From the Unsayable to Engineered Confession: The Sexual Taboo in Modern Arabic Fiction (1980–2015)
This article conceptualizes the “unsayable” not as a fixed prohibition but as a dynamic dispositive that structures confession across paratexts, spaces, voices, and regimes of the gaze. It proposes a replicable analytic matrix aligning a mediation axis — ellipsis → avowal → mise en scène — with a contextual vector comprising the institutional eye, spatial configuration, vocal modality, and narrative tempo. The study applies scene-level coding to seven modern Arabic novels and engages in a calibrated counter-comparison with Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint to broaden the comparative scope. The analysis demonstrates that degrees of disclosure depend less on authorial boldness than on the nature of the surveilling eye — symbolic, communal, or procedural — and the permeability of its spatial membrane (sacred/urban; closed/open). The findings show how legal, religious, and market institutions modulate confessional discourse, and how literary texts convert taboo into an aesthetic architecture that redistributes voice, visibility, and agency for both artistic and political purposes.