Abstract
The representation of the female body throughout literature has a complicated history. My thesis attempts to restructure the historical narrative of the female body through a regional narration. The region is a site for collective experience, it allows for different places, spaces, memories, and histories to form as a cohesive unit as it develops a female body that acknowledges the dehumanization, objectification, and otherness it has undergone in each place, memory, and history. However, it is through these historical acknowledgments that allow for an alternative narrative and routes of agency to be developed in the present.|Thus, I argue for a new narrative of the female body, one that intimately connects it to not the only place in which it dwells, but the local, transnational, and global as a means for developing new intimacies and new foundations of willfulness, rewriting its past objectification. The female body no longer remains a platform for dehumanization, sexualization, consumption, and objectification but instead a body that represents shared experiences, unforeseen intimacies, and collective histories of the regions in which it has found its sense of belonging. Looking specifically at Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, and Mohja Kahf’s A Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, I relocate the female body situating it within a regional border, develop its new identity by establishing its ever present regional embodiment.