Cabaret.
That was the word I overheard two young men use amongst themselves as I walked past them exiting what is a women’s-only dance studio that offered women’s-only belly dancing lessons. It was located on the ground floor, on a small street in a busy Alexandria neighborhood, with the windows completely opaque with vinyl advertising. You had to ring the door to be let in, and there was a cautionary curtain behind the opened door. I guess it must have been titillating to the men on the street, overhearing the blaring music, imagining what goes on behind closed doors with a room full of women in their sequined belts, laughing and sensuously dancing to the music in perfect unison.
Well, it was far from perfect unison. The space looked like your average dance studio, with a mirror wall to wall and a barre across. There was a small dressing room where the women could hang their veils and outdoor dress and get into something more conducive to movement. The instructor was a professional dancer who had worked in hotel entertainment and “fer’et Reda’ (a popular folkloric dance troupe). The attendees came in all ages and sizes. A younger woman was there because her friends had told her she needed to be less shy, and dancing would let her get more in touch with herself. An older woman was there because her marriage had waned, and she felt she needed to spice thing up a bit. I was there to get over a depressive phase in my life and do something completely out of the ordinary for me. Women looked in the mirror lamenting bulges (or lack thereof) in their bodies that didn’t make them adequately poised for belly-dancing, but the instructor assured them it didn’t matter. She would occasionally encourage the women to just let it go, sometimes rolling her eyes at someone’s stiffness, promising that it would wear off with practice. When the session finished, everyone got dressed again, including said instructor, often making them hard to recognize compared to their pre-veiled selves. The word ‘cabaret’ unnerved me, because the space could not have been more opaque and the women more concealing to the outside world. It was meant to be a safe space where women could own their bodies and its movement without judgement, and yet judgement was waiting right outside the door.
While it has been a while to Fatima Mernissi’s ‘Dreams of Trespass’, the story made me question whether women were really being segregated from the lavish spaces of men, or whether men were being segregated from the intimate spaces of women. Modernity has made public life the one more worth of envy for participation, because of increasing industrialization and value to the material. I wonder if more was said of women’s worlds and their aesthetic value, if it would not be men envying the closed off spaces of women.
Women in segregated spaces in a way do have more ‘access’ to spaces of both sexes. With mashrabeyas peering out onto courtyards, women could always have a view into men’s spaces without men having similar access to theirs. While women’s personhood may often be invisible, their voices are often audible. A marriage contract could not proceed without the consent of a woman, and she can voice discord and terminate a marriage. Men would be shamed if they dared look into private women’s spheres, let alone step into them. Even in the make-shift prayer space at Columbia University, men do not ‘look back’ at the rows of women praying behind them, while the women have full view of the men in the rows to the front. In a happy hour organized in the same space, a male friend recently made a comment at one of the pictures on the wall that he ‘had never noticed before’. I slyly commented ‘well, I guess you’ve never looked back there during prayer time where the women are”, to which he quickly shook his head with the urgency to dismiss any source of man-shaming, “no, never”. It made me feel good about my open field of vision.
Why is it then, that women’s spaces and access not seen as a position of privilege?
Sara O. Ahmed 