At the time, she had no idea that she would one day be imprisoned for engaging in activism based on her empirical research. The novel begins with an introduction in which the unnamed psychiatrist, the semi-fictionalized Saadawi, recalls her time as a prison psychiatrist in Egypt. The novel is celebrated today as being one of the first novels on the injustices of the sex trade and its relationship to the oppression of women that reached a popular international audience. Firdaus’s character is loosely based on a woman Saadawi met while working as a psychiatrist and researcher on the psychological consequences of incarceration for women in Egypt. Saadawi draws from her own experiences being prosecuted for speaking out against injustices against women in Egypt, painting a sympathetic portrait of victims of the stigmatized, poorly regulated sex industry. Set in Cairo, Egypt, it follows sex worker Firdaus, who commits to her trade out of desperation, murders her abusive pimp, and then awaits her death sentence. Woman at Point Zero is a 1975 novel by Egyptian feminist author and physician Nawal El Saadawi.
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