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‘Allez, viens voir tonton,’ Ummah Lolita: Digital Media and the Reframing of the Sexual Politics of the Nation in the 2014 Tunisian Elections.
Abstract
In Mahmud Bayrem Ettounsi’s interwar satirical newspaper Al Shabbab, Tunisia often appeared as an ailing mother in need of protection by her modernist son. While in these early political cartoons, the threat of sexual assault came from the outside world and mostly by French and Italian men, in the digital literature produced in the 2014 Presidential Elections (Facebook, Essadaa Online Newspaper, and the political cartoons of the Tunisian artist Z), the menace came from within. In both Islamist and secular digital narratives, Tunisia is constructed as a little girl about to be abducted on her way to school by old men from both the pre-and post-Revolutionary political order; either an incestuous father/grandfather or a pervert neighbor/relative. The only cartoons where she appears as a fully-developed woman are those where she is gang-raped by the two “Sheikhs of the Revolution”; 88 year-old Beji Caid Essebsi, leader of the secular Nidaa Tunis Party and 74 year-old Rashid Ghannoushi, leader of the Islamist Ennahda Party. Revisiting Gayle Robin’s 1971 essay “The Traffic in Women: Notes Towards a ‘Political Economy‘ of Sex,” this essay seeks to examine the following questions: Who is conducting the traffic in women’s bodies in the new Tunisian digital media? If there is today a cyber hom(m)osexual exchange, then what roles do differences of age, gender, class and especially region play in that male-dominated exchange? What does it mean for post-Revolutionary activists who are disillusioned with both Islamists and Secularists to express their frustration with images of sexual violence? What continuities or discontinuities are there between sexual violence against Tunisian women online and offline? Do Tunisian women show resistance or complicity with that cyber hom(m)osexual exchange? What emerging forms of masculinities and femininities underscore this cyber traffic in women’s bodies?
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Tunisia
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies