Lifting the Veil off the Intimate in Jordanian Women’s Literature

The contemporary scene in Jordanian women’s literature offers an intense intellectual debate that is emerging in a fundamentally new way of thinking about women in a modern globalized world. Theirs is a novel voice of gender politics that calls for progress, emaciation and empowerment of women. They do not seek merely to deconstruct the myth of the superior masculine ego that still continues to shape the socio-political fabric of Jordanian society, but they seek a more globalized perspective to detangle themselves by giving birth to a new consciousness. By lifting the veil off their personal and intimate experiences they give rise to a more global oriented image and join modern feminist writers in their endeavor to expose a world of political, economic and social system built on power rather than on justice. Their writings present a collective voice meant to force public opinion out of polemics about cultural authenticity that insists on subjugating the female body and mind by coercing social taboos created by long outstanding social and political patriarchal based ideologies. They do so by projecting a threatening image of female sexuality and by making the body a site for the intervention and production of discourses about the self and ‘other’. They strive to produce an unveiled body and an unveiled discourse showing that the personal is the political and by taking it one step further to assert that the personal affords a global and universal experience.