Abstract
The cultural representation of women in the Arab world is a complex issue due to the sensitivity surrounding their status in the region. We are confronted with many ways in which women are misrepresented and distorted. There are false claims used by male dominated culture(s) in the Arab world about women and their intellectual and physical capabilities. Indeed, Arab women are often prevented from representing themselves. When they are present, they are conceptualized as serving a decorative purpose. When women are given platforms from which they may speak, they are expected to reiterate male discourses.The paper focuses on the cultural and political marginalization and misrepresentation of Arab women and describes a number of cultural biases against women in Arabic-speaking societies. Based on culturally constructed misconceptions, Arab women are effaced and excluded from decision-making processes both politically, where they are subjugated and denied a social voice in the public sphere in favour of male-dominated discourses, and within the private sphere of the family where they are subordinate to male relatives.
Highlights
The photograph below was taken at a conference on “Women and Society”, which was held in Saudi Arabia at Al Qasseem University on 10 April 2012
Though the conference was focused on social position of women, there were no women present, neither as contributors nor as attendees.i I suggest the spectre of this woman-less conference on women may be seen as a metaphor for the ways women in male-dominated Arab society are generally considered to be unable, as Karl Marx so succinctly put it, to “represent themselves. [Instead, women] must be represented.”ii
The field of men, in this image, all of whom look the same, powerfully effaces the complexity of women's lived experience, as if women were being hidden behind a wall of men's bland, texture-less assertions and banal representations of protection, honour, lack of capacity and intellectual inadequacy. We can view this photograph as a complex metaphor; we can view it as a two-dimensional representation of the absence of an absence, as opposed to the presence of an absence
Summary
The photograph below was taken at a conference on “Women and Society”, which was held in Saudi Arabia at Al Qasseem University on 10 April 2012. The field of men, in this image, all of whom look the same, powerfully effaces the complexity of women's lived experience, as if women were being hidden behind a wall of men's bland, texture-less assertions and banal representations of protection, honour, lack of capacity and intellectual inadequacy We can view this photograph as a complex metaphor; we can view it as a two-dimensional representation of the absence of an absence, as opposed to the presence of an absence. The systematic cultural exclusion of women in the Arab world is much more sophisticated and complex than physically and intellectually excluding them from an academic conference. These exclusions are manifested in multiple ways depending on the country itself and on the form and environment within which this systematic process is executed
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