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This is Not An Advice Column: Satirizing Gender Performance on a YouTube Women’s Channel
Abstract
This paper focuses on the YouTube vlog (video blog) of Aya Mostafa, a young Egyptian satirist who started out as a make-up artist on the web television channel Maleeka TV. While the main presenter on this channel offered young women advice on beauty and social conduct, Aya’s videos satirizing mainstream femininity attracted far more hits and comments. How did Maleeka TV accommodate two such different perspectives on femininity? And what can the relative success of the satire tell us about frameworks for gender performance on Egyptian YouTube? Thinking about gender performance in the context of iterations enabled by YouTube seriality, I investigate how the satirical vlog hybridizes the genres of women’s advice shows and satirical comedy. Aya’s trenchant satire of women who think too much about their looks, and of girls seeking affirmation on social media, associated feminist critique with comedy. How did her satire iteratively produce the persona of a young Egyptian woman? I examine a selection of her YouTube performances sending up narcissism, insecurity, and other negative affects, and ask how these relate (i) to the performances of the poised, pretty main presenter on Maleeka TV, and (ii) to the comments of YouTube viewers. These different lines of relation stage the multifaceted quality of gender performance in networked contexts. I posit that such contexts require theories of gender performance other than those based on drag shows and such live performances. My analysis of digital embodiment along multiple lines of relation thus seeks to advance the study of gender performance in a digital age. The Egyptian digital context is particularly rich site of analysis, as it gives young urban women a relatively open space of sociality, and is filled with woman-oriented content. My paper investigates how YouTube channels for and by Egyptian women produce gendered space performatively.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries