A stepmother tongue: "feminine writing" in Assia Djebar's 'Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade.'

Ever since I was a child the foreign language was a casement opening on the spectacle of the world and all its riches. In certain circumstances it became a dagger threatening me.

Assia Djebar, Fantasia

The question of women's bodies and women's sexuality is a highly loaded one. It has implications both for politics--that is, for the relations of power and control that govern a society--and for literature, or the production of verbal constructs that in some ways reflect and in some ways help to create those relations.

Susan R. Suleiman, The Female Body in…