Women’s Resistance to Hostile Spaces

Civil war in Lebanon has lasted for fifteen years and has claimed a large number of victims between dead and wounded. War’s victims are not only individuals involved in the battlefield to fight for a cause they believe in, but also women who usually do not participate in face to face battles. In times of war, men who are not soldiers refrain from going out owing to the military situation outside. Home is thus transformed from a place where a woman can achieve partial freedom, to a spacewhere she is monitored by the male gaze continuously. She thus becomes a double victim: victim of an outside patriarchal society which dictates rules of behavior she should abide by, and a victim of the power her husband, father, and brother exert on her inside her home. According to Blunt and Rose (1994), space is “central both to masculinist power and to feminist resistance” (p. 1) since men impose rules that women try to resist.