Women’s Spaces: Inside Looking Out vs. Outside Looking In

May 7, 2020 ~ Sara O. Ahmed ~ Leave a comment

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?

Passerby

April 19, 2020 ~ Sara O. Ahmed ~ Leave a comment

(December 2016)

I like to think that I’m invisible sometimes. It usually happens as I walk down a street, or look up from my work or lunch at the library, or wait for the bus at the bus stop. I become like a video camera shooting a movie; you can’t see the camera but it is what the camera records that becomes the focus. Sometimes the camera captures the weather, acknowledging the peeping sun from behind the clouds on a cold morning, the rustle of the leaves as the wind picks up .

Most of the time, the camera zooms in on a passerby. It captures their attire, their stature, how they walk. Sometimes it zooms in on a silent facial expression. I am left wondering about the story behind the exterior. Is the girl pacing down the street running for an appointment? She is smiling as her blonde ponytail sways like a pendulum with her pace; that seems optimistic. There is an older man in a business suit adorned with a scarf sitting alone at a table, slowly sipping coffee and flicking the screen of his phone. What brought him here? His pace is slower than the millennials in the backdrop. Is it the confidence of an aged white man in a suit that makes his pace slower, or something about the mysterious weariness that shows in the way his eyes are half closed and his face wrinkled ?

The camera captures the scene while I am intrigued by the black man, eyes to the floor, who almost imperceptibly loosens his shoulders in the periphery of the camera’s focus as I shift my seat on the subway next to him, away from the white man on my other side. I do notice the simple smile of the woman of color sitting across from me, almost approvingly. I do notice when the next time on a bus, a white woman looks straight into the camera, a clear worry on her face, and glances sideways at her partner while stiffening her posture. As the bus rolls down the street, she loosens her stiffness and I get off, and her whiteness is no longer on scene.

—

Color didn’t intrigue me before coming to the US for graduate studies.

My dad looks a southern European white; skin that burns red in the sun, brown eyes, dark hair (or at least it was dark, now he just looks like Santa). My grandpa’s photo shows that he had what Egyptians call “colored” eyes (non-brown, so green or blue) as are my aunt’s and uncle’s. My dad swears my grandpa’s father was black, immigrating from the southern banks of the Nile to the north of Egypt – “but he married a Turkish woman”. My paternal grandmother’s family had immigrated from eastern Europe to Egypt when her father was young. I guess that tipped the genetic odds for my dad and his siblings to a larger prevalence of white skin among themselves, which is a rare homogeneity among siblings in Egypt.

My mom’s 9 uncles and aunts are like a litter of kittens. Three of them have blonde hair, olive skin, and green eyes. Three of them are middle toned with dark hair. And three look black. They have the same set of parents. Moreover, my great-uncle Farouk, who is one of the olive skinned, blonde green-eyed lot, marries a woman of Sudanese origin. All three of his sons look black. The eldest who has chocolate colored skin and hazel eyes marries a blonde whiter woman with green eyes. His two kids are green-eyed blondes (with tight curls). It’s beautiful to look at the way melanin manifests itself differently across members of the same family, all with the same last name.

Egypt had its first black president in the 1970s, but you would have to bring it to any Egyptian’s attention that Sadat was black. Egypt is one of the oldest states in the world, centrally connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. The sun feels lower and larger in the horizon, palm trees and vegetation lining the slow, long river Nile eventually meeting the placid turquoise of the Mediterranean. The rest of its expanse is grainy desert. Ruled by Pharoes from Africa, Romans from Europe, and Arabs from Asia, I wonder if many Egyptians would test genealogically positive for having roots from all continents of the world. Perhaps all human color just blends into the yellow hues of the horizon in Egypt.

—

I still marvel at where we have arrived in Egypt; a time in which people are not necessarily judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character (and whatever moral and political stance this character may suggest). July 3^rd 2013 at 10pm, I got the news of our friend Suhail being fatally shot at a demonstration on the streets objecting the military coup that happened that day. Suhail was only mourned by the people who knew him, because mainstream media writes him off as a “terrorist” threat. I remember him as a father, husband, and friend and he is smiling in the image of him in my mind.

Fear is a potent fuel, and it is lethal. I came to America a few months ago, and I recognize fear on frowning silent faces, in news reports of people being shot because of something that makes them less person and more label. What world are we making for our children if the first thing others see in them is a category and not the curious smile on their faces?

I have to remind myself I am not invisible. Maybe like me, there are others with camera vision, trying to figure me out as I come onto the scene.

I get on the bus and I can be a scary looking person to some folks whose body language says they don’t really want to be next to me, a rather obvious Middle Eastern Muslim woman. I do try and choose colorful hijabs to look inviting, but that doesn’t always work. Rather than frown to the floor, I smile at the other frowning person, and I have rarely not gotten a smile back, maybe even a short exchange where I tell them more about me, the person, the hero of my story. When my 6-year-old son stares like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone at the homeless man on the street and Mr.H the homeless man frowns and looks fearful and angry, I smile, I tell my son that thing on his arm is called a tattoo and not to be afraid of the wolf on his forearm. My son eventually smiles and so does Mr.H, and along with Robert from the mayor’s office, we make stories of how Mr.H is related to a long line of pirates in the Caribbean. When I imply to my 9-year-old daughter that I worry for our future as Muslims, she matter-of-factly tells me that it is wrong to judge others; “God says in the Quran that we can all choose what we want to be. Only He can judge people.” I smile the sort of smile a parent has when a pearl of wisdom comes from her progeny at the time when this parent feels most vulnerable. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about my daughter’s future too much.

But I do.

I’m an educator, and I’m committed to an education that develops children’s capacities for empathy with different people by sharing their stories. Will you help me get more stories their way so they develop the connections to others?

Maybe there is hope in the world, if forging our stories makes each of us more than some category of passerby.

Alone together, or Online together?

April 19, 2020 ~ Sara O. Ahmed ~ Leave a comment

On Easter Sunday 2020, Andrea Bocelli sang solo at the Duomo cathedral of Milan. I got the invitation on a WhatsApp group from a friend noting the time of the concert in Cairo. The dress code was whatever, since the audience was invisible to one another, save for a numeric audience counter. About 3.4 million people logged in for the concert exclusively on YouTube (about 2 million logging in within 10 minutes of start time, the numbers fluctuating as the concert progressed). As the daylight shone in through the window early in the afternoon in NJ, I see my reflection on the glass of my computer screen juxtaposed on a lone Bocelli singing ‘Amazing Grace’ in front of the cathedral late in the Italian afternoon. The producers inserted video showcasing the currently empty streets of London, Paris, and NYC. Music for Hope, the concert was called.

At the same time on my phone, a friend posted a picture on Facebook captioned “guess why I’m half dressed up again?” It was a virtual wedding. Daily reminders of our impending finitude may be inciting people to get on with big life decisions.

A joke going around social media is that if this pandemic happened two decades ago, the most connected we could be at home was listening to cable news and playing the one game that existed on our pixelated phones. With the myriad of online platforms and broad bandwidth potential, people have the option to bricolage their experiences to mimic in person interactions rather than to put life on hold indefinitely. I’m reminded of myths and scriptural narratives of instantaneous global transport. It’s not jinn powering this though, it’s manmade technology.

I read Turkle’s “Alone Together” and “Reclaiming Conversation” in which we are cautioned of the loss of campfire conversation and complete solitude. I’m part of the guilty generation. I’m an older millennial who only remembers her first decade of life uninterrupted by virtual connectivity. By adolescence, I could dial into the internet on my computer and send words back and forth to people halfway across the world. While the uninterrupted human experience could be an experiential ‘loss’, the human experience of being online and the expanded possibility it allows could be an experiential ‘gain’. Should it be insinuated as morally inferior to physical presence? Especially now, when we can’t afford physical presence?

Quarantine has stratified opportunity by privileged access to space, physical and virtual. A few optimists would say families can spend more time together and have dinner around the table. This assumes you have the privilege to be with your family, and dinner guaranteed. As evidenced by the questions in relationship support groups on Facebook, families have had to renegotiate connection. Children of divorced parents need to quarantine with one parent and contend with virtual connection with the other, despite whatever legally arranged custody agreements. Grandparents see their newborn grandchildren for the first time on screen. Hospitals have limited arrangements for kin to be present, but some have arranged for iPads to give a semblance of connection. Fear, nostalgia, humor and resilience are apparent themes in online interactions. We’re at war, but there’s no obvious human enemy. The mass graves of unclaimed bodies lost to COVID19 shown in news stories might one day be commemorated as the ‘unknown soldiers’ of this war.

Multiple deaths are shared as statistics, but the tragedy is much more heartfelt when stories are shared online by the people experiencing them. While there is no shortage of content analysis of online spaces, it’s present anthropological opportunity to reconsider what makes our connections ‘really human’. What is this pandemic showing us about connecting as humans when the physical body isn’t a factor? There are so many possibilities when there is a peeling of the categories that define us in the physical realm. What is an ‘authentic’ relationship? How does kinship manifest on Facebook? How do online support groups effect participants? What affinities do we have to one another online? How are these ‘networked publics’ (boyd p8-9) exploitable?

These are all broad questions, but maybe the moment begs us to ask more questions first.

Citations:

boyd, danah. 2014. It’s Complicated : The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Turkle, Sherry. 2015. Reclaiming Conversation : The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press.

Turkle, Sherry. 2017. Alone Together : Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.