3 - Sexualizing the City: The Yoking of Flesh and Stone

Summary

Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look.

Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975: 11)

When the Woman Looks.

Williams, “When the Woman Looks” (1984: 83)

The emphasis in this chapter is on how sexuality otherwise perceived as private and personal spills into the public sphere and is discernible in the outer spaces of the city. In these works, the city is feminized and eroticized by men who indulge in “fetishistic scopophilia” (Mulvey 1975: 14). In addition to their voyeuristic activities in the outer space, some male characters in Daoud's Sanat al-'ūtūmatīk take refuge on the roofs of buildings where they withdraw from the street in a voyeuristic attempt to watch women in their apartments. The roof where they position themselves is a liminal space where they indulge freely in fetishistic gazes, watching women sleeping or dressing up. In the city, these men of rural background are overwhelmed by this female presence.

Within the public as well as private spheres of the city, gender is constructed and reconstructed in daily quotidian exchanges. In Ḥikāyatī sharḥun yaṭūl, women as early as the 1930s roamed the streets of Downtown Beirut to buy commodities or go to the cinema and watch Egyptian romantic films of the period. Their peripatetic movements around the streets give them access to shortcuts and other hidden locales that provide them with autonomy and freedom, challenging the separation of public/outside and private/inside spheres. It also reveals that modernity is relative and that even in this period women are citified and certain locales in the city like a cafe in Rawsha that accommodate women are feminized and sexualized. Such sites are open to a different “social ordering” (Rose 1993: 46), which destabilizes a malecontrolled city.

The public sphere controlled by patriarchy is also central to feminine resistance, where the boundaries between what Rose (1993: 150) refers to as the “territoriality of masculinism” and private female spaces are erased, producing “paradoxical” spaces where women occupy, simultaneously, the inner sphere and the outer patriarchal domain. In point of fact, woman's participation in the voyeuristic spectacle afforded by the cinema empowers her and serves as a source of knowledge and power.