The Female Body In Nawal El Saadawi's Woman At Point Zero

The female body is simply a vessel that a patriarchal society makes use of or suppresses for their own agenda in the race to obtaining power. Unlike a man, a woman occupies her appropriate place in a patriarchal society with the predetermined notion that her sexual services are appropriately reserved in obedience to the patriarchal prerogative. Her virtue lies in what she does and does not do. In the two novels, Woman at Point Zero and Pillars of Salt, the female characters seek to expose and condemn the ideological trappings which pacify patriarchal societies.

In Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero, Firdaus illustrates how the female body is exploited to maintain patriarchal power and on the other hand how the same body destabilizes male

Firdaus finally feels that she exerts control over herself; she reclaims her anatomy and flips the inevitable event of her exploitation to turn a profit for her own benefit. Bodily sovereignty once significantly undermined has a causal effect of the body and its uses seeming to be not of great importance as it once was. One may then sell off her body with a capitalist ideology in mind: that marketplace participation is the ultimate display of freedom and personal sovereignty. However, when Firdaus or any other female counterpart not contained in the literary world attempts to claim control over her body, more often than not, male resentment is inspired. Precisely because the denial of such sovereignty is the central dynamic or patriarchy itself. Firdaus’s personal sovereignty becomes once more under attack, when her success attracts the attention of a pimp. Firdaus seeks rejection of patriarchal control yet again by reclaiming her body as hers by killing her pimp. It is not until Firdaus is on death row that she truly feels liberated; she would prefer to die in order to escape the control that others have over her. Only when dead will Firdaus be free.

In Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt, in the face of physical oppression, Faqir’s characters demonstrate the reciprocal relationship of the female mind and body in challenging gendered power structures. In doing so, the characters are punished by imprisonment thereby upholding the female body as a site for oppression as well as resistance. Although the female characters in Faqir’s novel are subjected to unyielding defeat, both demonstrate a fighting resistance using their bodies as vessels to defy patriarchal