Abstract
This article examines Queen Rania’s 2008 YouTube campaign, aimed at Arab and Muslim stereotypes post 9/11, as a political performance that articulates a branding exercise of modernity. Using feminist performance analysis, the article explores how Queen Rania’s activist performance brands monarchical self and country (Jordan) as modern and considers its implications. A focus on three selected YouTube videos by Rania from this campaign provides a careful reading of her body and embodied narratives to consider choreographies of self-authentication and nation branding. I argue that a politics of branding is practised in corporeal and cultural terms by means of a monarchical media spectacle that inadvertently enacts imperialist and orientalist supremacy. Paradoxically, in attempts to break Arab and Muslim stereotypes, Queen Rania’s performance instead reproduces them. This nation-branding practice forwards a modern Jordan and futures monarchical legitimacy on the expense of marking other Arab and Muslim bodies as backward and dangerous.
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