Circuits of Visibility
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Circuits of Visibility

Gender and Transnational Media Cultures

Radha S. Hegde

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eBook - ePub

Circuits of Visibility

Gender and Transnational Media Cultures

Radha S. Hegde

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About This Book

Circuits of Visibility explores transnational media environments as pathways to understand the gendered constructions and contradictions that underwrite globalization. Tracking the ways in which gendered subjects are produced and defined in transnationally networked, media saturated environments, Circuits of Visibility presents sixteen essays that collectively advance a discussion about sexual politics, media, technology, and globalization.

Covering the internet, television, books, telecommunications, newspapers, and activist media work, the volume directs focused attention to the ways in which gender and sexuality issues are constructed and mobilized across the globe. Contributors' essays span diverse global sites from Myanmar and Morocco to the Balkans, France, U.S., and China, and cover an extensive terrain from consumption, aesthetics and whiteness to masculinity, transnational labor, and cultural citizenship. Circuits of Visibility initiates a necessary conversation and political critique about the mediated global terrain on which sexuality is defined, performed, regulated, made visible, and experienced.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2011
ISBN
9780814790601
I Configuring Visibilities

1 Seeing Princess Salma

Transparency and Transnational Intimacies
Susan Ossman
In raising questions of how spaces of global media shape feminine visibility we find ourselves entangled in discussions about modernity and transparency that have remained lively for several decades. Women’s exposure to the eyes of particular men, or of random publics, and concerns about what their clothing covers or what it reveals have often been used to demonstrate the position of entire societies or classes or families with respect to ideals of equality and liberation. Yet at the same time as women alter their skirts in sync with international fashion, their sartorial choices are also asked to stand for national or ethnic or religious identities; pictured in burqas or ball gowns, they become tiles in the mosaic of world cultures. An image of a world of flows or the idea of a kind of liquid society may be enticing and, indeed, may even correspond to the sensations engendered by the speed with which we can connect to people in faraway places via Internet or travel.1 But such impressions of flowing and floating are often produced through the speeding up, multiplication, and blurring of fixed images. With respect to women, a scale of liberation that weighs them is calibrated first to weigh their clothing, then to examine what body parts are covered. The types of dress are inventoried, as are the kinds of occasions at which they are to be worn. A complex collection of scenes and types informs our interpretation of where an individual or group of women is located on the path of progress, indicating that more than attention to transparency or concealment is at work in shaping the politics of feminine visibility. Although much attention has been paid to the role of the veil, the hijab, when this “protection” appears as a piece of clothing that can be modeled, photographed, and worn, it is merely another picture in this evolving typology. It may act as an index of backwardness and a symbol of self-empowerment for others, but even the fully covered body can operate as a meaningful image in this system. What is difficult to tolerate is the absence of depiction. When meaning arises through the interplay of images that portray social positions and personal opinions, to refuse to present oneself or another in images becomes a problem.
In this chapter, I focus on one such conspicuous absence by following the media journey of Salma Bennani, who became the first publicly recognized wife to a Moroccan king in 2002. Princess Salma’s appearance in royal family photos on the event of her marriage to the young king Mohammed VI pointed to the absence of the figure of the king’s wife during the reigns of previous Moroccan kings. It also drew attention to the continuing refusal of other leaders elsewhere in the Arab world to admit their wives, following what have become international expectations regarding the composition and representation of first families. Without globally circulating norms for the composition of the family, tales of tumultuous affairs among international royalty would seldom be so eagerly reported in the popular press. The image of the first family in Morocco has progressively come to be based on the marriage of “one man and one woman,” as the current rhetoric of conservative America would have it. Of course, in the United States, the issue of polygamy has been extremely peripheral to this debate, which has focused on gay marriage.2 One might interpret King Mohammed VI’s introduction of the first royal wife to the national and international arena as indicating his willingness to become more like other world leaders, whose wives act as both accessories and spokeswomen for their husbands.3 But it would be wise not to forget that by publicizing himself as part of a couple, Mohammed VI did more than implicate himself and his princess into a new position with respect to global first couples. He also played on the limits of the Arab world and monarchy itself by coming out as a married man. Not only did his wife’s picture now appear beside well-known female representatives of visible Arab wives such as the Jordanian queens, but it was also projected against the background of the invisible wives of other Arab leaders. Monarchs such as Abdullah of Jordan and Mohammed VI of Morocco publicize their monogamy in nations where polygamy is legal, and they display their wives as indicative of their modernity and the degree of liberation of women in their nations. In so doing they play not only on increasingly global norms of the family but also with the very ways in which tropes of progress and modernity have been associated with the increased transparency and visibility of women’s bodies.
While I followed pictures as they moved to shape the nation and reinstate borders in Morocco under King Hassan II, I found that it was not sufficient to notice how the king’s portraits showed him first in military uniform and then as a playboy, in religious garb, or in a cowboy hat.4 The political import of these images was to be found not only in how they fixed certain notions of the monarch following globally circulating notions of various kinds of masculinity but also in what they excluded, what we forgot in viewing them. As pictures of the king moved across national borders into European magazines, Algerian newspapers, or American televisions, one could easily imagine that the sometimes scantily clad and always stylish princesses beside their father reflected the pro-Western alliances of the kingdom. Moroccans did often remark the absence of the children’s mother in family portraits, and they were thrilled when the national television offered a furtive glance of her at the wedding party of one of her daughters.
The woman whom Hassan II referred to only as “the mother of my children” never appeared in family portraits. Meanwhile a tidal wave of pictures of the king and other members of his family circulated around the world. One might interpret this flow of pictures of his daughters and sons and grandchildren as a tactic to obscure the disparity between King Hassan’s family photos and those of other nation’s leaders, who appeared with their spouses.
By responding to this perceived absence of a wife, King Mohammed VI was generally seen as making a political statement on women’s equality and drawing Morocco ever closer to the West.5 He shifted his own position by this visible adherence to dominant international norms of what makes up a family. While Salma’s presence at the king’s side filled a striking gendered absence, it also revealed a logic of publicity that claims transparency while being at odds with the basic tenets of equal access and open communication. Discourses of human rights, democratic governance, and the ideal Habermasian public sphere are typically conceived as unimpeded spaces of dialogue among equals. But this attention to the free flow of ideas does not allow us to engage with some very important truths about political communication that are clearly evident in Princess Salma’s coming out. In what follows, I thus part company with those writers who take the side of “free communication” and measure the progress of a nation according to narratives of progressive enlightenment. There is more behind what meets the eye in the introduction of the royal couple as a figure on the international political scene.6
While media reports in Morocco and internationally have tended to focus on the introduction of Mohammed VI’s wife as a part of the royal family as indicative of the present king’s modernity and progressiveness, I argue that Salma’s appearance is more about the transnational management of the king’s image. I draw on an analytic model of “three worlds” that I first developed through ethnographic research on social interactions, meaning, and judgment among women in the beauty salons of Casablanca, Paris, and Cairo.7 This model of “three worlds” links day-to-day social interactions to distinct ways of making sense of things, being with others, and making judgments. In a series of studies, I have worked through the way access to particular kinds of social spaces teaches people to think and take action according to “worlds” that I label as proximate, rational, and celebrated. Here I cannot provide details to the entire chain of connection that tie together social spaces to these different ways of configuring truth. What I will do is to draw on the model to disentangle the multiple ways that the appearance of Salma repositions the king firmly within the heterosexual contract of marriage, allowing the Moroccan royal family the possibility of repositioning itself on the stage of regional and world politics. By following the interplay of several coexisting ways of making sense of Salma’s image, we realize that what is really at stake in such representations is the figure of the king himself. The introduction of his wife to the world must be interpreted as a way of extending his own political reach and roles. This is possible not simply because of how the people of Morocco weave proximate, rational, and celebrity worlds into their lives but also because these social and cognitive worlds are no longer contained within national boundaries.

Selecting Salma

Salma Bennani was a young student when her sister introduced her to her fiancĂ©, the soon-to-be King Mohammed VI. In the weeks leading up to her wedding, the Moroccan press made sure that everyone in the kingdom knew that she had lost her mother as a child, had lived in an ordinary family environment, and had excelled in math and science. She was indeed ranked first in her class at engineering school and gave up a scholarship to go to Canada to pursue her studies when she agreed to marry the king. In addition to her academic credentials, she appears to have been a model daughter. The highly complimentary coverage of the life of the soon-to-be princess emphasized her beauty, good upbringing, and morality. Some more religiously conservative people criticized her for shamelessly revealing her beautiful, long, red hair in the many photographs that accompanied the news of the upcoming marriage; for others, these pictures indicated the possibility that the king might champion the demands of liberal groups for women’s rights. In online chat rooms and international discussions about the princess, her red hair and freckled pallor were sometimes taken as a sign of her foreign heritage, but among Moroccans, these traits represented her Fasi heritage and were discussed in terms of the king’s close connection with Fez, a city known for its cultural prestige and wealthy, intellectually prominent families.8
While some religiously inspired critics referred to the princess as “the actress,” implying that she displays herself in ways that connote sexual impropriety, others critiqued the rags-to-riches story of a poor orphan turned princess, a story disseminated by the national and European media. For all the accounts of how the king was smitten by the beauty and intelligence of his soon-to-be bride, all the people I interviewed in Morocco shortly after the wedding insisted that a royal wedding could not be so “spontaneous,” arguing that potential spouses would have been carefully examined. When the bride-to-be is the very first wife of a nation’s king to be publicly acknowledged, little could be left to chance. A quick look at Salma’s face, her background, and her rĂ©sumĂ© suggest why she was considered the ideal partner for the king. Such a match is rarely accomplished through a love-at-first-sight formula, yet the romantic narrative of the way the orphan became a princess steers us strategically to notice not only Salma’s resilient and feminine qualities but also those of the king who displayed such fine judgment as to fall in love with her.
The royal wedding allowed the king a chance to demonstrate his own qualities and capacity to rule. Whereas it would have seemed illogical for a king, whose office claims its legitimacy through ancestral links to the prophet Mohammed and ultimately to God as the Commander of the Faithful (amir al mouminin), to advertise his curriculum vitae in the media, his marriage to Salma, a simple girl of the people, allowed him the opportunity to do just that.9 In addition to giving the king occasion to publicize his academic achievements and accomplishments, their marriage led to new political opportunities to absorb her qualifications into his, thereby entangling the process of ordering and judging power and politics. To advertise a monarch’s academic accomplishments without such an event might be crass, but to publish them in parallel with those of his wife implies a certain kind of equality. Associating his image with hers allows him to publicize his ability to measure up according to impersonal measures such as diplomas. To move beyond the mere recognition of the revolutionary nature of viewing Morocco’s king as part of a couple, we need to notice the different yet coexisting ways in which the image of Salma and her husband are projected. By reading the wedding by distinguishing three coexisting worlds of judgment of proximity, rationality, and celebrity, we can derive an understanding of how making Salma visible as a princess led to a particular incarnation of the royal couple, with specific implications for the image of the king and his kingdom.
The model of three worlds is an effort to move beyond binary oppositions that have shaped our understanding of the contemporary world in terms of oppositions of modernity and the global with tradition, locality, or personalism. This model recognizes contradiction as a part of the way in which power works through the world at large, and it identifies sites of friction not between classes or cultures but in terms of the varying degrees and situations in which certain worlds are put forth as dominant by an individual or entity such as a state. This model is derived from ethnographic work, and I have drawn out elsewhere the ways in which particular kinds of interactions lead people to learn about their distinctive manners of conceptualizing the world.10 A short account of proximate, rat...

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