Poignantly addressing the precarious status of sex workers in Morocco, Nabil Ayouch’s highly unconventional film, Much Loved (Zin Li Fik), was released at film festivals in 2015, at a time when little if any data on the sex industry in Morocco had been officially revealed. Soon after the film’s release, Moroccan Health Ministry officials acknowledged for the first time in Morocco’s postcolonial history the existence of sex workers operating from within these locations. This official admission to the existence of a sex industry marks a significant milestone. In this paper, I analyze Nabil Ayouch’s film Much Loved together with Laila Lalami’s novel, Secret Son (2009), as they denounce the debilitating silence accumulated around the phenomenon of prostitution in Morocco that manipulates women with the threat of shame and defers social responsibility. Read in parallel, the two cultural texts constitute tools of activism arguing above all, that as long as women can be involved in the sex industry as sex providers, they will be economically and socially marginalized. While Ayouch depicts the troubled lives of four gregarious prostitutes, Lalami’s female protagonist is an enigmatic widow whose reputation is marred by the possible public discovery of her illegitimate relationship with her son’s father and her incrimination as a prostitute by the party ruling her shantytown. As a result of their puny economic status, these women will continue to be oppressed or assaulted as bodies in the preservation of the masculine state. In scripting violence, I contend, these texts indicate that the Moroccan state’s attempt to regulate and organize gender within the modern urban space banks on the control and discipline of “the female prostitute” as a product of patriarchy. Noha and Rachida’s agency over their own lives does not extend further than the small apartments in which they live. Tragically, the wider infrastructure legitimized by state institutions also maintains women’s precarious position, and thus preserves patriarchal ideologies according to which sinful women contaminate men and women around them and create chaos. These women’s terrible fate symbolizes the failure of the postcolonial state to recognize its weakness and to help at-risk women to embrace the rights promised them by law. I conclude that Much Loved and Secret Son become cultural tools of activism and resistance in the fight for women’s equality.

Soon after the Iranian revolution of 1979, both the US and Iran governments banned the distribution and exhibition of American films in Iran. The film industries in the two countries, however, used the political tensions as the subject matter of several of their products. This paper focuses on the reception of those American films in Iran which directly touched upon the causes and effects of the mutual animosity between the two states. I argue that the Iranian reception of these films developed a discursive narrative of Hollywood as a unified entity directly influenced by Islamophobia and anti-Iranianism. On a broad level, this research investigates how the meanings of cultural products are constructed and construed against the backdrop of local and transnational sociopolitical contexts. Tracing the official, underground, and diasporic responses of Iranian politicians, film critics, and intelligentsia in a variety of Persian and English news items and critical pieces, I analyze a track initiated by Brian Gilbert’s Not Without My Daughter (1990) and peaked by Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012). These cinematic adaptations of literary works share considerable similarities in their claims of authenticity and narrative patterns. Not Without My Daughter is about an American mother who wants to save her daughter from a barbaric society and an untrustworthy father by plotting an escape from Iran back to the USA. Argo is about a former CIA agent who wants to rescue six Americans trapped in Tehran during the Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981. These films contributed to the configuration and evolution of Iranians’ perception of Hollywood in the past three decades. A shared fear of Not without My Daughter’s negative effects on international public opinions about Iranians formed an alliance between many writers and critics of opposing political convictions. The Iranian officials exploited this wounded sense of national identity to advance a radicalized notion of the theory of cultural imperialism. Introducing Hollywood as the enemy’s arsenal in a media soft war, their theory of cultural assault prompted legal and cultural responses to similar American films in the following years. However, Iran’s own culture wars, revised structure of access to foreign films, and the success of Iranian filmmakers in international festivals made considerable changes to this hegemonic reading of Hollywood among various groups. Consequently, the Iranians’ responses to Argo were openly varied and negotiated. The historical approach of this research, thus, reveals much about the origination, contestation, and negotiation of Iranian cultural policies.

Academic discourse and artistic works have encouraged us to explore the intersectionality of gender and race/ethnicity to reveal the double or multiple levels of “otherizations” of women in many societies and to offer an alternative to a critique of either patriarchy or race/ethnicity alone. In my paper, I argue that in the context of Israeli cinema and literature, due to reception considerations and the stubborn persistence of the Mizrahi dilemma, intersectionality is often compromised by the lopsided rendering of the relations between gender and ethnicity. The paper focuses on the documentary “Child; Mother” (2016) and the film adaptation “Apples from the Desert” (2014). The most striking element in this adaptation is the dissonance between the film’s seemingly liberal and feminist stand and the problematic portrayal of Mizrahi/Sephardi religious traditions and of Mizrahi men. Most conspicuously, while in the short story by the same name (1986), the father figure is secondary and, indeed, is rather docile, he is given much more weight in the film in a manner that harks back to all the malicious stereotypical representations of the Mizrahi man in the Bourekas genre in Israeli cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Similarly, the important documentary “Child; Mother” reveals the painful stories of some Mizrahi women who, in their countries of origin, even before reaching puberty were forced to marry old men and were often raped by them, but the film provides no context or comparisons to these stories, thus implying that this is a uniquely Mizrahi phenomenon and that the stories are representative of the Mizrahi community at large. In these and other works, the empowerment or centrality of the Mizrahi women operates along gender lines alone and involves the degradation of their Mizrahi male counterparts. The Mizrahi woman’s plight is often reduced to a critique of patriarchal hegemony. In turn, overlooking the structural origins of the ethnic dilemma facilitates the circulation of negative stereotypes about the Mizrahi community and, specifically, about Mizrahi men. These works largely fail to relate the Mizrahi man’s alleged chauvinism and violence, or, alternatively, his emasculation and insipidity, to the broader socioeconomic predicament of high unemployment, an inadequate education system, and limited entrepreneurial opportunities. Instead of advancing notions of enriching conscious intersectionality and opening a space for advancing the struggle of the group as a whole as advocated by Crenshaw and hooks, the works discussed here acquiesce to a breach between ethnicity and gender.

To be Imprisoned Even in One’s Own Fantasy This paper presents an analysis of gender construction in movies. It focuses on films produced by three Iranian women directors: Tahmineh Milani, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, and Manizheh Hekmat. These directors have made more than thirty films about women’s lives and stories. The plots of their films involve women protagonists who struggle with patriarchy and try to challenge the phallocentrism of post-revolution Iran. However, the latent content of their work communicates a much more pessimistic worldview. Feminist film critics have long argued that the more women work behind the camera, the more powerful female characters they create, the more they present the female role models that instill a strong women image in young girls imagination. Considering this perspective, the aim of my analysis is to explain why these three Iranian filmmakers have produced works in which women are portrayed as passive and powerless actors who can never break the repressive cultural chain and escape the prison of patriarchy. Within the framework of Jacques Lacan’s theory, I will try to explore the unconscious fantasies behind such cinematic productions.