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Abstract This dissertation examines the representations of Arab and Arab-American women in mass media and literary fields in the plays of Yussef El Guindi especially Such a Beautiful Voice is Sayeda’s, Karima’s City and Threesome. The researcher has discovered that it is crucial to spot how Arab and Arab-American women are represented in their societies as one of the discursive practices which contribute to establishing oppressive representations of those women. Therefore, the objective of this dissertation is to relate postcolonial feminist theory to some Arab-American plays to illustrate how Arab and Arab-American women are misrepresented. It aims to analyze the latent ideology behind the media stereotypical misrepresentations of Arab and Arab-American women through utilizing the Arab-American theatre. It also examines the relationship between the chances of women in voicing themselves and their stereotypical misrepresentations. The Arab-American theatre is a valuable medium which reflects the world’s ideology and representations of the Egyptian and the Arab-American women. Concurrently, it assists in defying the damaging impacts of the negative representations through producing countering images of women who resist and protest being misrepresented and oppressed. This thesis starts with an overview of the historical background of Arab women and their oppressive conditions in Arab countries. Then it explores how the stereotypical representations that are imposed by social media culture contribute to the exploitation of the less powerful groups in the societies, especially women. The main concern of this thesis is to elucidate how the Egyptian-American playwright, Yussef El Guindi, has succeeded in giving voices to the female characters who are silenced and marginalized by their patriarchal ideologies and Western stereotypical representations of them. Therefore, the three plays under study are metaphors of the personal, cultural and political exploitation of Arab and Arab-American women. Summary 2 For decades, Arab women lived in an oppressive climate where they were represented as victimized women, irrational objects or sexual creatures that should be under the control of their male-dominated ideologies and Western colonial policies. As a consequence, several Arab activists have advocated calling for women’s rights inspired by Western feminist movements. Although these Arab feminists are guided by Western feminism, they respect the discrepancies between Western and Middle Eastern women represented in the diverse cultural, historical and ethnic origins. People’s lives are greatly influenced by social media. It establishes their cognition as well as their identities. With the assistance of social media, the discrepancies between people and nations are forged. Media messages direct their recipients to understand and identify the surrounding environment. In a sense, certain ideologies dominate these messages where people’s perceptions and behaviors are influenced. With the increase in modern technological innovations, media industry has achieved significant impact in manipulating both the sociocultural and the socioeconomic ideologies in nation’s mindsets. In order to clarify, several critics have concluded that any ideological practice serves the concept of ”hegemony”. In fact, hegemony is created by the dominant class to exercise their control with the aim of prevailing false ideas to establish their hidden agenda. It is to be noted that hegemony becomes effective when it is hidden, and this implicitness makes people’s common sense. That is why any authority strongly works to obtain the power of hegemony, and many social media utilize several tactics to obtain people’s consent on their decisions and performances. Media messages are delivered through specific representations which forge how life can be grasped and experienced. Accordingly, hegemonic ideologies create stereotypical representations about people’s lives. These representations are guided by serving the interests of those in power to create the identities of the living world Summary 3 around them. Relations between people and nations are sometimes dominated by stereotypes which are considered as constant images, impressions or ideas that are imposed upon something or someone. Therefore, stereotyping is a practice of winning a universal approval by believing that it is part of a natural act whether these stereotypes are based on true images or not. However, such ideological beliefs (i.e. stereotypes) can usually be malicious due to their classifications. For this reason, both Western and postcolonial feminists have devoted their efforts to resist the stereotypical misrepresentations of women through representing real images of them with their authentic feelings and experiences. The analysis of the plays in this thesis is built upon the theory of postcolonial feminism. It calls for equality between women and men in all spheres. Many theorists agree that feminism is a political act to defy the spread of sexism in societies. Feminism defies patriarchal ideologies that create power relations between men and women which put men on the top of the social hierarchy, while place women in the subordinate levels overlooking their personalities and interests. As for postcolonial feminism, it is deemed as a response to the dominant focus solely on the experiences of white women in the Western cultures. It highlights that postcolonial women suffer from various oppressive conditions differ from those that are faced by Western women. Postcolonial feminists accept that historical, political, economic and cultural conditions collaborate in marginalizing, silencing and misrepresenting postcolonial women. Consequently, many postcolonial feminists incite First World activists to give more attention in recognizing the experiences and complications of the Third World women apart from the Western hegemonic discourses. For this reason, postcolonial feminism is considered a critique of the homogenizing tendencies of Western feminism that promotes a universal model of the oppressed women. At the same time, being ignored in the postcolonial agenda has provoked postcolonial feminists to defy this overlooking. To summarize, the Summary 4 theory of postcolonial feminism seeks not only to shed light on all the suffering that face women in postcolonized countries, but also to work for the improvement of the conditions of these subordinated women. The present study aims to examine three plays of El Guindi, two of them are one-act plays: Such A Beautiful Voice is Sayeda’s and Karima’s City, and the other is a two-act play: Threesome. Such A Beautiful Voice is Sayeda’s (2005) is the first one-act play under study. It is an illustration of the oppressive misrepresentation that faces some Arab women in their Egyptian society. It is about the oppressed housewife Sayeda and her way to express her suffering. from the onset of the play, El Guindi succeeds in making his reading and reader travel to Sayeda’s world, which is full of jinns or spirits. He makes the reader feel that he is reading about an insane housewife who discovers, suddenly, that she has a beautiful voice which will enable her to sing. Unfortunately, the patriarchal as well as the postcolonial ideologies that are imposed on her hinder her from expressing her voice. Her attempts to voice herself cause her to be seen as a mad woman. This short play elaborates how simple things can be reason for causing Sayeda shame and disgrace. The second one-act play under study is Karima’s City (2005). As the title suggests, this short play is about Karima and her city. El Guindi creatively manages to picture the changes that occur to Karima’s beloved city; everything is changing around her; nothing is like the past. Every time she expresses her disgust from her surroundings or tries to change them, people make her feel that she is abnormal and crazy. Everything is repressing her. Her society’s conditions have been declined by the modern developments that accompanied the appearance of globalization. All these changes lead Karima to be physically ill. She cannot silence herself or even lose the hope of change. In fact, Karima’s devastating character is a reflection of her Summary 5 devastating society. This short play is a wonderful example of the oppression that shocks Arab women in a city that refuses to accept any hope of changing in the repressive ideologies adopted by some Egyptian people. The third play under study is Threesome (2015). Threesome exhibits the effects of oppression and misrepresentation on the protagonist, Leila. Leila is an Egyptian- American writer, who travelled with her Egyptian-American boyfriend, Rashid, to Egypt to join the 25th January Revolution. Both of them returned back to America after being exposed to violent assaults from the Egyptian police officers. Even though the title proposes that the reader is going to see a threesome relationship, this threesome has never happened. The play exposes the emotional turmoil and devastation that guide the actions of the characters. Leila tries to reclaim her own individuality and the province of her own body after being abused by both the Middle Eastern and Western hegemonic ideologies represented in both Rashid and Doug. Threesome mainly focuses on Leila’s struggle to come to terms with sexism, ”Orientalism” and the pursuit of power which resonates with intense passion and pain. Finally, the conclusion clarifies that as an Arab-American playwright, El Guindi succeeds in portraying the ordeals of the Arab and Arab-American women in an authentic and objective way by focusing on the shortcomings of both the Arab and Western ideologies. Our chosen female protagonists suffer from various oppressive situations that have urged them to resist with various techniques of fighting back. The three plays assert that oppression and misrepresentation have to be followed by resistance. Sometimes this resistance takes the shape of madness as an escape from such repression. The massive social, economic and political changes that take place in the Egyptian and American spheres have encouraged El Guindi to portray them in his plays; subsequently, in a chronological order, this study traces the development of these standpoints in El Guind’s plays. This study illustrates how Summary 6 media and literature could cooperate in changing the condition of women whether positively or negatively through their discourses |