Fatema Mernissi: Size 6 - The Western Women's Harem

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, theories, and concepts from Fatema Mernissi's essay 'Size 6: The Western Women's Harem' in Scheherazade Goes West.

Size 6

The standard clothing size in Western fashion that Mernissi identifies as a normative constraint functioning like a modern harem, idealizing adolescent thinness and excluding mature bodies.

Deviant sizes

The classification applied by American department stores to clothing sizes outside standard norms (such as size 4 and 6), which must be purchased in specialized stores.

Zirafa

The Moroccan term meaning 'giraffe,' directed at the author in her youth due to her long neck, which taught her not to depend on external standards for self-worth.

Beauty blackmail

The practice of using societal physical appearance standards to evaluate, intimidate, and control women, against which the author developed personal self-reliance.

Western harem

A system of domination that manipulates time and light to frame female beauty exclusively around prepubescent youth, rendering mature and aging women invisible.

Eastern harem

A system of male domination that uses spatial segregation and physical barriers, such as the veil, to exclude women from public space.

Chinese foot-binding

A historical practice cited by Mernissi where men defined small, childlike feet as the aesthetic ideal, prompting women to voluntarily mutilate their feet and surrender mobility to gain male approval.

Symbolic violence (la violence symbolique)

A concept developed by Pierre Bourdieu describing a form of power exerted directly on the body without apparent physical force, activating deeply internalized cultural codes.

Magic enchantment

Pierre Bourdieu's phrase for the spontaneous acceptance of subservient status by dominated subjects who have internalized patriarchal bodily codes.

Les signes ordinaires de la hiérarchie sexuelle

The ordinary markers of sexual hierarchy, such as older age and larger physical body size, which Bourdieu argues women willingly surrender by preferring taller and older male partners.

Political sedative

Naomi Wolf's characterization of dieting, arguing that chronic caloric restriction induces passivity, anxiety, and a tractable female population.

Immanuel Kant's theories of beauty (Mernissi's interpretation)

Nineteenth-century philosophical views cited as demanding that women appear childish and brainless in order to be deemed beautiful.