Masculinity and surveillance in Habib Selmi’s The Women of al-Basatin

This article examines Habib Selmi’s Nisā’ al-Bāṣatīn (The women of al-Basatin, 2010) as a postcolonial critique of masculinity in contemporary Tunisia. Drawing on Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, Fatima Mernissi’s notion of fitna (social disorder through temptation), and Daniel Monterescu’s “situational masculinity”, it argues that the novel presents masculinity as class-inflected and contingent, shaped through homosocial rivalry and communal surveillance. Through close textual analysis, the study shows how masculine authority is negotiated across key social spaces – the mosque, the home, and the brothel – while female interiority is marginalized by a dominant male narrative perspective. In contrast, women’s resistance emerges through embodied autonomy, economic independence, and refusals of domestic compliance that unsettle patriarchal expectations. The article further contends that Selmi exposes a performative secular patriarchy in which Tunisia’s liberal modernity coexists with persistent forms of gendered control. Masculinities thus emerge as precarious formations shaped by class and communal gaze.