Abstract
Twelve chapters and an introduction are packed into this slim book, compiled from papers that were originally published in the journal Feminist Media Studies. True to the two-gerund subtitle, the subject of veiling preoccupies several of the sixteen contributing authors; blogging, in contrast, features much less prominently and mostly in its micro-form. Three chapters highlight women’s use of social media for activism and advocacy in Turkey and Egypt, and Flickr for posting self-portraits. One third of the collection is given over to television and film. Those four chapters include two looking at television representations, of abortion in Turkish prime-time soap operas and the message of a female Syrian preacher on a Saudi-owned religious channel. Others explore the way an all-female film crew made a documentary about everyday life in a West Bank refugee camp and the work of female managers and producers employed by Iran’s state broadcaster, IRIB.
The theme of “veiling” threads its way throughout the book. Its ubiquity highlights a problem with the catch-all English term “veil,” which has so often been used about all forms of head, face, and/or body covering, in contrast to the different words available in Middle Eastern languages. The English term’s vagueness itself seems to demonstrate that the very practice of covering, however minimal or encompassing, is ultimately more of an issue for U.S. and European editors than it is for ordinary people living in countries where various forms of so-called veiling are adopted by the majority of women.
The four chapters devoted to veiling deal primarily with responses to it among anglophone and francophone media practitioners. They include an account of U.S. and French newspaper coverage of France’s 2011 ban on the full-face veil; a comparison between how women who wear the full-face veil and gloves portray themselves and how mainstream media portray them; a consideration of Marvel Comics’s burqa-wearing superheroine Dust; and a questioning of the documentary film They Call Me Muslim, in which Muslim women are interviewed with the aim of dismantling stereotypes around veiling and non-veiling, but which thereby intimately “unveils” the interviewees to serve an overarching Western narrative of individual choice.
It is no wonder that Eltantawy, an Egyptian-American journalism professor at High Point University, should want to challenge what she sees as “dominant Orientalist discourses of the Middle Eastern ‘Other’” by bringing together insights into the discourses and contrasting them with the diversity and complexity of real women’s lives. In what is described as a “Personal Reflection” in de Casanova and Jafar’s Bodies Without Borders (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Eltantawy recounts how her well-traveled and well-educated mother, visiting the United States from Egypt, attracted frosty stares from neighboring diners in a restaurant in 2005 because of her headscarf.
Ultimately, however, while the book’s examples of allegedly “simplistic” and “exoticiz[ing]” media coverage appear compelling at first sight, the objective of critiquing them primarily from a theoretical perspective of Orientalism is potentially equally facile. The chapter analyzing Western texts on First Ladies, “the female counterparts of authoritarian oppression in the Middle East,” illustrates the risk of oversimplifying. Based on news coverage of wives of the heads of state of Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia between 1985 and 2011, the study asserts that the Arab uprisings of 2011 “transformed the Western views” of these women “almost overnight.” While before the uprisings, women like Suzanne Mubarak of Egypt, Asma Al-Assad of Syria, and Queen Rania of Jordan were judged by media observers as reformers because of their connections to the West, bare heads, and fashion sense, the author suggests, referring solely to 2011 coverage of ousted Tunisian president Zein Al-Abidine Ben Ali’s wife Leila Trabelsi, that “Western media” quickly fell “out of love with the First Ladies.”
Admittedly, an eight-page article can never do justice to media interactions with five strikingly different First Ladies in different Arab countries. But the author could have heeded Fred Halliday’s 1993 critique (British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies) of aspects of Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which warned that not only Orientalists but also their critics tend to shy away from analyzing Middle Eastern societies, “focusing more on discourse than on the analysis of reality.” To analyze reality in relation to coverage of the five First Ladies would have involved, among other things, exploring Arab regimes’ use of public relations companies in the United States. It might have included reference to Shaikha Moza, turbaned wife of the former Emir of Qatar, whose media presence may not fit neatly into the “oriental gaze” approach. It would definitely have taken into account huge changes in national political environments between 1985 and 2011.
Lack of context detracts from the persuasiveness of some of the other textual analysis chapters. The four Turkish TV dramas used to present an argument about attitudes to abortion were aired by the same private TV station, Kanal D. Yet the author offers no evidence regarding the programs’ origins and production, their broadcaster’s place in the Turkish media landscape, or its owner and his relations with Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose view on abortion is quoted in the chapter’s first few lines.
The more successful contributions are those that explore practicalities and circumstances of communication, whether by women in the Middle East or, as in the case of poet Suheir Hammad, of Middle Eastern heritage living elsewhere. “Veiling,” albeit nonverbal, is a form of communication, as are blogging, preaching, filming, networking, lobbying, and so on. To that extent, this edited collection has coherence, and the editor’s ambition in bringing together tasters of such a wide range of research is admirable. One hopes that readers seeking greater depth or more extensive evidence can find it in other work by the individual authors gathered here.