Women’s Resistance to Hostile Spaces
Part I: Introduction. Written by Mona Kazzaz, this is a prize-winning research paper that is now being serialised by Sahab.
Civil war in Lebanon has lasted for fifteen years and has claimed a huge number of victims between dead and wounded. War’s victims are not only individuals involved in the battlefield to fight for a cause they believe in, but also women who usually do not participate in face to face battles. In times of war, men who are not soldiers refrain from going out owing to the military situation outside. Home is thus transformed from a place where a woman can achieve partial freedom, to a space where she is monitored by the male gaze continuously. She thus becomes a double victim: victim of an outside patriarchal society which dictates rules of behavior she should abide by, and a victim of the power her husband, father and brother exert on her inside her home. According to Blunt and Rose, both professors of geography, space is “central both to masculinist power and to feminist resistance” (Blunt and Rose, 1) since men impose rules that women try to resist.
The two novels discussed in this paper are Binayat Mathilde and Tawahin Beirut. The main action in both takes place in Beirut. Both works describe the plight of the female from the perspective of different women: Katia, the two aunts, two women at the bakery, the narrator’s mother and Mathilde in Binayat Mathilde. In Tawahin Beirut, the women examined are: Mme Rose, Zannoub, Miss Marie and Tamima. Women in the two novels are portrayed as powerless even in their most powerful moments of decision making because the social structure works against them. The power relations between men and women almost always does justice to men and fails women. In this context, women are different from men socially, economically and sexually. But they are also different among one another because each one of them fights essentialism in her own way and from her own spot that doesn’t resemble any other spot. Thus the need for “plurilocality” or “the diverse spatialities of different women” as Rose calls it. This paper discusses the secondary characters’ conflict with space in general and then targets Mathilde and Tamima at a later stage as they are the protagonists of the two novels. It aims at showing how women who abide by society’s division of gendered space can survive on relatively good terms with this society. Those whose bodies diverge from the norm endure society’s marginalization and criticism.
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