Arab Women in Arab News: Old Stereotypes and New Media

This book reports the first comprehensive1 survey of Arab women in Arab news – a picture of peaks, valleys, and troughs where the achievements, challenges, and day-to-day realities of Arab women are portrayed. The vast majority of media studies on Arab women thus far undertaken are Western-based. They study the effect of Western stereo-types in Western media depictions of Arab women. A sprawling literature traces 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 200-year-old stereotype. Much of this research has studied silent “image bites” of Arab women, in which women are pictured in veils and their own voices are replaced by Western captions or voice-overs.