Sex and the City 2, the Western Gaze, and the Politics of Representation
In 2010 Sex and the City 2 was released in theaters. Unsurprisingly, the film did relatively well and garnered a lot of attention by film critics and mainstream moviegoers. While the critics, who were highly critical of the film cited that it was a “…crass”, “…big, dumb…”
“…aimless” vacation, many critics did not discuss the ways in which the politics of representation aimed at portraying the Middle East as a luxurious, backward desert was largely a success. The representations of the Middle East that resurface throughout Sex and the City 2 are in their most basic terms marginalizingi representations and unfortunately are not new. These representative tropes that creep up in the film and are often deployed to signify otherness are largely one-dimensional, flattening the diversity among the human experience in such a way that renders whole groups of people invisible. In this paper, I want to engage these representative images of the Otherii and how these images strengthen the foundation through which the Western gaze continues to be cold, masculinist, evaluating, and marginalizing; in addition, I want to stress that this is primarily a critique of white supremacy and the construction of otherness and by association, a critique the West in its continuous attempt to divide the world into not so equal halves. It is also important to recognize that while these marginalizing images are for the most part oppressive considering they perpetuate the invisibility of diverse peoples and cultures, the
i I will often use “marginalizing” or “marginalized” because I feel that this term best describes these images, considering they exist in relationship to the centralized, hegemonic images. I will sparingly describe them as “oppressive” because I want to stress the Foucauldian notion of power as fluid, and the use of “oppressive” often conjures a top-down image of power.
ii I primarily use “Other” as a way to discuss the construction of the white “us” and the black, brown, red, yellow “them” as a process through which race is constructed to categorize individuals and their worth. I find it inappropriate to refer to it as “race” because not only does it have irrelevant connotations that are somewhat intimate to the American experience, but I also think it is more accurate to refer to the whole phenomenon of race as an “othering” process. 1 powers deployed in creating these images are just as vulnerable as those who these images define. In other words, the power behind these images only exists with these images. Whiteness does not exist without the existence of the Other. From this theoretical place, I will pinpoint the ways in which the consumption of the Other is utilized in this ideological work.
At first mention of the “Middle East”, the camera pans over a huge desert and an Eastern- sounding guitar flutters lowly in the background. This rather intentional usage of “representative tropes” (Said 1978, 71; Ansari 2008, 50) of the Middle East, maybe more generally the Eastiii, is held consistently throughout Sex and the City 2. These Orientalist tropes are purposely utilized to conjure images of otherness more so than they are utilized in an attempt to represent the Middle
East, as it most accurately would be. These representations, which are arguably more like costumes in a play (Said 1978, 71; Ansari 2008, 50), greatly contrast the images of the West as a liberated paradise. An important understanding of Orientalist discourse is the inconsistency of the kind of representations. For instance, when the women arrive in Abu Dhabi, on an invite from a wealthy Arab businessman, Shiekh Khalid, they are immensely impressed by the luxury and opulence they are greeted with. While images of opulence, rich textures, beauty and exoticism are common within Orientalist discourses on the East, they are often coupled with notions of backwardness. In addition to backwardness, it is not uncommon for the East to be represented as unchanging. In the film, this holds true. When Samantha first hears a business pitch from Khalid, he describes Abu Dhabi as “the future, a progressive global city… the new
Middle East.” The “new” and “progressive” in his pitch primarily means Westernized. From this, it is clear the West is contrasted with the Middle East as being modern and looking forward to
iii When discussing Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism” that Usamah Ansari discusses, I will often use the “East” as subject; this is primarily because Orientalist discourses that include the images I analyze in reference to Sex and the City 2 often do not specify between the Middle East, Asia, or Southeast Asia, etc. The West/East binary is often produced in these discourses, so when attempting to unpack them one has to engage the binary. 2 the future and that individuals who want the Middle East to been seen similarly have to describe their country within Western notions of progress and the future and convince Westerners that
“Yes, we are just like you.” Khalid is successful in convincing Samantha to take the trip and stay in his hotel, with all expenses paid. The “old” characterizations of the East as magical, intoxicatingly tempting, and its environment as dangerous and hot that were common in Europe during the time of British imperialism recur in Sex and the City 2 with surprising accurate inaccuracies. When Samantha tells the others about Khalid’s offer Carrie says, “I’ve always been fascinated by the Middle East, you know, the desert moons…magic carpets.” In response,
Charlotte’s young adopted Chinese daughter, Lily cheerfully says, “Like Jasmine and Aladdin?”
Not only is this culturally insensitive, it also is ironic considering the images Carrie blissfully describes are products of Orientalist discourse, as the film arguably is. As all the women agree to accompany Samantha on her trip, the line between us and the Other is systematically blurred, with consumption as the medium through which this is achieved.
Consuming the Other as a vehicle to legitimate whiteness has been a subject of study for many scholars within critical cultural studies for many decades. As consumer culture growingly involves the fetishization of otherness as means to “package authenticity” and “counteract”
“…the artifice, dissonance, and superficiality, that characterize contemporary consuming practices” (Shugart 2008, 73), the encounter with difference is often commodified. In Sex and the City 2, the women’s passage to the Middle East for the first time is very much commodified in that their experiences in Abu Dhabi help them to better understand themselves and by association their relative cultural power as Westerners over the region. As the women arrive in
Khalid’s hotel, they find the opulence and glamour they expected. As they enter the foyer, Carrie gleefully says, “Oh Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore!” It is very clear to the women that while
3 they experience luxury in New York (Arthurs 2003, 87), Abu Dhabi is much different and that through experiencing this difference they leave more deeply in touch themselves. For instance, they are offered Arabic coffee by the hotel manger and the women politely try it, but find it bitter and distasteful; however, they find their hotel room and the splendor they are afforded delightful.
It is important to note that commentary between the women often questions the “newness” of the
Middle East and of Abu Dhabi. For instance, while they are still on the plane, Miranda, who has taken it upon herself to learn a little Arabic and various customs, she cites that “…men and women do not embrace in public in the Middle East”; Samantha replies, “Oh please, we’re going to the new [emphasis in original] Middle East!” Furthermore, later in the film, when Samantha is on a date, she says, “Abu Dhabi is so cutting edge in so many ways, and so backward when it comes to sex.” In another scene at the hotel, the women see a woman wearing a niqāb. Miranda clarifies for the rest the differences between the styles of veils, and Carrie unabashedly, says,
“…the veil across the mouth freaks me out, it’s like they don’t want them to have a voice.” Not only do the women consume difference, they also select the ways in which they engage with the
Other and evaluate what they find to be comfortable and uncomfortable, clarifying the women’s judgment regarding themselves, those around them, and the Western imperialist power to do so.
Considering the “baggage” all of them carry with them to Abu Dhabi, it quickly becomes clear that the consumption of the Other is a medium through which the women come to terms with their most intimate problems that unraveled back in New York. Similar to the highly feminized notion of consumption as a way to better the self (Shugart 2008, 72), the Other, as an object of
“authentic” novelty (Shugart 2008, 73), provides this outlet for the women. This relationship is an incredibly important underpinning to the entire film.
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Carrie, feeling uncomfortable with the prospect of mundane married life, is struggling with Mr. Big’s insistence on spending nights at home, eating take out, and watching television.
She consistently wants excitement and the “sparkle” back into their relationship. After taking two days to finish her work in her old apartment, Big asks if they each could consistently take two days from each other to do “whatever.” This description of Carrie’s internal conversation with herself regarding her marriage is important because it is the state in which she finds herself in Abu Dhabi; her interactions with individuals and surprises there, and her simultaneous consumption of difference aids her as she makes sense of this. All the women face problems that began in New York and whose solutions become clearer to them as they spend time in Abu
Dhabi; this not only legitimates whiteness because it objectifies and subsequently oppresses the
Other, it also mirrors the relationship between the West and “the rest” where in which the rest exists as objects for exploitation and consumption. For example, after waking up in the middle of the night, Carrie finds her personal butler, Gaurav in the kitchen. They begin a conversation after
Carrie apologizes for not dismissing him:
Carrie: “Please apologize to your wife for me keeping you here all night.”
Gaurav: “It is fine; she is in India.”
Carrie: “…So you work here and you travel back and forth?”
Gaurav: “Yes, every three months, when I have a break in work or can afford the plane
fare.”
Carrie: “Isn’t that hard? Being married and spending all of that time apart.”
Gaurav: “Time does not matter. When we see each other, each time, it is very
wonderful.”
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This is important because it provides Carrie with comfort regarding her marriage, though it seems that Gaurav’s separation with his wife is not simply about trying to spice up his love life, but probably points to larger socio-economic disparities, notably due to 300 years of British colonialism, that make this the only way he and his wife can survive comfortably. However, it does inspire Carrie enough to tell the others putting extra emphasis on Gaurav’s thoughts on
“time”. She feels better about Big’s request to have a two-day break momentarily. This scene is an example of how encounters with difference, which are commodified for their “authenticity”, allows whiteness both a break from its “blandness” (Shugart 2008, 71) and a contrasting image by which to silently legitimate itself (Chidester 2008, 170).
As the women engage the Other through going to the market, taking camel rides in the desert, and going to a karaoke bar, they all begin to come to terms with their problems in various ways, but similarly through the consumption of the Other. However, this is not the only way whiteness and Western values are legitimated in the film. Toward the end of the film, the women have to “bail” Samantha out of jail for kissing on a beach, which causes Khalid to cease paying the expenses of their trip. In a rush to pack all of their things and catch a plane to New York,
Carrie realizes that she left her passport at the market. Upon their return to the market, they experience a distinctly “dangerous” experience of the Other coupled with the “betrayal” they feel
Khalid committed against them. Charlotte and Samantha are tricked into going to a back room where black market items are bought and sold and after maneuvering from that situation, they are chased down by a mob of angry Arab men who surround Samantha and condemn her for her dress to which she shouts obscenities, makes vulgar gestures, and mimes sexual motions. A group of women in the niqāb holding a book club meeting subsequently “rescue” them from the men. In this scene, the Arab women act as insiders that confirm “…common notions of Islam as
6 patriarchal in ways not shared in Western traditions” (Ansari 2008, 49). The depiction of Arab women as providing legitimacy to the “backwardness” of Arab, Muslim men that the Sex and the
City women have so insensitively displayed throughout their one-liners not only contribute to a fictional “universal sisterhood”, but it also erases the “diverse situations and attitudes of millions of Muslim women to a single item of clothing…”(Abu-Lughod 2002, 786), an item of clothing that the Sex and the City women and many other Western women consistently regard as universally oppressive. In order to make their flight, the women find themselves donning the niqāb to escape the men. This is an ultimate consumption of the Other and shows again, how the consumption of otherness is a medium through which whiteness can be momentarily transcended but ultimately reified (Shugart 2008, 71).
Ultimately, it seems that Sex and the City 2 perpetuates oppressive and marginalizing
Orientalist notions of the Middle East in an obvious effort to legitimatize Western occupation in the region as a “liberating” project. The women of Sex and the City more generally represent the ways in which white, Western women, who are cultivated in a patriarchal, white supremacist,
Eurocentric society, too not only perpetuate their own oppression, but actively oppress others with politics that are ignorant to the “…differences among women in the world—as products of different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires” (Abu-Lughod 2002, 783). With this, the film also contributes to the feminization of the Other, through Orientalist discourse and more interestingly through the feminine, albeit masculinist Western gaze. While the film is women-centered in that women and their struggles are primarily the focus (Brunner 2010, 87), it seems that the Western gaze in which the women used to look upon Abu Dhabi and the Middle East was unsurprisingly superior. This is evidence of the West’s systematically forced superior cultural and political
7 power over the rest of the world, through Western media’s manipulation of desires. Sex and the
City 2 in all its glamour complicated the ways in which critical cultural theorists engage the politics of representation regarding gender, difference, sexuality, and class precisely because the film solidified our relationship to the Other as being intimately intertwined and primarily built upon our existence and their invisibility.
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