Mediating Sex in Postwar Lebanon
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 The Boundaries of the Public: Mediating Sex in Postwar Lebanon Sara Mourad University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Communication Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons, and the Other International and Area Studies Commons Recommended Citation Mourad, Sara, "The Boundaries of the Public: Mediating Sex in Postwar Lebanon" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1905. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1905 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1905 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Boundaries of the Public: Mediating Sex in Postwar Lebanon Abstract This dissertation examines the mediation of non-normative genders and sexualities in contemporary Lebanese public culture since the end of the civil war in 1990. Through a critical analysis of television performances, literary texts, digital media productions, and narrative films and interviews with cultural producers, I demonstrate how media discourses on sexuality engender the public sphere through the construction and contestation of ideal masculinity and femininity. The confessional television talk shows, feminist films, and autobiographical digital and print queer publications collected here are genres that unsettle distinctions between the private and the public, the personal and the political. Through their circulation, these representations produce social discourses that reveal the centrality of sex and gender in the articulation of individual, collective, and national identities. They are public interfaces where the recognition and contestation of social difference unfolds, but they are also cultural artifacts that record and document the otherwise unspoken and invisible violence of normativity on dominated subjects. I conclude that processes of mediation shape the visibility of non-normative subjectivities and give cultural representations their social meaning, revealing what a repressed discourse on sexuality – one I characterize as infrapolitical – can tell us about the mechanics of power in society. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Communication First Advisor Marwan M. Kraidy Keywords Gender, Lebanon, Media, Postcolonial, Queer, Sexuality Subject Categories Communication | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Near Eastern Languages and Societies | Other International and Area Studies This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1905 THE BOUNDARIES OF THE PUBLIC: MEDIATING SEX IN POSTWAR LEBANON Sara Mourad A DISSERTATION in Communication Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor in Philosophy 2016 Supervisor of Dissertation ________________ Marwan M. Kraidy Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics & Culture Graduate Group Chairperson ________________ Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication Dissertation Committee Carolyn Marvin Frances Yates Professor of Communication Katherine Sender Professor of Communication ABSTRACT THE BOUNDARIES OF THE PUBLIC: MEDIATING SEX IN POSTWAR LEBANON Sara Mourad Marwan M. Kraidy This dissertation examines the mediation of non-normative genders and sexualities in contemporary Lebanese public culture since the end of the civil war in 1990. Through a critical analysis of television performances, literary texts, digital media productions, and narrative films and interviews with cultural producers, I demonstrate how media discourses on sexuality engender the public sphere through the construction and contestation of ideal masculinity and femininity. The confessional television talk shows, feminist films, and autobiographical digital and print queer publications collected here are genres that unsettle distinctions between the private and the public, the personal and the political. Through their circulation, these representations produce social discourses that reveal the centrality of sex and gender in the articulation of individual, collective, and national identities. They are public interfaces where the recognition and contestation of social difference unfolds, but they are also cultural artifacts that record and document the otherwise unspoken and invisible violence of normativity on dominated subjects. I conclude that processes of mediation shape the visibility of non-normative subjectivities and give cultural representations their social meaning, revealing what a repressed discourse on sexuality – one I characterize as infrapolitical – can tell us about the mechanics of power in society. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………...……1 The Public in the Media………………………………………………………………..10 Identity and Difference in Postwar Society……………………………………………26 Thinking Sex After Orientalism………………………………………………………..31 Gender or Sexuality? …………………………………………………………………..36 The Infrapolitics of Sex………………………………………………………..………50 Method………………………………..………………………………………..………59 CHAPTER 1: TELEVISION TALK: SEXUAL DEVIANCE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF POLITICS…………………………………………………….…67 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………67 Anatomy of a Neglected Genre………………………………………………………..72 The Promises and Pitfalls of Television Talk…………………………………………77 Not in front of the Children…………………………………………………………...79 Watching from the Margins…………………………………………………...………84 Televisual Seduction……………………………………………………..……………89 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….……………94 CHAPTER 2: THE PRIVATE LIVES OF NADINE LABAKI: PROJECTING FEMININITY IN THE NATIONAL IMAGINARY…………………………………..98 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..98 Nancy Walks into a Coffeeshop……………………………………………………..101 The Seductions of a Global Filmmaker: Labaki as a Feminine Auteur…………...…110 The Reticent Poetics of Caramel …………………………………………….………126 Where Do We Go Now? Towards a Politics of Lamentation…………………...……140 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...…158 CHAPTER 3: “WE MUST WRITE:” THE LANGUAGE OF VISIBILITY IN A FEMINIST QUEER COUNTERPUBLIC…………………………………………...…162 Introduction…………………………………………………………………..………162 The Digital Roots of a Counterpublic……………………………………………..…169 Narcissism and Women’s Writing: Making Shame Public………………….………178 Translation at the Limits of the Sayable……………………………..………………186 The Politics of Visibility: The Uses of Anonymity……………….…………………207 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...…212 CONCLUSION: THE AFTERLIVES OF COUNTERPUBLICS……………………..218 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………....237 iii INTRODUCTION “The thing I remember as the hardest about my childhood, and I am sure about the whole culture, the hardest to live with, was the fact that we had no life of our own, no privacy, neither physical nor moral. People in the Arab world, and certainly elsewhere in the Third World, are never really left alone, they live under the scrutiny of everybody around.” Etel Adnan, 1986, p.13 In an essay titled “Growing Up to be a Woman Writer in Lebanon,” Lebanese- American poet, novelist, and painter Etel Adnan remembers her childhood and adolescence in Beirut of the 1930s and 1940s - when the country was under French mandate - formative years in which she came to writing, which in turn opened the door for her to travel to France to attend college there. An only child to a Syrian Muslim father and a Greek Christian mother, Adnan’s solitude fuelled her creativity. Watching French and American movies and writing, she recalls, provided an escape from the constant and unflinching gaze of her overly protective mother, and a hiding place from familial surveillance which embodied a “whole culture’s” scrutiny. “Developing private thoughts was my first rebellion, my first emancipation,” she writes (p. 13). In a context of pervasive social scrutiny, the ability to evade the social gaze is critical for those who – like Adnan – break the mold of normative masculinity and femininity. Adnan’s queerness manifested itself early on in her cross-gender identification as a child: “Being dressed as a boy made me feel very happy” (p.9). Recalling a pair of short black pantaloons and a white satin blouse sewn by her mother, she notes that the outfit “must have reinforced my identity of being neither just a girl, nor a boy, but a special being with the magical attributes of both” (p.9). 1 Her sense of marginality, of being neither here nor there, was compounded by her mixed religious background: “I got used to standing between situations, to being a bit marginal and still a native, to getting acquainted with notions of truth which were relative and changed like the hours of the days and the passing of seasons changed” (p.11). As a young girl growing up in late thirties Lebanon, Adnan had few life options ahead of her. “A little girl,” she writes, “was a daughter, a school girl, and a future wife. She was never considered as an autonomous being whose life could turn out to be something other than what was considered to be the social norm” (p.12). In her autobiographical account, Adnan paints a picture of the norms that prescribed the spaces she had access to, the roles she could play, and the aspirations she could have for herself as a woman. These norms, as she explains, dictated conjugal heterosexuality as the ultimate destiny of young women like herself, and manifested themselves