Women without Men and Women’s Time

The present paper seeks to study Shahrnush Parsipor’s Women without Men based on Kristeva’s concept of women’s time. Kristeva in her essay Women’s Time asserts thatwomen are all imprisoned in a circular time, in which whatever they do follows a repetition mode. Therefore, she wishes for a new fashion that women try to make progress and seek asocial place for themselves. For doing so, women have to concentrate on their individuality, and provoke a generation where they can express themselves easily, and they do not need to be what a patriarchal society injected them. They can make progress and go beyond a motherrole, or a domestic role. For this reason, Parsipor fulfills Kristeva’s notion of women’s time,since in her novella, female characters try to gain a social voice for themselves. They stand against the predetermined gender roles. Moreover the concept of sisterhood has beenexplored in this novella since this is only through sisterhood which female characters achieve unity. As such, this paper focuses on Kristeva’s notion of women’s time, and the way female characters try to make their dreams come true.

Keywords:

Gender roles , Julia Kristeva , Shahrnush Parsipor , women’s time , sisterhood