Gendered Spaces

1
Gendered Spaces

• What are some examples of gendered settings
  (private and public)? What functions do these
  settings perform in regard to gender roles?
• How are men and women supposed to behave in
  certain places?

2
History of Harem institution

• The rise of patriarchy
• Seclusion and veiling
• Imperial harems
• Orientalism and harem fantasy in the Western
  imagination

3

• My harem was associated with a historical
  reality. Theirs the Westerners was associated
  with artistic images created by famous painters
  such as Ingres, Matisse, Delacrioux, or
  Picasso-who reduced women to Odalisques (a
  Turkish word for a female slave)-or by talented
  Hollywood movie makers, who portrayed harem women
  as scantily clad belly-dancers happy to serve
  their captors whatever image they referred to,
  the journalists always described the harem as a
  voluptuous wonderland drenched with heavy sex
  provided by vulnerable nude women who were happy
  to be locked up. (Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes
  West)

4

• What does the disparity between the popular
  Orientalist notion of harem and Mernissis
  account suggest about the Muslim woman?
• Marxist feminists look at gender oppression as a
  form of class oppression while some other
  feminists regard patriarchy not as a subset of
  Capitalism but as a problem in its own right.
  What do you think in this respect?

5
Power of words Storytelling as a matter of life
and death

• Who was Scheherazade?
• Shaharazad had read the books of literature,
  philosophy and medicine. She knew poetry by
  heart, and studied historical reports, and was
  acquainted with the sayings of men and maxims of
  sages and kings. She was intelligent,
  knowledgeable, wise and refined. (The Arabian
  Nights)
• An indigenous feminist icon for Arab Muslim women
• Right words and the right to live
• Who was Dinarzad (Dunyazad)?

6

• In Mernissis account words determine the
  boundary between life and death. Fatimas mother
  teaches her that her chances of happiness would
  depend upon how skillful she became with
  words(Dreams16).
• And Woolf demands, if we have the habit of
  freedom and the courage to write exactly what we
  think if we face the fact that there is no
  arm to cling to and that our relation is to the
  world of reality and not only to the world of men
  and women,the dead poet who was Shakespeares
  sister will put on body which she has so often
  laid down. She will be born (207).
• How similar or different are the ways in which
  these authors approach the language and the power
  of words?

7
Spatial and Temporal context

• In order to read texts, and write about them
  effectively, we need to know the relevant social,
  political, geographical, economic, ideological
  and psychological history of the times.
• This helps us to understand why societies thought
  and behaved in particular ways and what were the
  personal and historical consequences of their
  collective acts.
• 
  (ppt courtesy of Mridula Chakraborty)

8
Historical context (1944-1949)

• North Spanish Morocco/ South French Morocco
• End of WWII
• Nationalism Transition to Independence
• Womens rights

9
Dreams of Trespass
I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, a ninth
century Moroccan city some five thousand
kilometers west of Mecca, and one thousand
kilometers south of Madrid, one of the dangerous
capitals of the Christians. The problems with the
Christians started, said father, as with women,
when the hudud, or sacred frontiers, is not
respected. I was born in the midst of chaos,
since neither Christians nor women accepted the
frontiers. Right on our threshold, you could see
women of the harem contesting and fighting with
Ahmed the doorkeeper as the foreign armies from
the North kept arriving all over the city(2-3).
10
Dreams of Trespass

• Christians, just like Muslims, fight each other
  all the time, and the Spanish and the French
  almost killed one another when they crossed our
  frontier. Then, when neither was able to
  exterminate the other, they decided to cut
  Morocco in half to go North, you needed a pass
  because you were crossing into Spanish Morocco.
  To go South, you needed another pass, because you
  were crossing into French Morocco. If you did not
  go along with what they said, you got stuck at
  Arbaoua, an arbitrary spot where they had built
  a huge gate and said it was a frontierNo one
  ever had heard to a frontier splitting the land
  in two before. The frontier was an invisible line
  in the mind of warriorsAll you need is soldiers
  to force others to believe in it. In the
  landscape itself, nothing changes. The frontier
  is in the mind of the powerful (Mernissi, 2-3).

11

• Frontiers or hudud are a major theme of the
  book. How many of them can you identify in this
  passage and the excerpt from the anthology?
• How does Mernissis portrayal of space in the
  narrative reflect codes of expectation in terms
  of gender issues?

12

• What are the conflicting forces in this
  narrative?
• What ideologies are unfolded?
• Is Althussers theory relevant to the narrative
  or not?

13
The Western womens Harem

• the power of the western man resides in
  dictating what women should wear and how they
  should look. He controls the whole fashion
  industry, from cosmetics to underwear Both Naomi
  Wolf and Pierre Bourdieu come to the conclusion
  that insidious body codes paralyze Western
  womens abilities to compete for power, even
  though access to education and professional
  opportunities seem wide open, because the rules
  of the game are so different according to gender.
  Women enter the power game with so much of their
  energy deflected to their physical appearance
  that one hesitates to say the playing field is
  level ( Scheherazade Goes West 216-218).

14
Scheherazade, the storyteller

• Riding on her words, we traveled past Sind and
  Hind (India), leaving Muslim territories behind,
  living dangerously, and making friends with
  Christians and Jews, who shared their bizarre
  foods with us and watched us do our prayers,
  while we watch them do theirs. Sometimes we
  traveled so far that no gods were to be found,
  only sun- and fire-worshippers, but even they
  seemed friendly and endearing when introduced by
  aunt Habiba (19).

15
A Room of Ones Own

• Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
• Cultural and Historical milieu
• 1)The public/ the private world of Victorian
  era
• 2) Modernism
• 3) Feminist consciousness
• Inter-war period, a transition era (1920-1940)
• 1) Decline of prewar industries/ new
  industries
• 2) Mass production and consumerism

16
e

• Why would Woolf invite us to call her Mary
  Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or any other
  name we please?
• Mary S. is her host at Fernham in chapter I
  and in subsequent passages that are not included
  in this selection.
• Mary B. is an aunt whose bequest gave her a
  crucial income of 500 pounds per year, enabling
  her to become a writer.
• Mary C. is a promising young contemporary
  novelist. These names come from a 16th c. ballad
  called Mary Hamilton. The story of forcible
  seduction of a serving girl by the son of Queen
  of Scotland. The woman gives birth to an
  illegitimate child, whom she drowns. She is
  condemned to death in the court. The names appear
  in the last stanza.
• Do you find a similar relationship in Mernissis
  text?

17
t

• What solution(s) each one of the writers offer to
  the problem of women literally and/or
  figuratively locked into patriarchal structure?
• Are there any similarities between the two
  narratives?

18

• Despite the fact that Woolf and Mernissi were
  born in two different geographical and cultural
  locations and over half a century apart, it is
  possible to find similarities between their
  narratives. Compare and contrast the two pieces.
  You can draw on issues such as the treatment of
  space and its implications about womens
  marginalization, relationship among women, the
  message, the tone, and solution(s) offered to
  solve womens problems.