This Space Is Mine

Inspired by something a friend of mine in the States said the other day in our online chat, I've been thinking about my position here vis a vis gender. Constructions of gender here are much better defined and therefore much stricter than they are in America. Most importantly for an outsider living in Cairo as I am, the physical space of the city is divided along gender lines, with men occupying the public sphere of the cafes, parks, and sidewalks and women that of the private world of the home. Stopping by a typical coffee shop any evening, one finds exclusively men gathered around the sheeshas and trays of tea; women have no place in the ritually male space of the common cafe. This is not to say that women are never seen in public. To the contrary, the streets are filled with women buying groceries, shopping for clothes, or going about in pairs or groups on unspecified errands to and from the various neighborhoods of the city. There is a crucial difference implied in the way the two genders make use of the public space, however. Men lay claim to portions of the public zone by sitting in it, smoking in it, eating and sleeping in it, etc., marking it as their territory by involving it in traditionally private acts that are more typically linked to the home and thereby transferring to it an associated aura of ownership. Women, on the other hand, traverse the public space but do not stop in it, using it as a means to get from one place to another without attempting to establish any claim over it.

The physical space of Cairo is one of the most obviously gendered components of life here. The routines that the differing uses of space give rise to have shaped the geography and urban development of the city, while being simultaneously reinforced by socio-cultural and religious preferences so that they solidify into norms of space-usage that are nearly impossible to transgress. Being a foreigner and a woman, I am in many ways exempt from all norms by virtue of my outsider status in Egyptian society, yet on the other hand my femininity often threatens to trump (or does trump) my foreigner label so that I am perceived as a woman first and as an American only secondarily. I've found that when I stick to the streets near my apartment and walk around by myself, particularly when I've been running errands and I'm loaded down with bags of vegetables and kitchen supplies, no one bothers me. At these times, I'm abiding by the accepted rules for public space usage, using the streets only to travel from my home to the stores and back again. On the other hand, when I'm taking my time, stopping often to look around, or standing still entirely, or when I'm with a friend and we're chatting loudly in English and look as though we're tourists of the city rather than residents, the unwanted attention is pervasive and annoying.

Because I defy categorization, I am problematic to the city I live in. I am left floating in a limbo of not-belonging that my American male friends don't have to contend with. Their masculinity entitles them to the public space, while their foreigner status, which might be seen as threatening in the private world of the home, serves on the street to further liberate them from social and religious norms. They are ultimately free to do anything within public Cairo, while I am trapped within the convergence of conflicting paradigms.