From the Harem to the Midan: (Counter-)Spaces of Gender and Sexuality in the Arab Region

Catalog description

From the Harem to the Midan: (Counter-)Spaces of Gender and Sexuality in the Arab Region This course applies a spatial lens to the study of gender and sexuality in the Arab region. Drawing upon feminist and queer theory, feminist geography, and critical urban studies, we will focus on a number of spaces to examine how, through their inhabitation, people throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and the Gulf conform to, reproduce, resist, and subvert dominant norms about gender and sexuality. The harem, the hammam (the public bathhouse), the café, the public garden, the shopping mall, the gym, the midan (the public square), the prison, and the Internet are some of the spaces through which we will explore the production of (counter-)spaces for self-expression, leisure, romance, (homo-)erotic desire, sociability, and politics. The course adopts an intersectional approach to analyze how gender inflects upon and is inflected by race, class, sexuality, religion/sect, and nationality in the production of space from a multi-scalar perspective that considers the home in relation to the neighborhood, the city, and the state. We will engage memoirs, fiction, historical texts, academic articles, art, films, and other media to complicate notions of public and private, consider questions of embodiment and agency, and discuss the transformation of these spaces and of people’s inhabitation of them over time and across borders.