"Unity in diversity:" Towards a Mediterranean feminist criticism

This thesis aims to lay the basis for a Mediterranean feminist criticism in literary studies inspired by Caribbean feminist criticism. Drawing upon the previous comparisons and contrasts discussed between the two seas made by both Mediterranean and Caribbean scholars, the introduction discusses the relevance and possibility of building a feminist oeuvre in the same way that anthologies of Caribbean women's writing were constructed as a result of the collaborative effort of Caribbean feminists in the 1970s. In the three main chapters, this research aims to start the anthologizing practice by choosing and analyzing three books written by three authors across the Mediterranean that consider the sea a safe space and a sphere of opportunity for women. The first of these chapters focuses on the way Ece Temelkuran builds a trans-Mediterranean, feminist micro-community and appropriates the longue durée approach in her fictional writing by centralizing the relatively small number of women and driving the larger event of the Arab Spring into the peripheries of her narrative. The second chapter delves into Nina Bouraoui's bicultural upbringing as the daughter of a French mother and an Algerian father, and the possibility of adopting a queer Mediterranean identity to overcome the identification crises she experiences when growing up. The third chapter turns to Mediterranean industrial spaces and their masculine cultures which are often overlooked by fiction, discussing the sea's position as an alternative space for the emergence of a "female culture" as described by Luce Irigaray.