Featuring Domesticity: Filmed and Televised Representations of Gender Relations in the Transitioning Space of the Family

Films and television serials produced within the Arab world, particularly by Arab program and film makers, provide a window into visual domesticity and its transformation from tradition to modernity. They also serve as an important medium for the analysis of the imagined interaction that takes place between the family within the house, since the camera’s eye can pierce the interior world of the family in ways that may be guarded, in real life, by silent walls. The dissertation takes as its premise visual culture not as a replica of actual life, but a reality of its own. It serves as a commentary, reaction, or propaganda that at times influences actual reality. After an extensive review of films and television productions from the Arab world, two countries were selected as the most prominent virtually in the region and used as case studies for the project. Cairo’s film industry was the earliest in the Arab world and has been a regional force since the early twentieth century, becoming the example from which the rest of the Arab nations learned, imitated, and or adopted. With direct connections to Egyptian expertise, Kuwait initiates a national television station, and established itself as a forerunner in televised serial productions in the Gulf. The dissertation investigates Egyptian films and Kuwaiti sitcoms for their potential particularly in the 1960s to critic or promote particular understanding of the home space. In Egypt, through an analysis of the work of Hassan Al Imam in his adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, the dissertation argues, that productions of the time, used mise-en-scene and décor to critique traditions of hyper-patriarchy, subjugated femininity, and haptic interaction. By deliberately exaggerating changes in the domestic space, they articulated in the process a clear distinction between tradition and modernity in the domestic landscape of the time. In the early 1960’s, the same year Kuwait became a nation state, the newly found Ministry of Information, invited a large group of Egyptian media specialists to put together television serials. Aware of the social and political influence that televised media could have on its vast audience, the state took on the role of the educator and under this rubric produced television shows with the themes of tawwiyya (discipline), to spread social and ethical instructions on how one must live in a modernizing world. In the process, the state portrayed images of the ideal modern Kuwaiti home, it’s nuclear family and the role of the model wife and husband, each with his established gendered, normative, and prescribed role. Al Qawmiya (nationalism) which had immediate repercussions in Egyptian theater and cinema found its way to Kuwaiti theater and television through individuals like Zaki Tulaimat, an Egyptian actor and director, who with the acquiesces of the Egyptian government, moved to Kuwait to help develop its theater and television station. With these influences, Kuwait developed its national television and particularly through sitcoms and melodramas advocated two distinct understandings of the post oil modern domestic space and its gender hierarchies, with a deliberate focus, in both instances, on the wife/housewife. A number of different lessons promoted by a series of different female subjects were portrayed in each genre. Television viewers hence watched a host of modern interpretations creating an enormous amount of tension in the messages directed to the public. Although women roles were often played by crossdressers, Kuwaiti sitcoms, locally created, inspired, and themed, were more accepted by the Kuwaiti public because they were in line with general ideas of how women are viewed and hence could be laughed at by the viewers. While on the other hand, melodramas, produced mostly by foreigners, included actresses, and represented women either in a more realistic or aspirational form. This didn’t necessarily have to do with the liberation of women, but rather recognizing their existence in a manner that goes beyond Kuwait, reflecting I would argue how women existed in Egypt in the 1960s. While Tulaimat was successful at including women on stage, and later at showcasing a more ‘positive’ televised female sample, women were still trapped in the making of a man’s visual world. Directed, produced, and developed by an all-male crew, women on television had little space to articulate their actual concern or image. Male supremacy over the making of the ‘image,’ influenced how the female home subjects was characterized, first as a masculinized victim in sitcoms, and later as accountable for the success or failure of the family in melodramas. Unlike the importance placed on a comprehensible set in the Cairene cinematic example, early Kuwaiti televised productions focused on generating home subjects and not mise-en-scenes. The scope of articulation of the female home subject, thus was always in reference to her husband (father or brother) who drafted the outlines of her character. Be it ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ her role as a wife or housewife (sister or mother) determined her pedagogical responsibilities, not her physical home space. While in the Egyptian example, the house or the set had an influence on the manner in which the female character changed throughout the course of the narrative. As the virtual Cairene house transforms from a traditional to a modern settlement the females responsibilities within the home also changes. In the Kuwaiti example however, the female role did not change with her physical environment, her characterization remained subordinate and in reference to the demands of her male counterpart