Reviewed by: Women and the Media in the Middle East: Power through Self-Expression Christa Salamandra Women and the Media in the Middle East: Power through Self-ExpressionNaomi Sakr, editor. London: I. B. Tauris, 2004. viii+248 pp. including chapter notes, bibliography and index. £45.00 hardback, 15.99 paperback. Like the best work in media studies, Naomi Sakr's ambitious volume focuses on social relations, on how Middle Eastern women shape and are shaped by the press, television, and internet. Chapters span the region from Morocco to Iran, incorporate a variety of disciplinary approaches, and examine a range of media topics from early twentieth-century Egyptian journalists to early twenty-first-century cyber-savvy professionals. Contributors include both academics and practitioners. As its title promises, Women and Media in the Middle East serves as a valuable overview of women's involvement in and with a range of media. But it does much more. Rather than attempting to formulate theories about how media works, this book consistently links media to broader social, political, and historical processes. Sakr's helpful introduction situates Middle Eastern women in a context of general media studies concerns. She identifies a series of key issues—representation, democratization, participation—that frame discussions of media's empowering potential. The theme linking diverse contributions is clearly articulated: how media in different times and places have expanded or restricted women's possibilities. All essays emphasize the relationship of media to both physical and social space. Some women use media to become visible, as in the case of journalists and activists, others to limit visibility, as in the case of professionals seeking to mask appearances, and students in the conservative Gulf states to subvert restrictions on interaction with the opposite sex. Women's centrality to anticolonial struggles, and their subsequent [End Page 107] marginalization in newly independent nations, links chapters exploring women's activism in Iran, Egypt, and North Africa. Gholam Khiabany and Annabelle Sreberny examine the challenges facing women's publications in Iran, arguing that an overemphasis on Islam and its relationship to feminism has distracted many observers from other factors influencing women's involvement in the public sphere. They attribute women's achievements to nationalist, secular, and progressive strains in Iranian culture and women's continued difficulties to the oppressive social relations legitimized by the Iranian political system. Sonia Dabbous's discussion of early twentieth-century journalists—Egypt's first women professionals—demonstrates the press' crucial role in opening up avenues of public participation. A portrait of a vibrant, early feminist press emerges. The role Palestinian women journalists play in the continuing struggle against Israeli occupation is explored in Benaz Somiry-Batrawi's contribution. She notes the small triumphs of local media producers operating under duress. The Oslo agreement paved the way for private media outlets, and these have employed women and addressed their concerns. Their efforts proceed under periodic disruption and constant threat. Kuwaiti women activists lobbying for suffrage face a different challenge. As Haya al-Mughni and Mary Ann Tétreault demonstrate, the Kuwaiti press reduced a complex array of women's groups and positions to a two-sided debate that worked to support conservative forces. Yet they find promising the growing number of women working in both the media itself and the Ministry of Information. Magda Abu-Fadil's portrait of prominent journalists such as CNN's Octavia Nasr provides an inside, personal glimpse of successful career trajectories. The "retributive peace" of postwar Lebanon maintains and exacerbates sectarian divisions and class hierarchies. Victoria Firmo-Fontan argues that women's nongovernmental organizations in Lebanon tend to reinforce rather than challenge existing power structures and fail to foster social responsibility. The Hezbollah Women's Association, which spreads its message through the party's television station, al-Manar, stands as an exception. The HWA, unlike its sister organizations, does not promote the use of imported domestic servants as an instrument of women's emancipation. It also eschews objectified representations of women. Two chapters on visual media content show how depictions of women serve as metaphors of nation in both colonial and nationalist [End Page 108] constructs. Zahia Smail Salhi explores stereotypic depictions of Maghrebi women in colonial imagery...
Read full abstract
Sep 10, 2010
Islah Jad 
Open Access
