UC Davis

This dissertation argues that a close study of North African literature can ground a broader reconception of feminist critiques of gendered spaces and challenge commonplace associations of North African women with limited public mobility and domestic confinement. In readings of twentieth and twenty-first century authors including Fatema Mernissi, Leila Abouzeid, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Zineb Mekouar, Souraya Nini, and Faïza Guène, this project explores the gendering of spaces and boundaries and the ways in which such partitions are both imposed upon and yet undermined by those who live them. Drawing on Mernissi, I refer to gendered spaces as a mental harem. As a concept, the harem is a frequent object of fantasy across many literary works, films, and mainstream media. Instead of accepting the orientalist framing of the harem as a supposedly culturally particular form of patriarchy, I reappropriate the term, both in reference to North Africa and more broadly. I argue that the concept of the mental harem offers a useful, revisionist feminist lens with which to study how gendered boundaries come to be internalized, and not just in North Africa. The dissertation begins by examining gendered spaces and their boundaries in twentieth-century North Africa, during early colonial times and following independence from France. It reexamines the meaning of the harem while illustrating its conceptual versatility and the immateriality of the hudud (frontiers) surrounding it. The focus then shifts to more recent literature from Morocco and the North African diaspora in France, where I explore gendered experiences of spaces in relation to ideological structures and shared public feelings and the ways in which they influence shaping an internalized harem for many young women.