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Politics Through Other (Mediated) Means: Veiling and Unveiling the Female Body
Abstract
Women's bodies have historically been used as political, religious, or cultural symbols. They were often the sites to be studied in order to understand religions, ideologies, and traditions. Arab and Muslim Feminists' work (Ahmed, 1993; Mernissi, 1987) has shed much light on the centrality of the female body in any understanding of Islam as a historical and contemporary socio-political and cultural movement. This paper traces the path of two women and how their bodies were used by competing groups as conduits of identification. Examined here are the cases of Neda in Iran and the "Sois Belle et Vote" campaign in Lebanon during each country's 2009 elections. What makes the uses and appropriations of these bodies particular to these "Muslim" contexts is the recurrent theme of veiling and unveiling of the "national" female body. These processes of veiling and unveiling served to reassert various group identities and were played out in various media such as billboards, blogs, viral videos and posters within virtual, public and political spaces. What allowed such discursive contestation, that is, multiple and conflicting uses of these bodies - some of which were formulated by groups outside of the countries' traditional power structures -was their movement from one medium to another. Ultimately, this paper argues that while the movement of these bodies into virtual space ("new" media) enabled non-dominant groups to make their own competing claims, it is namve to posit that the capacities of new media technologies (that of Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube) trigger and fuel revolutions. The regime was not toppled in Iran and Lebanese women did not take the streets of Beirut. Rather, what needs to be considered is the proposition that although media do not produce revolutions, any "revolution" today will not happen without the "new" media.
Discipline
Communications
Geographic Area
Iran
Lebanon
Sub Area
None