الفهرس 
Women’s Memoirs of Conflict: Intersectional SubgenreOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
In an attempt to come to terms with the chaotic and disturbing experience of/in
conflicts and conflict zones, narrating these experiences becomes crucial in understanding,
documenting and processing these contexts. The urge to narrate is an impulse to seek
legitimation and it fulfils a need for self-expression. Besides, giving a voice for the
marginalised allows for a form of agency. Until recently, conflict zones have been regarded a
male domain; however, the experience of and involvement in conflict zones are common to
both men and women alike whether directly or indirectly. Hence, it is significant to examine
selections of women’s life writing in conflict zones in an attempt to fill this gap. The aim of
the thesis is to examine women’s memoirs in contexts of conflict from non-military
perspectives, which were not widely studied, using the relevant critical concepts and
approaches from life writing studies, women studies and trauma studies. It is hoped that the
contribution of the thesis would be in filling a gap in women’s life writing studies with a focus
on the notions of genre, gender, and trauma in women’s narratives of conflict/ war experience.
The perceived gap is the scarcity of studies examining women’s memoirs of conflict from
different positionalities comparatively.
Women’s life writing in/of contexts of conflict allows for examining how this form of
writing gives these women agency over these chaotic and traumatic experiences, and shares in
being a part of an alternative collective archive of these conflicts in addition to helping these
women reach a better understating of their world and self. The texts embody a performative act
that offers a resilience response to the trauma of living the war. Through examining these
works, as exemplary works of women’s life writing, the agency provided to these women
within the debilitating contexts of conflicts can be examined. Thus, the study of these texts of
the individual experience of women involved in different conflict zones gives room for
examining the more often absent or marginalized accounts of experiencing conflicts from the
“othered” perspectives of women, highlighting the similarities and differences of rendering the
unique experience of each of these women in conflict zones.
The thesis examines three texts by women writers from different backgrounds covering
three main different positionalities and conflict zones that each was involved in. The texts that
the study examines are, chronologically: Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the
Lines of the War in Chechnya (2000) by the French journalist and writer Anne Nivat about her
experience of the second war in Chechnya in 1999 and 2000; Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from
Iraq (2005) by the Iraqi young woman who takes the pseudonym Riverbend as she blogs about
the first year of the coalition occupation of Iraq in 2003 led by the American forces; and The
Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (2015) by the Syrian journalist and writer
Samar Yazbek narrating her experience of the War in Syria during the years 2012 and 2013.
The rationale for choosing the texts is that, though the three memoir texts are considered
eyewitness accounts, they represent three different positions of women engaged in conflicts:
the external observer “reporting” the conflict, the insider, the one moving back and forth
through the conflict. It is believed to be significant to examine how the position and
situatedness, in relation to the context of conflict affect the perception and narration of the
situation.
The thesis is divided into an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion. Each of the
three chapters examines an aspect of women’s memoirs of conflict. The introduction deals with
providing an overview of the thesis, its aim and the perceived gap. It includes introducing the
writers and contextualizing the selected texts in their sociopolitical contexts. Chapter One
entitled “Women’s memoirs of conflict: intersectional subgenre” examines the position of
memoir in the spectrum of life writing genres and the reasons the texts under study fit within
it and how it is an intersectional subgenre accommodating several types of life writing. The
chapter traces some of the key features of autobiographical acts in the texts, namely
storytelling, the notion of the coaxer, space, place and sites of narration. Through the chapter,
it is argued that the memoir form fits the female gender, the postmodern age with it blurring of
boundaries between the private and the public.
Chapter Two “Gender identity and conflict/war contexts” investigates how the gender
aspects is represented in the narratives and how the gender identity affects the experience and
subjectivity of the writers and their interactions with others. Through their narratives and their
interactions within the community during the experience, the women writers of the memoirs
under study counter the silencing and the marginalization imposed on female and non-military
experience of war/conflict. The gender aspect is examined through investigating the elements
of experience, positionality, subjectivity, performativity, relationality and the ethical role that
each believes to have, as the chapter elaborates.
Chapter Three is entitled “Trauma and Memory in conflict memoirs”. It examines how
the texts represented the multiple types of trauma that living the conflicts involve. It also
highlights how the texts presented a trauma response that deviates from the typical PTSD
response and how memory plays a major role in that process. The role of narrative in the
communication of the trauma of living the conflict and fighting the crisis of knowledge that
trauma represents is emphasized. This proves the engagement of these narrative with the real
world both individually and relationally as a form of positive action in addition to offering the
trauma survivors a chance to work through it.
The examination of women’s memoirs of conflict experience proves that it is crucial to
voice the counternarrative and to strive for its dissemination, for this is one major way for the
marginalised not to be utterly silenced and overpowered either by the conflict, the injustice that
it breeds, or the weight of the trauma it involves. The marginalised category involves both the
women writers whose authority over the conflict/war narrative is challenged as well as the
community