Rough Draft
As images of San Bernadino shooter Tashfeen Malik juxtapose horrific images of a veiled woman stoned to death in Pakistan, the media currently offers endless affirmation for non-Muslim Americans to justify Islamophobic rhetoric and fear. Images of Arab and Muslim women presented by the media semiotically work to reinforce historically situated and often contradictory representations able to simultaneously evoke fear, sympathy, hatred and curiosity while failing to adequately address issues of women’s rights in the Arab world. In academia, western feminists reject the notion of feminism in the Arab world or keep the issues at a safe and global distance, often ignoring a long history of Arab feminism and existing calls to action.
What becomes lost in both instances are the actual voices of women in the Arab world as well as their past and present efforts in human and equal rights. This research will address the issues of erasure in Arab women’s voices by addressing their socially constructed identity from a Western perspective to understand how constructions in media work to silence the efforts of Arab women’s voices, even in regard to western feminism.
Feminist theorists have fallen under criticism for having dismissed the notion that the Arab world could benefit from feminism or that feminism could be indigenous to the Arab world in general and Muslim women in particular. Critiques by Nawar Al-Hassan Golley refute this perception, arguing that not only is feminism relevant to Arab women but has a substantial history which has been perpetually undermined by western feminism (Golley, 2004).
The notion that women in the Arab world are simply too different to develop feminism is, in part, constructed by the same historically situated misunderstandings that much of the western world falls ill to. By continuing to perpetuate these false representations of Arab women, the west creates canvases out of human lives onto which they project false renderings that only serve to further “otherize” non-western women, silencing their heterogeneous voices in a construction of false homogeneity.
Through the erasure of their voices, western media representations contribute to creating a dangerous space where real victims of violence and oppression in conflict areas become a problem; all at once they are under our authority to use opportunistically to promote specific political or social agendas yet distant enough to consider irrelevant in understanding and engaging with effectively.
To contest such constructions, this paper will highlight the heterogeneous lives of Arab and Muslim women in Egypt and Afghanistan, all of whom are or have previously contributed to the history of feminism in their country. By doing this, the research does not only challenge the problematic representations of Araba and Muslim women but it seeks to effectively dismantle them using their own voices.
Methodology
It is important to first be grounded in an understanding of the historical relationship western media and academia has with the Arab world. To accomplish this, the work of Edward Said, Susan Muaddi Darraj and Katharina Motyl, will be used to illustrate relevant background information on perceptions of the Muslim world throughout the 20th and 21st century. US relations with the Middle East obviously precede these time periods but they are the most relevant for how the homogenization of Arab women was and continues to be part of the erasure of individual identity by the media to mobilize sensationalized realities.
Said’s work in Orientalism is often referenced for his critique of western representations of Muslim and Arab women historically in literature and pop culture. Darraj’s Understanding the Other Sister: The Case of Arab Feminism observes the history of Arab feminism in juxtaposition to how Arab women are often portrayed, and silenced, within the media. Finally, Katharina Motyl’s No Longer a Promised Land: The Arab-Muslim Experience After 9/11 gives insight into the historical trend of pre-9/11 representations of Muslim women and how they persist today. (Said 19;Darraj 2002; Motyl 2011).
Once a background has been established I will draw from anthropological work on global feminism such as Chandra Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes: Revisited and Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? to particularize the way western representations of Arab women in academia and globally prevent the ability to address feminist struggles locally.
I will also draw from work in linguistic anthropology as it pertains to historical mapping, racial classification and authority. Kristina Wirtz’s work in Performing Afro-Cuba synthesizes premiere theoretical work in linguistics and linguistic anthropology from Mikhail Bakhtin, Michael Silverstein and Judith Butler to think about performance as part of the racialization process of black Cubans in Santiago. Specifically, her use of Bakhtinian chronotopes and his discussion of historical mapping speaks to the genre of “Arabness” in a US context. Referring to blackness in Cuba, Wirtz argues that such racial classification is not a static or straightforward category in general and is “a complex series of cultural constructions whose [Blackness in particular] overlapping histories encompass several continents and oceans over half a millennium” (Wirtz, 2014: 220). Considering the construction of Arabness in the US as it persists today, the same overlapping histories exist in what diachronically changes or becomes reified as the irrevocable relationship between the Arab world and the US changes.
Highlighting history as an interlocutor and receiver of racial reconstruction, Wirtz uses Bakhtin to illustrate how history also assembles geography both figuratively and literally. She argues that as history “maps onto and thereby helps recreate history,” geography can be seen as historical record (Wirtz, 2014, 201). In dismantling the homogeneous representations of Arab women, especially geographically, this work becomes salient.
The first part of this paper will, as previously stated, establish a background for the racialization process of Arabs from a US context. How the media represents them, especially as a homogeneous group, is largely informed by important moments in the history of US relations with the Arab world. This will allow for a connection to the misappropriation of Arab women in feminist theory as well as why previous approaches to the region from a western feminist perspective have often failed. Finally, a comparison of these notions against actual voices and accounts from Muslim feminists from Egypt and Afghanistan will be used to contest the work western reconstructions have done while emphasizing the heterogeneity of women in the Arab world.
Background
The Middle East as a geographic region is a Eurocentric, nebulous and socially constructed concept, emerging in Europe during World War II by the military to tactically delineate the space between Europe and the “far east” (Brittanica;2015). Now, the term “Middle East” or “Near East” has normalized itself within the western perspective as an appropriate way, although wildly inaccurate, to geographically place all Arab speaking and Muslim countries. Similar to other socially constructed concepts, the exact geographic boundaries of the Middle East are unofficially established and change over time. As Wirtz discusses in her work on Afro-Cuban performance, history
Like many immigrant populations from Europe, early Arab immigrants attempted to assimilate and were, eventually, successful in almost complete assimilation into white hegemony. For these early populations, racial classification as “white” and triumphing the economic outcome of subordinate communities was attainable, especially for immigrants with greater human capital, or the skills and knowledge necessary to function within a labor market (Cainker 50). It is worth mentioning, however, that relatively speaking the success of early Arab immigrants is not the totalizing experience of all Arab immigrants as many without the same level of human capital necessary to succeed were pushed to the margins of society socially and economically (Cainkar; 2008:50). In the 1980’s and 1990’s, migrants of the diaspora were often more poor and less educated than the immigrants before them.
World War II, the Balfour Declaration, and the subsequent political and social conflicts in the latter half of the 20th century such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the June war and the Gulf War etc, marked a “fall from grace of marginal whiteness” as predominantly Palestinian Americans were portrayed in the media as culturally barbaric enemies of the US government (Cainkar, 2008). This, as Louise Cainkar argues, is the locus for modern discrimination, hostility and violence toward Arab and Muslim populations. As Cainkar writes in her article Thinking Outside the Box: Arabs and Race in the United States, “Islamist challenges to American hegemony became more powerful than Arab nationalism and essentialist constructions reached beyond human difference to civilization” (Cainkar 2008:46). In other words, the involvement of the US in international conflicts concerning Arab/Muslim countries engendered a fear of their people and their seemingly “backward” customs as a threat to the “American way of life.” Their subordination domestically was rooted in an essentialist belief in “innate cultural dispositions to violence,” a belief still vehemently present today (Cainkar 2008:48).
What emerged from the post-World War II era and the Arab/Israeli conflicts which situated Palestinian Americans as the enemy, was a classification unique to Arab ethnicities, within the US context, as neither white nor minority. Caught in its own ambiguity, the term “Middle East” or even “Arab” (as there are many languages spoken across this area) has made it difficult to place people of Arab descent within the racial classification system of the US. Cainkar emphasizes this in her article, addressing the erasure of discussions regarding the “darkening of Arabs,” and its social side effects within US political organizations and institutions. She says “Arabs have experienced the double burden of being excluded from whiteness and mainstream recognition of color,” making it difficult to index inequality on the basis of race. She goes on to say that despite their heterogeneous ethnic options, their negative stigma as a group has not been altered while their racial identity formation remains an “unfolding and ongoing” process (Cainkar 2008:50). At the time of the US civil rights movement, the ongoing international conflicts in the Middle East kept Arabs at an ideological arms-length. Officially, Arabs are white (and as such, ineligible for affirmative action) although their socioeconomic status and discrimination places them, as far as Anthropologists are concerned outside of white hegemony (Cainkar 2008:49).
Unable to be classified as white or non-white, the image of Arab/Muslim populations has become its own racial classification, despite the diversity culturally and linguistically between countries. Opposing our American ideology “personal responsibility” concerning the individual, the homogeneity of Arabs/Muslims transcends racial classifications and attaches itself to a concept that the actions of small groups or individuals within the conceptualized region of the Middle East is the collective responsibility of all Arabs (Cainkar 2008:49). This concept, I argue, establishes a base for the historic and presently emerging stereotypes of Arab women.
The focus of this paper, representations of Arab women in the media through a Western perspective, urges me to make a decision as to the terminology I will use throughout my discussion. By continuing to use the phrase “Arab” and “Middle East,” I am on the precipice of perpetuating stereotypes but I feel that as of now, there is no alternative word for referring to the homogenized group of people spanning from Turkey to Uzbekistan. As such, in order to address the affected populations, I must draw for now on this phraseology. In the last section of this paper, when mentioning the various feminist movements emerging from specific countries like Egypt and Afghanistan, I will address populations by singular and focused geographic location.
Section 1
In an article written shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Arab feminist scholar Susan Muaddi Darraj recounts the memory of a white student lamenting the forced veiling of Muslim women in the Middle East. “I feel so bad for them all,” says the student, “At least Christian women don’t have to walk three steps behind their husbands…that’s so insulting” (Darraj; 2002). This exchange, steeped in misinformation and ethnocentric criticism, is for Darraj and other scholars a common occurrence in dealing with Western perceptions of Arab women. “Many Americans continue to purchase wholesale the neatly packaged image of the veiled, meek Arab woman,” Darraj says, “this pitiful creature follows her husband like a dark shadow, is forced to remain silent and obey her husband at all times, is granted a body only to deliver more children, perhaps even in competition with her husband’s other wives” (Darraj 2002).
The image of the “meek”, oppressed Arab woman is one that has remained powerful in US media imagery, especially in buttressing the valor and affirmation of the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – as Americans, we were there to protect freedom and save women from the terrifying oppression of the Taliban and Islam – yet, as feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty points out, this view of “us and them” misdirects the dialogue of feminism as it pertains to Arab women away from individuals. By assuming the “white savior” role in media imagery, the focus of demands from Arab women, their values and opinions, are lost in an assumption that America knows best about the Arab world.
Images of Muslim women as oppressed also work to reconstruct images of Arab men as barbaric and violent. Historically, researchers recognize the trope of an “rich oil sheik” or “despot lusting after western women,” in earlier 20th century representations of Arab men but throughout the 1960’s and especially after 9/11, this image transformed into a more violent image of Arab men as “terrorists, traitorous and religious fanatics.” These images, according to Katharina Motyl have “increasingly portrayed persons associated with the category Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim as not only culturally backward, uncivilized, exotic, or potentially dangerous but also as potential enemies of the US nation” (Motyl,?) Using women as the medium through which the threat of distant violence is made tangible, and Islam a force to cull or eradicate, representations of Muslim men have been made to appear more threatening than ever. By constructing male identities through the specific lens of female identity, the female voice becomes more susceptible to erasure.
Lila Abu-Lughod critiques this imagery in her article Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others by drawing attention to the emphasis on women’s liberation from Taliban rule within the immediate response to the World Trade Center attacks on September 11. Much of the media coverage surrounding this issue focused not on the political and historical roots of human suffering in this part of the world, but on the “religiocultural,” or the religious and cultural beliefs, shared by 1.5 billion Muslims to explain the fanatical actions of singular terrorist organizations. She critiques the mobilization of Arab female imagery in contextualizing broader, more politically and historically rooted issues:
“the ‘culture’ of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the U.S. role in this history. Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering in this part of the world.” (Abu-Lughod:2002)
Similar to the theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Abu-Lughod’s argument shows Arab femininity being constructed and used to construct other social realities in the media, while concurrently erasing the actuality of what Arab femininity is or is not. The consequence of focusing on the relgiocultural as opposed to the political and historical, she argues, is a self-inflicted inability to accurately address conflict in the region. She goes on to say:
“Instead of political and historical explanations, experts were being asked to give religiocultural ones, Instead of questions that might lead to the exploration of global interconnections, we were offered ones that worked to artificially divide the world into separate spheres—recreating an imaginative geography of West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas.” (Abu-Lughod:2002)
Here, Mohanty’s concepts are illustrated as these explanations served to divide the world into “separate spheres,” instead of an interconnected continuum of how regional conflicts in the Middle East, based on non-religiocultural understandings, are affected by a global political history.
Ghazi Wahid-Falah, in his analysis of visual representations of Arab/Muslim women in newspapers, refers to a term coined by T.A. van Dijk, “elite racism.” Viewing the media and press coverage as a social institution, Wahid-Falah sees a “microlevel process of producing news…informed by, and, to a certain extent, is the manifestation of racism at the macrolevel of society and the state” (Wahid-Falah 2005:304). In other words, those who control and have access to the media decide how reality is represented, which is interpreted and recreated by media consumers. For the purpose of my later analysis, this is critical to understanding how the media serves as an interlocutor in how people internalize misrepresentations of Arab women, provided by the media, which then becomes part of a covert racist discourse.
In projecting images of Arab women as helpless and oppressed by the patriarchy, the media seems to use women as a platform to reify stereotypes of Arab men as violent, sexist, degenerate terrorists. In the work of feminists such as Simon de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, male and female genders are often constructed through and by one another. For Beauvoir, society establishes what a woman is by the lack of what a man is, or in other words, a woman exists in the space of what a man is not. Butler will go on to later argue that these constructions do not presuppose one another but are constructed through larger structures of dominance and are often reiterated and reconstructed by one another.
In regard to Arab women and men, the image of a meek and oppressed woman reflects and reconstructs the image of Arab men as barbaric and violent. Historically, researchers reflect on image of the “rich oil sheik” or “despot lusting after western women,” in earlier 20th century representations until a similar turn throughout the 1960’s and especially after 9/11 to a more violent image of Arab men as “terrorists, traitorous and religious fanatics.” These images, according to Katharina Motyl have “increasingly portrayed persons associated with the category Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim as not only culturally backward, uncivilized, exotic, or potentially dangerous but also as potential enemies of the US nation.” Using women as the medium through which the threat of distant violence is made tangible and Islam a force to cull or eradicate, representations of Muslim men have been made to appear more threatening than ever.
In binary opposition to the meek and covered maiden, the image of the harem girl or the odalisque, as some researchers phrase it, is another historically prevalent representation of Arab women in Western media. This image, unlike the covered and oppressed maiden, is one of sensuality and power. As Darraj describes, the Odalisque is a “Western-generated frenzy” of the concubine, meant to lay in wait for the sultan, the only man allowed to see her, in lavishly adorned palaces (Darraj 2002). This trope, while perhaps faded from more recent media representations, still quietly persists in the exoticism of Arab women and again the assumption of total male control, regardless of how a woman is situated within the binary. Golley also critiques this image with a detailed history of the harem. Literally translating to “sacred,” which could apply to any part of the house a woman resides in, the erotic and mysterious harem was something that early ethnographers, likely male, would not have had access to. Therefore, the eroticism of the harem is fundamentally flawed in the work it does to represent Arab and Muslim women (Golley, 2004).
Especially in the case of the harem, ethnographic research and the media create a circular pattern of construction and reconstruction as it applies to the Arab world. To dismantle some of these historically embedded ideologies, it is important to address the issues in scholarly work which have informed and been informed by the history of stereotypes outlined in the previous section.
The following section will focus on the conflicts between western and Arab feminism, beginning with Chandra Mohanty’s critique of how western feminism approaches third world women in scholarship.
Mohanty argues that the “us and them” perspective is actively engaged by feminist scholars as well. In the revision of her first critical feminist theory piece, Mohanty addresses issues within the discourse of feminism on how women in the “third world” are talked about. In general, Mohanty sees a pattern of “us and them” in the feminist narrative – a pattern which geographically and ideologically separates foreign women’s issues with our own. This thinking, she explains, is limiting in what feminism is trying to achieve. From an academic perspective, she outlines two within the literature that tend to emerge:
1. The “feminist as tourist” model which often situates Eurocentric feminist issues as the unchanged and formidable locus of the discourse, through which “third world” or “foreign” issues are considered as a supplement to the issues of Western women as opposed to a continuum of issue regarding power and gender. (Mohanty 2003:515)
2. The “feminist as explorer” model, adherent to cultural relativism, distantly addressing issues of women in the third or second world but again, not contextualizing them within a greater global model. (Mohanty 2003:516)
I find the “feminist as explorer,” model to be a relevant component to this research. As will be discussed later, issues of Arab women are not simply looked at as a homogenous, all-encompassing subject but as one distantly related to the issues of women in America. As Nawar Al-Hassan Golley mentions in his piece Is Feminism Relevant to Arab Women? Western feminists have argued that Arab women’s lives are “so different from theirs that they cannot possibly develop any kind of feminism” (Golley, 2004). His perspective, much like Mohanty’s, is that women in the Arab world need commensurate access to positive change to women in the west; no more no less.
Media images of oppressed and naïve Arab women fosters the “us and them” mentality Mohanty mentions, insinuating that Arab women need, specifically white western women, to save them, if they can save them at all. As Lila Abu Lughod muses on this in her article “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” she says: “Often, Arab women’s voices are excluded from discussions concerning their own lives, and they are to be “informed” about feminism, as if it is an ideology exclusive to American women alone” (Lila Abu Lughod 2002).
It is a misconception by the west that feminist thought and a call for emancipation was introduced to the Arab world through the West. Similar to the west, gradual shifts in political organization and society, especially the effects of globalization (not limited to interaction with the West) influenced men and women from the bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie of the 19th century to address the issues of female rights, some of whom were Muslim, which serves to discredit more than one assumed stereotype.
Recently, feminist thinkers have begun to address the misconceptions present in earlier works, yet some still resist the Islamic feminist movement. Many women reformers of Islam argue that true readings of the Quaran do not allow for some commonly assumed doctrine such as forced marriage and instead offer a call for more egalitarian treatment of women. As Therese Saliba states in her article Arab Feminism at the Millenium “The rise of Islamic women’s movements throughout the Arab world has further challenged the secular, liberalizing assumptions of feminism by focusing primarily on progressive readings of Islamic texts to argue for a more egalitarian Islamic tradition that enhances women’s rights” (Saliba, 1091).
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