Spoken Autobiographical Acts
Spoken Autobiographical Acts
Nayra Atiya's ‘Khul-Khaal'
This chapter examines “spoken autobiographical acts” and the demotic eloquence of women who share their experiences about excision with a female amanuensis-cum-ethnographer in a post-colonial context. It looks at Egyptian journalist Nayra Atiya's 1982 book Khul-Khaal, which transcribes and translates the stories told by five Egyptian women who act as “native informants.” Atiya's subjects are all women from Egypt, and Khul-Khaal documents their transitions of excision, menarche, defloration, pregnancy, birth, lactation, and menopause. By erasing her own autobiography, Atiya has inadvertently supported traditional anthropologists who were reluctant to consider autobiography in their fieldwork. Through the housekeeper Suda in Khul-Khaal, she challenges general assumptions about gender and sexuality.
Keywords: spoken autobiographical acts, Nayra Atiya, Khul-Khaal, excision, women, Egypt, informants, autobiography, gender, sexuality
Stanford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.