This doctoral project brings Moroccan and Scandinavian literature into dialogue to examine how gender roles are constructed, performed, and contested across different cultural and historical contexts. It reads Siham Benchekroun's novels Oser Vivre and Chama alongside Henrik Ibsen's plays A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler, focusing on the ways female characters negotiate agency within patriarchal and neopatriarchal structures.
The project draws on Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler to frame gender as something made and performed, on Jacques Derrida and R.W. Connell to deconstruct gendered binaries and the power systems that sustain them, and on Kimberlé Crenshaw, Fatema Mernissi, and Toril Moi to build a situated, intersectional comparative framework.
By placing a contemporary Moroccan francophone author in conversation with a canonical European dramatist, the study questions universalist readings of women's emancipation and highlights how context shapes both the constraints women face and the forms their resistance takes.
