Abstract
Arab Women in Arab News is based on an innovative study of the representation strategies of Arab women in a sample of 2323 news items covering more than 100 sources from 20 Arab countries reported in the period from 2005 to 2007. The innovative angle is manifested in the way the authors look at the representation of these women, not necessarily as repressed victims, but as active agents in their own local and regional as well as international communities. The study aims to dispel myths and stereotypes of Arab women, showing the intricate status of women striving for more visibility and equality. The authors also aim to analyse the depiction of Arab women in Arabic news sources to see whether this depiction is less stereotypical than that in western sources.
The book is divided into two parts: the first part reports the quantitative findings derived from a sample of translated Arab news articles. The coding scheme provides categories of passive versus active behaviour. The second part focuses on the qualitative analysis of selected individual portraits of Arab women, showing their involvement in their communities. This part of the study introduces the readers to such women by name, illustrating their inspiring examples to other Arab women. The majority of news items analysed in this part stem from pan-Arab newspapers such as Al Hayat, Al Quds Al Arabi and Al Sharq Al Awsat. The analysis looked in depth on the women as subjects and main characters in the news stories. The analysis shows that 44 per cent of the news items portray women as active agents, while 10 per cent portray them as passive. The remaining items either portray women in a neutral fashion or highlight examples of non-Arab women. The authors conclude that portraying women as active agents challenges the passive role confined to Arab women in western media, or as they put it, ‘Arab women referenced in news from their own cultures play more active roles than has been found by previous studies that have examined references to Arab women in Western-based pre-Internet print media’ (p. 67).
The second part further develops the categories used in the quantitative analysis in order to illustrate the subtle representation strategies of these women. This interpretive part of the analysis zooms in on the lives of selected Arab women to show their hopes, dreams, expectations and even frustrations. For instance, some of these women seek opportunities for education and work despite obstacles in their societies, and others have used new media to counterbalance the bias in state-media news. Examples of the latter case are the Egyptian female bloggers who ‘had become emboldened to think that government stories based on lies were no match for their counter-stories so long as the truth and a blog or Facebook account was at hand’ (p. 325). Arab woman can also be an ‘undercover worrier whose grief masks vengeance against the West’ (p. 381) – such is the case with the depiction of Palestinian female suicide bombers. Other women, however, struggle with the impact of violence, corruption, war and patriarchy, as discussed in great detail in Chapter Six, which concludes that women display retributive anger ‘that squarely confronts male domination as a target’ (p. 101).
These diverse examples of passive and active Arab women substantiate the argument of the book and its challenge of the traditional western stereotype of Arab women as submissive. The authors juxtapose these Arab news stories with the narratives circulated in English-speaking news media in an attempt to highlight Arab women’s plights, aspirations and hopes.
The contribution of this volume rests on these vivid examples of Arab women and their daily struggle for more opportunities, as well as in combining quantitative and qualitative methods in analysing discourses about Arab women in their unique cultural context.
The book is a must-read for anyone studying the representation of women in the news, particularly in the Arab world.