The Architecture of Submission Covert Ideological Engineering Through Panoptic Surveillance and Interpellation in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero

Abstract

This paper investigates how women’s identities are gradually transformed and manipulated at the very beginning of their lives in the post-colonial Egyptian era under intersecting power structures through the character Firdaus in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero, drawing on Foucauldian ideas of the panopticon and Althusserian concepts of interpellation. The purpose of this paper is to unmask the covert mechanisms of patriarchal power and state authority in shaping and regulating women’s behaviours. It also analyses how social institutions, such as educational and religious institutions, operate as ISAs and RSAs to endorse and inject stereotypical ideas into women. Implementing a qualitative approach through intensive textual analysis, this study identifies themes of surveillance, discipline, and ideological interpellation with the help of multiple feminist and postcolonial scholarship. The study identifies the very process of domestication of women’s identity through Firdaus. It demonstrates how Firdaus’ identity is systematically produced, policed, and censored through familial, religious, educational, legal, and economic institutions. The panoptical gaze transforms Firdaus into a ‘docile body’, who hailed patriarchal norms as a daughter, wife, prostitute, and a prisoner in a panoptic world until the end. It focuses on the hidden process of ideological apparatuses by linking Foucauldian and Althusserian theories to showcase how female subjection is sustained in a postcolonial context and how ideology is partly responsible for engineering female subjectivity in a subtle but effective process.