YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT: REPRESENTATION OF DESIRE AND NORMALIZATION OF RAPE CULTURE IN EGYPTIAN CINEMA

This course is based on Salma El Tarzi’s art research project, “Yataman Wa Honna El Raghebat” ongoing since 2018.

BACKGROUND

For a very long time, Egypt has dominated the commercial cinema industry in the MENA region. This domination meant that mainstream Egyptian film references represented a big part of the collective Arab popular culture. It also meant, that the discourses this cinema mediated were shaped by the complex social, political, and economic relationships that tied Egypt to other countries in the region. While global feminist film studies have mainly focused on the analysis of gender representation and sexual violence, Arab studies of the past twenty years, have limited their focus on different types of representation of women, misogyny and objectification of women in Egyptian films. These contributions did not contextualize the representations nor theorized the complexities of representation politics. This often resulted in misleading assumptions and narrow conclusions about representation of desire as exploitative to women by default. And while this may seem true in a large number of films, it is a generalization that creates an “anti sex” narrative. As such, the representation of desire as exploitative to women paradoxically reproduces a patriarchal discourse. This discourse clearly dehumanizes women above all, by stripping them of their sexuality and their will over their own bodies, as well as, by stigmatizing sexual desire. For the above gaps and limitations, in her project Yataman Wa Honna EL Raghebat (You know you want it), Salma El Tarzi approaches the topic of representation of desire and normalization of rape culture in Egyptian pop culture, from two vantage points: 1) a sex positive position, where she problematizes sexist representations of desire, and 2) a celebration of diverse sexuality and representations of sexual desire.

Using mainstream Egyptian cinema as one site of inquiry, this research examines the manifestations of patriarchal discourses in Egyptian and Arab popular culture and studies their implications on the normalization of sexual violence. How do patriarchal discourses shape mainstream Egyptian cinema and how this cinema contributes to their reproduction, creating a vicious circle of sexual violence, sexism and misogyny in society. She is also interested in following the shifts in morality discourses throughout the history of Egyptian commercial cinema, whether represented by changes in the laws of censorship or public outrage towards certain films or artists.

THE COURSE

This workshop combines discursive and practical practices, where participants will get introduced to this project and its methodology, and will collectively reflect on the questions of representation of desire & the female sexuality, Image & agency, and the normalization of rape culture, through the example of Egyptian Pop Culture of the current moment. This process will include examining films, music videos, social media influencers activities, sexual violence and rape cases, as well as public reactions, moralistic outrage, policing the female body and THE STATE.