Changing the Caricature: ‘TED Talks’ questioning veils over Muslim Women Representation
The Muslim woman identity often codes for morph representations of repressiveness and a shallow-sort of obedience. Whilst reductions of the female construct come from derivations of long patriarchal culture, there is value in recognizing the highly embedded layer of orientalist discourse that feeds through the machinery of hegemonic media in favour of a nefarious, static image of women in Islam without developing the full multiplicity of female representations.
Studies on aversive discrimination using implicit-association tests reveal that regardless of ethnic or sexual orientation, prejudiced behaviour is an imbedded quality primed into all individuals. Of course, whilst the matter of interest is not a direct product of such psychological analyses, it of value to consider how responses towards Muslim females may be shaped and reconfigured with tolerance towards media views.
Would a woman dressed in the traditional Islamic hijab be seen as a competent model of Islam or as Somali-American poet Hamda Yusuf describes, “Just another towelhead?”[1]
Let us surrender to that persistent scratch of probing a little further and question the integrity of hegemonic edifices in dominating the treatment of women representation within the Muslim landscape. An obvious answer would, in all likelihood, negate the preceding statement if one is to think from an entirely moral outlook. Of course, disrupting these singular images is easier said than done and by no means offers a simple resolution for the academic scholar.
However, the advance in the genre and collection of ‘TED talks ‘has widely transformed into a new apparatus against these unregulated hegemonic divisions and offers considerable negotiations for refuting assumptions of gender dichotomy or the submissiveness of the female power by integrating a montage of female views, including the prominent Bahraini artist Tamadher Al Fahal.
The title of her ‘TED Talk’ — “I am a mad Arabian women” [2]
— is as innovative as the medium she uses to protest the subjugation of the Muslim female identity; that is, comic art-inspired diary or as she alludes, the “Diary of a mad Arabian woman.” In these segments, she reflects on her own perplexities of being trapped by the distortions of a singularly –representative system ,as quotes:
“I am mad because people have been using religion to contain me, not to free me.” [2]
In the broader interplay, it is of merit to acknowledge the synonmity apparent in both Al Falhal’s position as the repressed female identity which, in valid ways, isn’t indifferent to the subjugation and lack of exchange that happens between neoliberal structures with the oppressed consumers that feed off of the bottom of this hegemonic schema.
Al Fahal, thus, allows us to lift our oblivious arrogance by confronting against the “cultural frustrations” [2] in attacking both misogyny and Islamophobia with equal discretion.
One cannot help but admittedly become amused by the satirical nature of the diary and the ‘TED Talk’ being situated in the very media format that has seeked to promote an exotic metaphor in translation of the female caricature. Yet, the subtle irony of her diary succeeds in both repressing the vectors of stereotyping that intersect between the interface of both the male and female Muslim embodiment.
References:
[1] Hamda, Y. (2014, Jan 22). “Just another Towlehead.” [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M91vfQ6Ooxw
[2] Al Fahar, T. (2014, Oct 27). “I am a Mad Arabian Women.” [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q78JDzv50Q8
