Session 11: Consuming Bodies: Literary Representations of Health, Illness and Disease
Chair: Jude Frankau

Death, Illness, and Disability: The Crisis of Iraqi Masculinity in Betool Khedairi's Novel Ghayeb
Abir Hamdar
Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East, University of London – SOAS, LOndon, United Kingdom

The paper will examine the ways in which the war, Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime and the international sanctions have affected Iraqi men, their masculinity and their conception of themselves as men as well as their experience of gender relations by focusing on the novel Ghayeb (2004) (The Absent One) by Betool Khedairi. Drawing on the experiences of the characters in the novel, the paper will contend that the sociopolitical/socioeconomic factors have demoralized Iraqi men, diminishing their self esteem and depriving them of the ability to be perceived by society/themselves as men thus creating a masculinity crisis. The paper will highlight that this crisis is embodied in male infertility and the absence/death of male voices throughout the narrative. Nevertheless, the paper will mainly argue that it is male physical illness that dramatizes most clearly a masculinity failure and crisis. The breakdown of male body/health is a manifestation of the collapse of male dominance, selfhood and ideology in a once patriarchal society as well as a resistance to this and to the emergence of a matriarchal structure. Finally the paper will highlight the dichotomy that was at play in Iraq between public discourses of Iraqi manhood as exhibited in the image of Saddam and the dissolution of this manhood at an individual and private level as is revealed in withered male corporeality in the novel.

Bodily Decay, Disease and Death in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman
Marta Cerezo Moreno
UNED, Spain

“The alarm clock startled me out of a dream in which I had looked down and seen my feet beginning to dissolve”, states Marian, the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman. Marian’s dream-like vision of her own bodily dissolution stands as the first of a series of recurrent images developed by the text as regards bodily decay, decomposition, disease and death. This cluster of physical images and allusions to corporal extinction is intimately linked to Marian’s feeling of entrapment within a gender ideology that depicts woman as an item of social consumption. Atwood’s references of disease, demise and disintegration give shape to her narrative speculations about “symbolic cannibalism” which finally lead to the ultimate metaphor of the novel, the edible-woman in the symbolic shape of a cake. The protagonist’s nervous eating disorder is the leading image of a text in which the act of devouring the other’s self is central as it constantly revolves around the novel’s tripartite structure. The Edible Woman metaphorically represents women as ideologically digested entities whose gradual reduction and final demise is preceded by ailment. Marian disturbingly reflects on her role as a woman within a society that merely expects her to become a wife and a mother. Her conclusions trigger a series of descriptions of maternity as woman’s bodily and intellectual decay, and of female maturity as physically revolting. Paradoxically, Marian’s attempts to escape from this reality are also imbued by an atmosphere of death and illness since they both govern her relationship with Duncan. As my paper will show, the “cadaverously thin” English graduate symbolically represents a mirror image in which Marian reflects both her fears of being consumed and her desire to free herself of the rigid patterns the cannibalistic society she is surrounded by demands of her.

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