Book description
This book addresses east-west understandings of Arab women as portrayed
through translated media. The vast majority of media studies on Arab
women are western-based. They study the effect of western stereotypes in
western media depictions of Arab women. There is a vast scholarly
literature tracing western stereotypes of Arab women from medieval times
to the present. From 1800, the dominant western stereotype of Arab women
depicts them as passive and oppressed. Thirty years of social science
media research in the west has shown that media images of Arab women
reinforce this two hundred year old stereotype. Much of this research
has studied silent "image bites" of Arab women, where women
are pictured in veils and their own voices are replaced by western
captions or voice-overs. This book sets out to answer this question. To
answer it, we contracted with a global news translation service from the
Middle East to collect and translate a sample of 22 months of new
summaries from 103 Arab media sources belonging to 22 Arab countries.
Filtering the summaries that contained one or more female keywords (e.
g., woman, mother, aunt, sister, she) yielded 2, 061 summaries between
September 2005 and June of 2007. Using the 2,061 summaries as input
data, a coding scheme was developed for "active" and
"passive" female behaviors based on verb-phrase analysis and
conventions of English-language news-reporting. Amal Al-Malki is
Assistant Teaching Professor of Literature at Carnegie Mellon University
in Qatar. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from University of
London. David Kaufer is Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon
University, USA. Suguru Ishizaki is Associate Professor of English at
Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Kira Dreher is Visiting Instructor in
English at Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar
