The Politics of Representation: Feminist Media Studies in the Middle East

This panel, co-organised with Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), focused 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'. 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'. 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. 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. 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. https://www.lse.ac.uk/middle-east-centre/events/2023/feminist-media-studies-middle-east