Abstract :
Women have historically been excluded from war literature. Recently, however, women, including those in the Middle East, have begun to recount the stories of war and create alternatives to time-honoured masculinized war narratives. Their articulation of their experiences is having a dramatic impact on perceptions of conflict, sexuality, and society. Three novels written about the Lebanese civil war – Ghada al-Samman’s Beirut ’75, Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra, and Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter – are linked by their critiques of gender-specific behavioural expectations, of nationalism, of individual and communal identity and violence, as well as the connection between sexuality and violence
