Building oppressive proxies: Sudanese and Egyptian domestic place and the production of patriarchal femininity in Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley

Abstract

Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley disrupts the trend in much feminist literature to present women’s places and spaces as sites of revolt against patriarchal oppression. In the small places of the Abuzeid home, Lyrics Alley reveals that women’s places are not inherently emancipatory, and patriarchal behaviour is not exclusively observed in men. Through the socio-spatial dispersal of patriarchal power, homosocial domestic places, where women interact with other women, can produce femininities that oppress other women by actively advancing patriarchal concerns. In this essay, Lyrics Alley provides a cartography for socio-geographical enquiry to establish how space and place construct patriarchal women. My analyses of these literary spaces reveal the mechanisms by which patriarchal women are spatially produced, and may use space to oppress other women.