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#IAmReal - Mediating Difference Between Amna and Sophia: Citizenship, Gender and Hyperreality in Saudi Arabia
Abstract
On October 25th, 2017, a Saudi woman named Amna, who was abused by her father and male guardian, posted a call pleading for help in two videos, one in Arabic and one in English, onto her YouTube channel. On the same day, Sophia the robot came to the Saudi public sphere through a YouTube video broadcast by the Future Investment Initiative, a conference that brings together companies and international investors to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in which we learn that she is given Saudi citizenship. By giving Sophia Saudi citizenship at the “Davos in the Desert” event, the Saudi state seeks global citizenship with the world, straddling a self-orientalist identity with futuristic grandeur. Like the simulated city of Disneyland as exemplified by Jean Baudrillard, the stage where Sophia announced her citizenship (and the room in which Amna recorded her plea) subject the surrounding spaces of Riyadh and its desert outskirts to the hyperreal order of simulation. This paper will interrogate Amna’s plea, “I am real, and I am here,” in the context of what it means for both Amna and Sophia. What is “reality,” “existence,” and “citizenship” for these two mediated subjects in the posthuman and highly globalized world? By pitting Sophia against Amna as a media intervention, I will illustrate how such interplay between the two storytellers unravels both the coexistence and conflict between them as subjects and within their worlds. The heteroglossia between Amna and Sophia highlights difference through the irony of sameness, culminating in a Bakhtinian “hybrid utterance,” which serves the “dialogical imagination” of the author and recipients of this media. I situate these two gendered bodies, faces, cyborgs, and supposed citizens of the same nation in one frame, generating from their differentiated speech a polyphonic tension as an interspersed source of agency and solidarity. The ambivalence between the two subjects opens up a “third space” for textual resistance to the hegemonic state, in which the mimicry of the new Saudi national female spectacle, Sophia, is subject to mockery, while Amna’s performative nationhood is on display, challenging the state’s narrative. In the interstitial space and structured silences between signs, the potential traces of meanings and intersection of gazes extend questions of presence and immanence for Amna and Sophia and the overlapping contexts from which they emerge. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Saudi Arabia
Sub Area
Identity/Representation