Autobiography and Muslim Women’s Lives

In her article “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity,” the historian Joan Wallach Scott interrogates European and North American feminism for its frequent deployment of what she refers to as a “fantasy echo”: a psychoanalytic reference to identity formation that underlines its complexity and its “diffracted relation to others.”¹ Separating fantasy from echo, she explicates historical fantasy as a phenomenon apparent in the act of both individual and collective identity formations. “These fantasies are the myths cultures develop to answer questions about the origins of subjects, sexual difference and sexuality. Primal fantasies of sexual difference (which assume the female body has been castrated) may provide a ground of unconscious commonality among women who are otherwise historically and socially different.”²

Discussing fantasy as something that can help us to understand subject formation, Scott argues that it can also be deployed to “study the ways in which history … contributes to the articulation of political identity.”³ To exemplify her point, she refers to feminist history and its focus on retelling a “continuous, progressive” narrative of emancipation for women that elides differences and conflict. She then brings in her notion of the echo by drawing on the story of Echo and Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to explain the “process by which subjects come into being.”⁴ She reads identity as echo and identification as fantasy echo. As both individuals and groups are prone to giving themselves histories of identification, they can be read through the prism of fantasy. In her critique of the historical identification of “woman” as subject she appropriates a Foucauldian genealogy, inflecting it with a psychoanalytic methodology that seeks to explicate her point of departure that is the fantasy echo. She argues, “women refers to so many subjects, different and the same, that the word becomes a series of fragmented sounds, rendered intelligibly only by the listener who (in specifying her object) is predisposed to listen in a certain way.”⁵ Scott turns to psychoanalysis as a means of complicating the historiography of gender relations amongst women and, thus, gives a new inflection to women’s subjectivities. Scott’s questioning stance, here as in her earlier work, can be read as underlining the difference of cultural contexts, the heterogeneity of subjectivities within the same period, and the limitations of woman as a universal historical category. An iconic Euro-American feminist thread she interrogates is the retrieved “feminist” identity of women orators who were excluded from speaking in public forums in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their intervention in the public and political sphere. Her other illustration is drawn from the universalized category of mother: a role model for women who embodies the idealization of love and is a “feminist maternal fantasy.” She argues that these figures have been subsumed over time in a fantasy echo of either an “idealization of maternal love” or as interventionists in the masculine public sphere to construct a “seamless” argument for feminism in the present.⁶

Scott’s representation of the fantasy echo offers a point of departure for the retrieval of identity and identification in women’s history. In particular, she draws on French feminism to discuss the complexities of female identification. In Scott’s own words the fantasy echo is not something that can be applied as a label to explain identity. She concludes her article by saying, “It does not presume to know the substance of identity, the resonance of its appeal, or the transformations it has undergone. It presumes only that where there is evidence of what seems enduring and unchanging identity, there is a history that needs to be explored.”⁷ I wish to extend Scott’s idea of the “fantasy echo” to a post 9/11 worldview and discuss how imaginative literature on Muslim women’s identities has come to play a significant role in the identification and representation of the backwardness of Muslim societies through a universalization of their oppressed status.

In particular, I explore what happens to women’s histories when they are self-authored and presented as autobiographical accounts, and consider how this might decenter Scott’s...