Women in the Middle East: Representation through Storytelling and Cinema The theme of this week’s readings, “Representation, Historicized” dug us eve

The theme of this week’s readings, “Representation, Historicized” dug us even deeper into the issues of representation of women in the Middle East through history, storytelling, and of course, cinema. Different authors from different backgrounds, including historical, cinematic, and fictional, introduced us to a number of different analytical ways of looking at these issues.
A major trend in Orientalist discourse, according to Lina Khatib, is the manipulation of the representation of women to be used as a national symbol. For example, in Egyptian cinema, women are portrayed as a virtuous, virginal females that pose no threat to existing patriarchical system. Particularly in Egyptian films, the “other”, mainly Israel and the U.S., are shown as sexually permissive, and as a stark contrast to the virtuous Arab women, which depeens the virgin/whore dichotomy. In Palestine, the representation of women as a national symbol is also linked to freedom for the Palestinian people; if the woman is liberated, so too is Palestine.
In her essay “We’ll Talk Later”, Rhoda Kanaaneh, Palestinian scholar and author of Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (2002) looks at the tradition of oral history in Palestinian communities as it relates to the struggles of women. Feminine sexuality is so formally suppressed in that society that once the main character of her story is revealed as a female, after hiding under a cover of masculinity, “her femininity is discovered and she becomes a possession once again” (Kanaaneh p 271).
Donmez-Colin also looks at violence against women particularly with regard its representation in cinema. In her chapter, “Violence Against Women and the Politics of Rape”, she analyzes several films, mainly Turkish and Iranian, in order to better understand the far-reaching effects of violence against women that occur inside and outside of the family unit. She mentions conjugal violence, revenge-motivated rape, honor killings, trafficking of girls and women and masculine domination of female relatives, all as being relevant in a discussion about human rights as well as cinematic expression.
And while most of the information is hard to absorb, Trin Minh-ha, author of Women, Native, Other, quotes Audre Lorde to offer some consoling words: “Survival is not an academic skill… it is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” (Minh-ha, p. 80). So while representation of women in Islam, whether through oral history, written text, or cinema, may have some strides to make, survival lies in focusing on individuality and allowing that to guide us.