Abstract

As a subdiscipline of geography, feminist geography has recently emerged to free the study of space and gender from the exhaustive claim to knowledge of the masculine subject in traditional geography. Due to the “masculinity of the discipline,” women have been kept “hidden from geography,” but with the rise of this recent subdiscipline, the study of geography has become more open to women. Nevertheless, the fact that feminist geography has not paid the needed attention to the differences within feminism has necessitated opening the study of space and gender to a more transnational approach. With racial and ethnic differences shored up, the study of trans-feminist geography has become an interdisciplinary field studying the construction of gendered relations in hybrid spaces. A case in point is Hannah Khalil’s play The Scar Test, which represents the hardships female immigrants face in British detention centers as they await being granted or denied asylum. During their stay at the detention centers, the detained women face different forms of gender and cultural oppression such as confinement, surveillance, forced feeding, and seclusion. They, nonetheless, try to resist by acting according to codes of behavior acceptable in their cultures such as the wriggly dance, socializing, and speaking. Analyzing spatial relations in Khalil’s play from a trans-feminist perspective helps explain how women from different cultures relate to spaces that “cut across national boundaries and economic forces.” It also helps open contemporary theater to the interdisciplinary study of space, gender, and culture.