Adopting a geographical/spatial approach to Beirut in contemporary Lebanese fiction, this paper deals with the city not as a passive and static physical space, but rather as interactive, mobile, and historical, a place that is created from the factuality of the street, building, or monument as well as through performance and social interaction (de Certeau, 1984). In this paper, I will show how the spaces of the city are negotiated, and how they become gendered within diverse relations of power. If traditionally women have been aligned with the house and private space and men with the outer public space, the novels reverse this hierarchy. In view of that, I will show the fluidity of the public/private divide and focus on masculinity and femininity as socially-constructed within particular frameworks linked to class, age, sexuality, religion etc., all of which inscribe and are re-inscribed by spatial differences. To illustrate this gendered notion of spatial trajectories, I will deal with two novels: Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Hikayati sharhon yatul (2005, translated as The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story), and Hassan Daoud’s Sanat al-automatik (1996, translated as The Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-Making Machine). In these works the focus is on how sexuality otherwise perceived as private and personal spills into the public sphere and is discernible in the outer spaces of the city, destabilizing the ideology of patriarchal control. In these works, the performances of pedestrians and voyeurs, both male and female, across the city are divergent and contradictory, depending directly on their quotidian experience of the city. In Daoud’s novel, the city is feminized and eroticized by men who indulge in voyeurism or “scopophilia” (Laura Mulvey, 1975). The public sphere controlled by patriarchy is also central to feminine resistance, where the boundaries between public male and private female spaces become blurred. Al-Shaykh’s novel shows that as early as the 1940’s, women roamed the streets of Beirut to buy commodities or go to the cinema to watch Egyptian romantic films of the period. Their participation in the voyeuristic spectacle afforded by the cinema empowers them and serves as a source of knowledge and power. These early nomadic movements around the streets give women as well as men access to shortcuts and other hidden locales that provide them with autonomy and freedom from patriarchal authority.