Hammam, Harem and Heterotopia - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages Foucault established five principles that explain the reality of heterotopia spaces. The first of these principles is crisis and deviation and refers to sacred and prohibited spaces. The principle of crisis and deviation are captured through the imagery of hammams and harems in Ben Jalloun’s The Sand Child and Lord Byron’s Don Juan which represent sites of bodies and androgyny. Through Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this study analyses transgressing bodies in Ben Jalloun’s The Sand Child and Byron’s Don Juan to illustrate how images of hammams and harems represent networks of non-linear time and space in the development of history and its intersection with the present.

Thesis Statement

Although separated by geography, era and genre, and the disparate experience of colonizer and colonized, both The Sand Child and Don Juan politicize the androgen. Byron and Ben Jelloun transform the androgynous body into the ultimate expression of sexual/na(ra)national border crossing, and alter the Orient, replete with its iconic images of hammams and harems, into a counter-hegemonic liminal space where alterity is fully explored. Through narrating ambiguous bodies and androgynous experiences, both novels essentialize and destabilize national and gender identities.

Part 1:

The postcolonial scholarship acknowledges the debilitating effects colonialism had on the national psychology of former colonial cultures. According to Said, within the framework of Orientalist discourse, Arab society is often reduced to a submissive female figure waiting to be unveiled and liberated by a virile colonial presence (309). Although Said’s investigation of the feminization of Oriental races and culture involves an examination of the political and sexual paradigms of race, he distinguishes the feminization of race and culture. In doing so, Said fails to link colonial politics of race to gender and sexuality. On the other hand, Frantz Fanon fills the gap left by Said’s failure to investigate the effects of colonial emasculation on the gender of the colonized. Fanon instead represents the post-colonial desire for independence as a re-establishment of masculinity for the colonized male and the liberalization of the colonized female. Yet, Fanon appears to have overestimated its ability to break the dichotomous opposition of masculine dominance/feminine subservience from the actual gendered bodies. ...Download file to see next pages Read More