Feminist Revision of Arabic Fairy Tales as Intralingual Translation: A Case Study of Qālat Al-Rāwya

Fairy tales are believed to be home to cultural beliefs and gender stereotypes. The fluidity of fairy tales lends them to constant revisionist retellings under the sway of feminism. This opens the way for the evolving of new versions that mesh with the ideal of women’s empowerment in the face of the patriarchal stranglehold over meaning-making. The influx of gender-sensitive revisions of fairy tales attests to the growing feminist awareness of the imperative that women should be brought from the margins to the center, reclaim their voices, and attain a suitable space for self-expression. Feminists have forayed into the terrain of translation and blazed a trail in it by vociferously voicing their stances and interventions in the texts they translate. They capitalize on translation to realize activist goals related to the fight against the dominant patriarchal discourse. In light of this, the present study aims to explore the feminist underpinnings of selected Arabic fairy tale retellings in the Women and Memory Forum’s project Qālat Al-Rāwya(The She-Narrator Said) from the perspective of intralingual translation. The study employs gender as an analytical category and draws on von Flotow’s (1991, 1997, 2020) feminist translation strategies of prefacing and footnoting, supplementing, and hijacking in the analysis of the intralingual translations of the Arabic fairy tales to expound the appropriation of these tales and their metamorphosis from being male-biased to being women-friendly texts.