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The Female Suffering Body: Illness and Disability in Modern Arabic Literature by Abir Hamdar

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By CentreForMedicalHumanities.org Research Team | Last verified: September 2026

Research Summary: The Female Suffering Body: Illness and Disability in Modern Arabic Literature

Category: Literary Studies / Cultural Criticism
Author: Abir Hamdar
ISBN: 978-0-8156-3365-5
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Primary Focus: Representations of female physical illness and disability in modern Arab literature across six decades.
Key Writers Examined: Mahmoud Taymur, Yusuf al-Sibai, Ghassan Kanafani, Naguib Mahfouz, Ziyad Qassim, Colette Khoury, Hanan al-Shaykh, Alia Mamdouh, Salwa Bakr, Hassan Daoud, Betool Khedair.
Core Argument: Female suffering bodies have shifted from literary margins—historically associated with shame and revulsion—to center stage, particularly through contemporary female writers.
Methodological Approach: Integrates analysis of canonical and marginalized Arab writers to trace cultural and literary transformations in disease and disability representation.
Scholarly Contribution: Addresses historical absence of complex female illness representations in Arab literary imagination compared to Western literary traditions.

A new book by Abir Hamdar (ISBN: 978-0-8156-3365-5, Publisher: Syracuse University Press)

Although there is a history of rich, complex, and variegated representations of female illness in Western literature over the last two centuries, the sick female body has traditionally remained outside the Arab literary imagination. Hamdar takes on this historical absence in The Female Suffering Body by exploring how both literary and cultural perspectives on female physical illness and disability in the Arab world have transformed in the modern period. In doing so, she examines a range of both canonical and hitherto marginalized Arab writers, including Mahmoud Taymur, Yusuf al-Sibai, Ghassan Kanafani, Naguib Mahfouz, Ziyad Qassim, Colette Khoury, Hanan al-Shaykh, Alia Mamdouh, Salwa Bakr, Hassan Daoud, and Betool Khedair. Hamdar finds that, over the course of sixty years, female physical illness and disability has moved from the margins of Arabic literature—where it was largely the subject of shame, disgust, or revulsion—to the center, as a new wave of female writers have sought to give voice to the “female suffering body.”

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