Women Crossing Borders of Experience and Genre

Abstract

This paper argues through a reading of The Rebel (2003) by the Algerian francophone novelist Malika Mokeddem that the 'third world' feminist text has undergone a process of self-liberation through continual transgressions of genre and experience. The feminist text has crossed the borders of isolated scholarship and experience only to cloud the orthodox literary lens through which it was read and interpreted. However, rather than merely crossing the border from one space to another, this paper argues through the concepts of experience and gender, that the border is a special transgressive space that guarantees the displacement of the stereotypical woman's experience and visions, and it is a border that paradoxically frees the text from the traditional feminist taxonomy of second wave feminism by embracing contradiction, dislocation and change..