Mural in downtown Tunis by Chouf in collaboration with the feminist collective Fearless. It reads: “Be tender with yourself”; “Listen to your rage”. Credit: Fearless Collective, 2018.
This panel, co-organised with Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), will focus on the role that representations of femininities, masculinities, and sexualities in media and cultural productions play in maintaining or challenging stereotypes, and the gendered norms and regimes that these give rise to.
Drawing on feminist approaches to media and cultural studies, speakers will discuss how different media forms, ranging from traditional print to film, advertising, and digital media have shaped gendered discourses and, relatedly, feminist thinking and praxes in the Middle East.
Dalia Said Mostafa is Associate Professor on the Women, Society & Development Programme, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. On this panel she will discuss 'Women's Formidable Role and Influence in the Making of Arab Cinema'. Her areas of expertise (research & teaching) include postcolonial and comparative literature, Middle Eastern cinema, and Arab cultural studies, with a focus on the intersection between gender, society and politics. She has published widely in multiple refereed journals. She is the editor of Women, Culture, and the January 2011 Egyptian Revolution (2017). Her latest co-authored monograph was published in 2020, entitled The Egyptian Coffeehouse: Culture, Politics and Urban Space.
Polly Withers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. On this panel she will discuss 'Problematising feminist media studies from the Middle East: Gendering media in Palestine'. At the LSE MEC Polly leads the project “Neoliberal Visions: Gendering Consumer Culture and its Resistances in the Levant”. Polly’s interdisciplinary work questions and explores how gender, sexuality, race, and class intersect in popular culture and commercial media in the global south. She is particularly interested in examining how different media and cultural modalities frame, produce, and/or challenge dominant subjectivities and social relations in the Middle East and beyond.
Amal Al-Malki is the Founding Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar Foundation. Before that, she was the Executive Director of the Translation and Interpreting Institute, which she founded in 2011. She also was an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar where she taught courses in writing composition, postcolonial literature, theories of translation, and Islamic feminism. Al-Malki’s research interests include the negotiation of identity between East and West, media representations of Arab women, and postcolonial literature. She has published numerous articles in academic journals in the United States and the UK. Her book, Arab Women in Arab News: Old Stereotypes and New Media (2012) is published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation and Bloomsbury Academic, UK. It was lauded as the first comprehensive study of the topic in the world.
Marc Owen Jones is an Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University, where he lectures and researches on political repression and informational control strategies. His recent work has focused on the way social media has been used to spread disinformation and fake news in the Middle East. In March 2019, he published "The Gulf Information War| Propaganda, Fake News, and Fake Trends: The Weaponization of Twitter Bots in the Gulf Crisis", in the International Journal of Communication. His upcoming book on ‘Disinformation and Deception in the Middle East’ will be published by Hurst Books and Oxford University Press in 2021. His previous work has focused on political repression. His recent monograph, Political Repression in Bahrain, was published in July 2020 by Cambridge University, Press.
Sophie Richter-Devroe is Associate Professor in the Women, Society and Development Program at the College of Humanities and Social Science, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Sophie's broad research interests are in the field of everyday politics and women's activism in the Middle East. She is the author of Women's Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance and Survival (University of Illinois Press, 2018) which won the National Women's Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. The book analyzes Palestinian women’s creative and often informal everyday forms of political activism after the Oslo Accords.
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