This article examines western media's fascination with Arab Muslim women leaders.
What is it about?
This article presents a critical perspective on contemporary forms of ambiguous (mis) representation, women's positionality in the context of shifting geopolitics, and constraining gender limitations.
Why is it important?
Until the Arab uprisings occurred, many Arab first ladies and queens feted by U.S. media received exceptionally favorable coverage that celebrated their physical appearance and western sense of fashion. Grounded in the context of neoliberal politics which considers them objects of cultural identification, this article comparatively studies western media’s representations of Suzanne Mubarak, Queen Rania of Jordan, and Asma al-Assad who are framed as virtuous house wives, western by ethnicity, birth place, or education, and sophisticated upper-middle class ladies with panic-trigger for both Arab elites and western observers Egypt’s veiled Naglaa Mahmoud and the architype of a working-class seductress with lust for power, Tunisia’s Leila Trabelsi. Using qualitative textual and visual analysis of narratives and images from media coverage, reports, and fashion magazines, the article presents a comparative content analysis of their representations through a set of three dichotomies: the first one pays careful attention to the intersection of neoliberal politics and the deployment of ethnic hybridity as an ideological apparatus that sets up a binary between Arab and Caucasian or hybrid half-white woman who emerges as the new “savior” of Muslim women; the second is a close pairing between the sexualization of westernized and fashionable first lady and the de-sexualization of her veiled “backward” counterpart sister; and the third entails a juxtaposition of the good and desired seductress with the promiscuous and bad one. Findings show how media discourses of modernity impose neoliberal and neo-Orientalist demarcations to define Arab Muslim women’s agency, femininity, bodies, and status according to western standards.