Week 2 Response

The most interesting part of the readings for me was the contrast between imprisonment and protection, and how these terms can be conflated with one another. This theme is most explicit in Alloula's "Women's Prisons". In the photographs, and as explained in the writing, the women depicted are clearly imprisoned by conventional means (prison bars), while some of them (such as the younger girls in "Aicha and Zorah" on page 22) are also covered in more modest, traditional garb. This clear physical imprisonment is also implied to be protection from the impulses of the photographer or a male observer; the women being photographed behind bars are the "equivalent of sexual frustration" (Allula 25), and the bars in turn protect them from the man who "is desperately clutching the bars that keep him from the object of his unequivocal yearning" (Allula 25). This protection is only from physical interaction, as voyeurism is a term often brought up in Allula's piece, a term which accurately sums up the concept of the harem as a "phantasm".

This conflation of imprisonment and protection is also clear in Ann Laura Stoler's "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power" in the discussion of European women and their sexual roles in colonial communities. White women "needed suitable quarters -- discrete and enclosed" (Stoler 19) in which to maintain a higher standard of European-style living, while the men who had arrived in the colonies before them were often encouraged to indulge in concubinage with local women. The heavy racism of life in the colonies also resulted in an abundance of sexual assault and rape charges against supposedly uncivilized native men for violating the white women, thus requiring that the women be further secluded and protected from the threat. This protection of the white women from the native male threat, the same threat that was restrained to voyeurism in Allula's piece, resulted in a similar imprisonment within their own homes as was seen in "Women's Prisons", while by contrast the European men were even encouraged to have extramarital relations with the local women as concubines.