Figures of Exclusion and Embodied Life-Narratives in Najat El Hachmi’s El lunes nos querrán

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this article is to analyze the inscription of the embodied and political “I” in El lunes nos querrán (2021), Najat El Hachmi’s most recent novel. The study starts from the premises developed by Martine Leibovici in order to focus on the narrator’s particular social position as an “insider-outsider” as a powerful means of (self)knowledge about the mechanisms of social exclusion and estrangement. Consequently, the literary text, when analyzed as the life-narrative of a defector (transfuge), to employ Leibovici’s term, reveals the “psychic life of power” (Butler) that oppresses women. Gender, as codified in the novel, is a regulatory ideal, materialized in a performative way through the imposed and internalized reiteration of transcultural practices.