SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

Discovering Feminist narratives in private spaces: Homes, Hamams and armoires

Room 221, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)

Dr. Angela Phillips Director Gender and Women’s Studies Warren Wilson College aphillips@warren-wilson.edu Discovering Feminist Narratives in Private Spaces: Homes, Hamams, Armoires In Iris Marion Young’s essay “House and Home : feminist variations on a theme” Young gives a critique of patriarchal values through a women-centered account of the positive aspects of a specifically female experience, preserving and maintaining the private, domestic space. For the author, personal space and privacy are important material bases of self. The author points out that homes are both constructed and preserved, however, constructing is associated with the male, and preserving the living or dwelling space associated with the female. Young’s analysis considers many theories on the home, in particular Martin Heidegger, “building in the sense of preserving and nurturing is not making anything.” (Building, Dwelling, Thinking” 147) For Young, Heidegger only sees the moment of constructing as creative. However, Young contests Heidegger’s disregarding of preservation and maintains that the idea of home and its preservation contributes to one’s sense of identity and can form a personal narrative, “The home is not simply the things, however, but their arrangement in space in a way that supports the body habits and routines of those who dwell there.” (139) Young endeavors to revaluate and degender the private and public work of the preservation of meaningful things and spaces. I propose to apply this same analysis to the traditional Arab-Muslim view of public and private space, which is based on a strict gender-based space dichotomy. For many, maintaining the sanctity of the family automatically assigns women to the domestic, private space of the home, while men control the public space of the street and the marketplace. Such a separation of space and of sexes in a patriarchal environment implies that the outside denotes authority, while the inside powerlessness. In my presentation, I will consider how certain Moroccan women writers validate traditional private settings and show how acts of homemaking and preservation give context to their protagonists’ lives and individuate their narratives.