Summary Of Dreams Of Trespass By Mernissi

Interestingly, Rhouni narrates the twofold critique that Mernissi uses to approach the Moroccan feminist discourses. Moreover, the deconstruction of euro-centrism and patriarchy are meant to relegate women to the periphery and to place them in a secondary position. Moroccan women in the western mainstream indicate passivity, lust, docility, and submissive human beings who are frozen and essentialized to sex objects. That is why Mernissi seeks to represent them as being active agents, powerful beings, producers, transcendent, and the like, by generating local feminist narratives that counter the discursive western ones. In her work Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood Mernissi proves that, as Rhouni claims, ‘’Foregrounding women’s agency, the novel is an attempt to decenter feminism from its Western location where it supposedly has originated, locating it in Moroccan culture and even within the confines of the harem” . Furthermore, patriarchy is another hindrance that women have to deal with in the Moroccan context and elsewhere; in the sense that, women

Obviously, this division is ideological and discursive as the public space, which is a symbol of power, production, creativity, agency, and the like, is male’s space. Whereas, the private space symbolizes submissiveness, passivity, reproduction, imminence, and nurture, is women’s space. Thus, space is gendered and not equally distributed for it is male dominated. To distinguish between the two types of space, Hudud is the divider and it must not be crossed by women. She compares between the two spaces of the medina and the Ville Nouvelle. The former which is erected to serve what Foucault names panopticon theory, and the former that inspires a sense of fascination, frustration, and