الفهرس 
Postcolonial FeminismOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 266 |  |  |
| | | from | 266 | | |
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