Not Without My Daughter

Abstract

In 1987 the book Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody became a worldwide best-seller. In the line of Mahmoody’s book, similar ‘true stories’ of western white women with oriental husbands were published. These books concentrate on topics like bad marriages, abuse and international parental abduction. In this article the books are analysed as popular culture products of orientalist discourse on mixed marriages. They are maternal melodramas in which women who are victims of their intermarriage become heroines by sacrificing themselves for the sake of their children. As ‘learned foolhardy women’ the authors of these stories are cultural reproducers of the West; their function is to warn other women not to enter into a mixed marriage and to warn western society about the dangers of racial and cultural intermixture.

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