Gender, Identity, and the Politics of Difference in Popular Romance

Abstract

A big deal of attention has been recently allotted to popular romance in academia due to its increasing popularity in the Western sphere. Within intercultural postcolonial studies, this paper scrutinizes how the Moroccan woman’s identity is constructed under the Western female gaze in British imperial romance. It unveils the extent to which Rebecca Stratton’s best-selling romance The Silken Cage (1981) could speak against imperial gender stereotyping within the duality of being subjected to Western domination and being given, in the meantime, the opportunity to speak against this dominance. The selected romance deserves to be examined because it throws light on how the relation between gender, identity, and difference is (re)constructed by the politics of power rooted in the interracial encounter. A postcolonial reading of The Silken Cage showed that Stratton provides the reader with a cultural discourse where gender stereotypes about Moroccan men and women are ‘contested’ and ‘denied.’ However, her frequent assertion of the formulaic images of the West about the ‘feminized’ Morocco is not innocent, especially when challenging the Moroccan woman’s absolute ‘silence’ in the novel. This absolute silence is succinctly manifested in the hegemonic construction of Morocco as a space replete with patriarchal structures. Thus, Stratton’s romance is not only a literary form destined to entertain and seduce the Western reader but a significant aspect of the “culture industry” whose ultimate goal is to ‘exoticize’ the oriental ‘Other.’ This paper has come to contribute to a better understanding of cross-cultural projects begun by researchers to bridge the gap between the West and the East.