Radical Bodies: Gender and Sexuality in Arab Digital Performance
Panel 063, 2015 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
This panel brings together scholars of media studies, anthropology, and performance studies, to investigate the representation and embodiment of gender in Arab digital worlds. We ask how the performative possibilities of digital media accommodate growing repertoires of gendered and sexualized relation as well as practice. The papers bring together case studies from Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt, in order to generate more complex frameworks for thinking about Arab digital worlds than normative notions of these as spaces either of freedom or surveillance. Representing a range of digital genres--satirical, feminist, and warlike--we open a conversation about the gendered and sexualized body in Arab digital worlds
Web magazines and YouTube videos are the two focal points for the panel. Cultural productions in these genres invite more emotional responses than broadcast media counterparts. The waves of support and protest that gendered and sexualized digital bodies elicit in our examples trace emerging forms of audience interaction that reimagine the notion of media communities. The seriality of YouTube allows successive videos to address audience response, and thus to stage digital bodies in relation to viewers' desires and projections. Videos by the Syrian rebel commander Abu Saqqar cannibalizing the body of a soldier he had killed elicited polarized responses, and he responded with more sober videos. A YouTube beauty advice channel for Egyptian women called Maleeka TV generated a spin-off, when satirical presenter Aya Mostafa's videos grew more popular than advice segments by the main host. How do digital contexts enable video series to accommodate a range of contradictory gender performancesm How do the videos illuminate links between gender performance and identity politicsl Representations of women in web cartoons and magazines elicit similarly affective responses by sexualizing independent or vulnerable women who symbolize social transformation. The lens of embodiment offers a way of thinking about gendered representations and their recognition in Arab digital production. Gender performances and their iterations likewise offer insight into subject transformation in revolutionary societies.
Finally, the panel takes up the digital practice of "acting as-if" ones media interventions mattered, as a performance practice that is also potentially performative (or transformative). Even short-lived digital phenomena allow audiences to rehearse modes of rupturing normative discourse. We interrogate the radical possibilities of digital performance without limiting these to political programs. Thus, the panel charts the varied ground of new civil debates in contexts of revolutionary movement.
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.
In May 2013 footage of a Syrian rebel fighter mutilating the corpse of a Syrian soldier went viral on YouTube and social media. Such self-incriminating documentations of violence are not unique to the current war in Syria, other conflicts in the region, or to other postcolonial nation-states. Examples from current imperial and former colonial powers include the meticulous records the Nazi bureaucracy kept of those deemed by the state to be unworthy of belonging to the nation, and hence undeserving of life; postcards of lynching in the United States; and more recently, photographs taken by U.S. army reservists of prisoners they tortured in Abu Ghraib prison. An important difference between the first two and the second cases is that of medium—digital media versus print media. A digital file can be accessed around the world by anyone with a computer or a smartphone and an internet connection. This speed of dissemination raises new questions regarding representation and audience. Focusing on YouTube clips about Abu Sakkar, the Syrian rebel fighter this paper will explore the following questions: i) Who were these incriminatory videos clips produced by and for? ii) How does Abu Sakkar’s performance of violence in his own and bystanders’ ‘amateur’ videos compare with his self-presentation in his interviews with satellite news correspondents? iii) What tropes of nationalized gender and sexuality constitute these narrations of incrimination?
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?
