Femaleness, Femininity and Feminotopia: The Female Hamam as a Homosocial Space

Spaces are gendered in a myriad of different ways in accordance with not only various user identities, but also social, cultural and political domains, within which these identities are constructed. Although this multi-faceted gendering potential of spaces inevitably challenge the global binary constructs (male/female; public/private) of the patriarchal system in which the male is associated with the public and the female with the private sphere; this twofold gendering of spaces may well be subverted by means of the lived experiences in various cultural geographies. The Turkish neighborhood bath (mahalle hamamı) is one such gendered space in which the public norms of its environmental setting have been subverted by means of privatized spatial practices of its female users. In an alternative critical approach to male-dominated constructions of the hamam, this paper focuses on the women’s section of the neighborhood hamam as ‘a homosocial space’. In the first part, I consider whether the sexual division of the hamam reflects any difference in daily spatial practices. In the following parts, based on an in-depth reading and interpretation of the literary works by critical female scholars, ethnographers and travelers, I make a threefold analysis of various genderings that occur in the females’ hamam: (1) a cultural space of femaleness, (2) a representational space of femininity, (3) a feminotopia of female autonomy, empowerment and pleasure. In light of the analyses, I conclude that the homosociability in the females’ hamam is a unique kind of homogenous sociability derived from heterogeneous forms of genderings in the Ottoman-Turkish society.