Representing ‘Middle East Women’: A Critical Analysis of The Fertile Crescent Project

• In Event: 545 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session.
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Gender and Sexuality

Abstract

The uncanny and long standing Western curiosity regarding ‘the Middle East’ ascended with the events of September 11 and what has come to be known as ‘the Arab Spring’. Such curiosity re-mobilized overdetermining signifiers such as ‘veil’, ‘war’ and ‘violence’ as geographical, ethnic and religious markers within dominant discourses of knowledge production about ‘the Middle East’. These signifiers of dominant discourses condense the complexity of anyone of ‘the Middle East’ into intelligible renderings for the Western audience, even within the novel initiatives that seek to challenge them, by mobilizing such markers of alterity. In this paper I analyze one of these novel artistic initiatives The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society, a “global feminist” project organized by Rutgers University Institute for Women and Art in 2012 in New Jersey. By analyzing the project, I seek to answer following questions: what gets to be represented as ‘the Middle East women’ and what are the concrete social processes these representations are produced and reproduced? I argue that the space provided for what is categorized as ‘the Middle East art’ within Western circles of contemporary art field, primarily serves for informing the Western audience about ‘the Middle East’. Within this space, the works of ‘Middle East women artists’ are circulated only through certain symbols that are legible to the Western audience, as informative pieces. These symbols usually evolve around the themes of ‘veil’, ‘war’ and ‘violence’ and they serve as dominant explanatory umbrella terms for anyone and/or anything ‘Middle Eastern’.

Author

• Nil Uzun, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers