An Analysis of Women's Resistance in the Novel Ta Al-khejel by Fazileh al-Farooq (based on Michel Foucault's Theory of Power)

Resistance" is a central yet ambiguous and questionable category in Foucault's thought. This is due to Foucault's new and extensive analyzes and conceptions of power. He believes that power is not something that is concentrated in the hands of one person, one particular class or institution and applied to others, but is spread throughout society. Power relations are not possible without "resistance"; because wherever there is power, there is resistance, so resistance manipulates power with calculated strategies. The novel "Ta al-khejel" by the contemporary Algerian author Fazileh al-Farooq is a clear example of the blatant oppression against women in Algerian patriarchal and traditional society, an oppression that begins with the family and ends with society, institutions, law and religion. But the women of the novel resist to this all-encompassing dominations. The aim of the present study is to examine the resistance and struggle of women against the domination of the patriarchal system in a descriptive-analytical way and based on the concepts of power and resistance of Michel Foucault. The results show that the female protagonists of this novel have appeared in two types of positive and negative resistance. Positive resistance through challenge to patriarchy (resistance against tradition and imitation), continuing education (affirmation of female nature), writing (expressive language of women and awareness of their classes) and emigration and negative resistance through denial of femininity (struggle against patriarchal discourse), suicide and insanity have resisted male power.