ancient cities

the highly sexualized contacts that often resulted
had a profound influence on both the colonizer
and the colonized. Yet, Western observers continue
to perpetuate colonialist discourses that marginalize
women of the third world by situating
them in spaces that have limited relevance to third
world cultures.
In the Islamic world, there are strong cultural
and religious restrictions on women’s ability to
move unaccompanied through public spaces.
Visitors to Muslim countries are struck by the
strongly gendered distinctions in both public and
private spaces. Male visitors to a Muslim household
are typically welcomed into a formal sitting
area with a nearby dining space. Drinks and food
are brought by the male head of household or one
of his sons. The interior space of the dwelling is set
up so that the women of the household can move
through the rest of the space without being seen by
anyone in the public rooms. This separation
extends into the public sphere because women in
public spaces must be covered or veiled. Similarly,
in the public spaces of the mosque, there are separate
areas for men and women to pray. Yet, within
the culture, some women consider veiling an
enabling device that frees them to enter public
spaces that would otherwise be inaccessible to
them. Other crossings into public space can occur
in what Amy Mills describes as Mahalle space in
Istanbul. These neighborhood spaces shift when
men are at work, permitting the space outside the
houses to become a semiprivate space shared by
women in neighboring houses and that reverts to
its fully public nature when the men return and
becomes off limits to women.
In other parts of the world, the nature of
domestic space is quite variable. Louise Johnson
has edited a special series of ten articles in the
feminist geography journal, Gender, Place, and
Culture, that examined the varied understandings
of kitchen space across cultures. Although in the
West kitchens are usually within a private dwelling
place, contributors to this issue note that
many kitchens in developing nations are shared
spaces located in a courtyard or other communal
space.
In some cultures, land is inherited solely by men,
but in parts of West Africa, land is inherited via the
maternal lineage. Accordingly, in the case of the
wife’s death or divorce, the land reverts to the wife’s
Gendered Space
301
family, leaving the husband without a home or producing
crops. There is great variability in the gendered
nature of public commercial activity. For
example, in the West African nation of Togo,
women known as the Mama Benzs are the dominant
force in commerce, especially for cloth and household
goods, and because of their influence have also
begun to exert political influence on the government.
However, in other parts of West Africa, commercial
activity is the sole province of men.
Many non-Western cultures show greater tolerance
of gender diversity, and the resulting array of
possible gender categories also undermines binary
understanding of gendered space. These different
cultural situations provide useful insights into the
spatial implications of more fluid gender possibilities.
Anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, in Third Sex,
Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in
Culture and History, has provided a rich collection
of perspectives from around the globe demonstrating
variations in gender categories. Some of these
variations also have direct spatial implications.
Sometimes, sacred spaces are protected or otherwise
associated with nonbinary genders. For
instance, traditionally, the guardians of the holy
places of Islam were special eunuchs known as
mukhanath, who were considered a kind of third
gender, which enabled them to be present while
both men and women approached the holy sites.
In India, third-gender people known as hijra play
important public roles during religious ceremonies
marking births and weddings.
The gendering of urban spaces is a result of specific
sociocultural processes, including religion,
social structure, and economic class. As societies
evolve, the social forces that create the gendered
spaces may also change. For example, although
some view religion as a conservative force in terms
of gender, in fact, the spread of religion is dynamic
and rises and falls with global expansion. In
Turkey, for instance, in the 1920s, Ataturk led a
revolutionary change toward a more secularized
interpretation of Islam that decreed that veils would
no longer be worn in “modern” society. More than
half a century later, some of those secular changes
are under considerable pressure with the rise of
Islamist parties in Turkey, and the nature of gendered
space is in flux.
In 1996, South Africa adopted its first postapartheid
constitution, which includes some of the