society 43
Masculinity: circumcision, the moustache, and heteronormativity 46
Moral reformation and the body: fiction of the pre-modern period 56
Her body, his struggle: fiction of the modern period 66
II. Operation feminise. The body in the discourse of the war on terror 89
Bodies and narrative strategies: sexual terrorism, the orientalist gaze, necropolitics and cognitive marginalisation 94
Homeland: the sex-freak shows 113
War relics: mainstream and veteran’s fictions 123
Video games: kill for your life 145
III. Irakaustus. Representation politics in contemporary Iraqi fiction 153
Grotesque bodies 154
Four fictional grotesqueries 168
Four approaches to re-gendering bodies 217
Conclusions: a report on the banality of violence 217
Bibliography 229