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 Mernissi’s 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 Mernissi’s account words determine the boundary between life and death. Fatima’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 relevantsocial, political, geographical, economic, ideological and psychological historyof 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 collectiveacts. (ppt courtesy of Mridula Chakraborty)

8. Historical context (1944-1949) North: Spanish Morocco/ South: French Morocco End of WWII Nationalism: Transition to Independence Women’s 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 frontier…No one ever had heard to a frontier splitting the land in two before. The frontier was an invisible line in the mind of warriors…All 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 Mernissi’s 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 Althusser’s theory relevant to the narrative or not?

13. The Western women’s 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 women’s 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 One’s 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 Mernissi’s 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 women’s marginalization, relationship among women, the message, the tone, and solution(s) offered to solve women’s problems.