Siouar Douss – Goddesses: Divine Constructive Destructive Powers
Preferred Name
Siouar Douss
Legal Name
Siouar Douss
Contact Email
s.douss@ids.ac.uk
Age
30
Gender Expression
Female
Which student are you?
College Student (The World)
Name of School
University of Sussex
Grade / Year in School
MA 2021/2022
Location (City, State/Province, Country)
Brighton, United Kingdom
If you identify with an ethnicity or culture(s), which one or ones do you identify with?
North African
What is the name of your legal guardian/parent (if under 18)?
Please provide contact information for your legal guardian/parent (if under 18)
What are your social media accounts (TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook)?
Instagram: siouar.douss
Twitter: Siouar.douss
Please select type of project you are entering
Literature/Poetry
What is the title of your project?
Goddesses: Divine Constructive Destructive Powers
Please tell us about your submission (maximum 600 words)
I have used creative writing to write about women’s stories, in a mix of fiction and reality. This practice offered me a gentle approach to exploring myself. I reflected on understanding my personal process of liberation from the web of patriarchal structures through writing about my and other women’s liberation stories within the unequal power structures. I found this approach to be less scary than looking directly at myself in the mirror and writing my personal story of liberation in detail. Writing women's stories even in fiction holds the responsibility of acknowledging and respecting the complexities and differences of women’s life experiences. Therefore, my project aims to be inclusive and diverse to put an end to the delusion that women are naturally a homogenous group.
What is something you learned about patriarchy and what is something you would like to change about what you learned?
I named the project ‘Goddesses: Divine Constructive Destructive Powers’ to highlight the polarity and the contradiction with the saint images of women in the hegemonic discourse. I named every story after a name of a goddess not to convey that women are inhuman. Rather acknowledge the resilience of women surviving in a world that considers them to be less than human. I have used the ‘I’ pronoun in the stories, to get a glimpse of myself in their stories. I learned how the patriarchal structures have deeply restricted and abused my and other women's life experiences. I have also learned that women's unique experiences are not well documented. Anthropologists affirmed that women’s unique experiences are silenced in written history, especially when their experiences are intertwined with men’s. This project is, therefore, an initiation to a personal long-term project of writing women's unique stories as a contribution to the feminist writing of oral history.