Representations of Women in Family Notebooks of Ishraq Sami

Abstract

Through four axes, this study adopts a cultural approach to Family Notebooks, the short-story collection by the Iraqi writer Dr. Ishraq Sami. The first axis of the study focuses on defining research concepts and establishing a theoretical framework. It introduces the short story collection and its main themes, then discusses critical concepts of "the image."  the concept is not addressed in its aesthetic or imaginative sense-known in Western criticism as "Image"-but rather in its cultural sense as revealed by cultural studies, specifically "representation,". The study also points to the image as an ideological mental construct that is constantly reshaped through language and narrative to reinforce hegemony. The second axis focuses on the interaction between two concepts: the discursive actor and the social actor. the narrator takes refuge in the former to express confrontation with authority in its various forms, which are embodied by the latter. The presence of these agents in reality produces authoritative discourses that serve their ideologies and orientations. Thus, this axis examines the conflict between these two modes. in the third axis, story “The Dictionary” constitutes a striking presence, as the narrator resorts to cultural representation through the splitting of the dictionary’s function between its educational and its predictive, the study concludes with the fourth axis, in which it moves toward ideological representation through the mechanisms of representing women and producing images of them within this dimension. This is evident in the story “Prize,” where ideology enters the narrative through the portrayal of women from a masculine voice, assigning them multiple roles and patterns. Each role and image is linked to class, authority.