Senses of Vulnerability: Gender, Embodiment, and Dis-Orientation from the Algerian War To
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Senses of Vulnerability: Gender, Embodiment, and Dis-Orientation from the Algerian War to the War in Iraq A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Alexandra Magearu Committee in charge: Professor Maurizia Boscagli, Co-Chair Professor Dwight Reynolds, Co-Chair Professor Catherine Nesci Professor Eric Prieto Professor Elisabeth Weber September 2018 The dissertation of Alexandra Magearu is approved. ____________________________________________ Catherine Nesci ____________________________________________ Eric Prieto ____________________________________________ Elisabeth Weber ____________________________________________ Maurizia Boscagli, Committee Co-Chair ____________________________________________ Dwight Reynolds, Committee Co-Chair September 2018 Senses of Vulnerability: Gender, Embodiment, and Dis-Orientation from the Algerian War to the War in Iraq Copyright © 2018 by Alexandra Magearu iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have come into being without the support of mentors, family, and friends. I am deeply grateful to my mentors in the American Studies department at the University of Bucharest, Mihaela Precup and Ruxandra Rădulescu. Their warmth, their passion, their dedication and their integrity have inspired me to pursue a degree in the humanities and research social justice issues. Mihaela’s friendship, her sense of humor, her energy, and her feminist commitments have provided a model of ethical living for me. Ruxandra’s wisdom, her kindness, and her empathy have inspired me to become a better person. I am also grateful to my committee, whose feedback, critical comments, and invaluable advice have considerably shaped and improved this book. I would like to thank Maurizia Boscagli for her unwavering support, her critical intensity, and for encouraging me to persevere in my writing in moments of disorientation. It has also been a pleasure to work with Dwight Reynolds, whose elegant thinking, positive energy, and wonderful storytelling skills have been inspirational. Catherine Nesci’s warmth, her attention to details, her excellent editing, and her advice have been essential to me. I have been touched by her dedication to others, immensely grateful for everything she has done for me, and I have to thank her for her care, her awareness, and her sensitivity. Elisabeth Weber’s passion, her rigorous feedback, her ethical commitments, and her understanding of the history of philosophy have guided and inspired this project. I am particularly thankful to her for challenging me to strengthen my arguments. Eric Prieto’s advice has also been important to the evolution of the project, particularly his attention to details and his capacity to contextualize my project as a whole. There are other mentors who have left their marks on my life and shaped the path I’ve taken throughout graduate school. Bishnupriya Ghosh has been a role model for me. Her insightful scholarly work, her admirable poise in the classroom, and her sophisticated and eclectic knowledge have shown me that academic research can be radical and elegant. I would also like to thank Bernadette Andrea, Barbara Tomlinson, Eileen Boris, Enda Duffy, Russell Samolsky, Colin Gardner, Jocelyn Holland, Sven Spieker, and Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook for making UCSB an intellectually rich and politically aware environment. I owe a special thanks to Mohja Kahf for her kind messages, for her generous advice, and for the feedback she has provided on my critical analysis of her texts. Her crucial scholarly work, her playful and brilliant poetry, and her witty and insightful fiction have provided some of the richest sources of inquiry for my project. This book is dedicated to Niva Ran and Nadim Sarhan, who impacted my life in unexpected ways and who enabled me to reconsider my identity, my ethical commitments, and my political attachments. Many of the philosophical, existential and political questions emerging from my respective relationships to them led me to some of the fundamental questions of this project. I am also grateful to the many friends and colleagues I have met on my journey at UCSB, including Candice Perez, María Inés Canto, Michael Grafals, Tegan Raleigh, Margarita Delcheva, Inez Zhou, Rebecca Stewart, Earl Foust, Eugeniu Plămădeală, and Alexandra Garcia. Patrícia Lino will always have a special place in my heart as she has not only been an affectionate friend, but she has taught me to express my feminist iv attachments beyond writing, as part of my lived experience, and maintain my integrity. I am deeply grateful for having met Nesrin Ünlü, who has been a sensitive, wise and caring friend and the best conversational partner I have ever had. I am thankful for the countless intellectual discussions we have shared, from which I’ve learned more about the world and myself. I am infinitely indebted to Zach Horton for his unwavering devotion to our friendship, for his emotional support, and for always being able to open different intellectual perspectives to me. He has often provided a sense of familial safety and unconditional love for me even when I struggled with homesickness and the difficulties of cultural displacement. Last but not least, I would like to thank George Blake for being a most caring and loving partner, for making me smile countless times throughout the day, for always offering me his support and thoughtful advice in demanding moments, and for making my life rich with beauty, creativity, and curiosity. My family has been close to me throughout this time, despite their physical distance. I am grateful to my mother, Adela Bărbat, for her intuitive knowledge of the world, which she has imparted to me. My cousin, Corina Maria Pall, has been my best friend and a sister to me and she is one of the kindest and most reassuring presences in my life. I am thankful for my stepfather, Adrian Bărbat, and my father, Adrian Magearu. And finally, I am grateful for the love bestowed on me by my grandparents, Constantin Grigore and Maria Grigore, to whom I owe my first years of emotional and intellectual development. Even if some of my family members may not be able to read the English text of this book without a translation, I have written it for them. v VITA OF ALEXANDRA MAGEARU EDUCATION PhD, Comparative Literature, with Emphases in Feminist Studies and Global Studies, UC Santa Barbara, September 2018, Ph.D. thesis: “Senses of Vulnerability: Gender, Embodiment, and Dis-Orientation from the Algerian War to the War in Iraq.” MA, Comparative Literature, UC Santa Barbara, June 2013, MA Thesis: “Nomadic Imaginaries: Figurations of the Female Body in Movement in Contemporary French and Francophone Narratives.” MA, Photographic History and Practice, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, September 2010, MA Thesis: “Beyond the Cotton Wool: Virginia Woolf, Photography and Autobiography” BA, American Studies, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, Major Field: American Studies; Minor Field: German Language and Literature, June 2009, BA Thesis: “Transgressing the Assumptions of Hegemonic Discourse: Magical Realism in the Fiction of Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich.” PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT Instructor of Record, UC Santa Barbara Comparative Literature 33: Postcolonial African Women’s Writing, Summer 2017. Comparative Literature 100: Comparative Existentialism, Winter 2017. Comparative Literature 113: War, Imperialism, and Trauma, Summer 2016. German 164E: Franz Kafka, Summer 2015. French 50CX: Queer Attachments, Summer 2014. Graduate Teaching Assistant, UC Santa Barbara Black Studies 33: African Literatures, Fall 2017. Comparative Literature 35: The Making of the Modern World, Spring 2017. Black Studies 33: African Literatures, Fall 2016. Global 130: Global Economy and Development, Winter 2016. Global 110: Global Ethics and Culture, Fall 2015. Comparative Literature 30C: Major Works of European Literature, Spring 2016. Comparative Literature 30B: Major Works of European Literature, Winter 2015. English 104B: British and Anglophone Literature and Culture, 1900 to present, Spring 2015. vi English 103B: Nineteenth Century British Literature, Fall 2014. Reader, Comparative Literature, UC Santa Barbara Comparative Literature 171: Post-Colonial Cultures, Winter 2018. Language Instructor, French and Italian Department, UC Santa Barbara French 1: Elementary French, Summer 2013, Spring 2013, Fall 2012. French 2: Elementary French, Winter 2013. PUBLICATIONS “Torture and Traumatic Dehiscence: Jean Améry and Frantz Fanon on Vulnerability.” Phenomenology of the Broken Body, edited by Espen Dahl, Cassandra Falke and Thor Eirik Eriksen. Routledge, 2018 (forthcoming). “A Phenomenological Reading of Gendered Racialization in Muslim American Women’s Cultural Productions.” The Comparatist, Vol. 42, 2018. “The Transversalization of Wildness: Queer Desires and Nonhuman Becomings in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood.” Ecosophical Aesthetics: Art, Ethics and Ecology with Guattari, edited by Colin Gardner and Patricia McCormack, Bloomsbury, 2018. AWARDS Spring 2017: Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies 2014-15: IHC Fellow in The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities series 2009-10: Michael Wilson Fellowship, MA in Photographic History and Practice, De Montfort University. FIELDS OF STUDY Twentieth Century and Contemporary Anglophone and Francophone literatures, American Studies, Diasporic Muslim and Arab Cultures, Third