Cultural Globalization

Jane Sternbach

3/5/12

Sociology of Globalization

Response to Media and Representation

            Both Jarmakani, and Stabile and Kumar do great jobs of fleshing out the ways in which the U.S. media purposefully construct images of Arab women, and the entire Arab world to suit the government’s agendas. Both authors gave countless examples of instances in which U.S. relations to Middle Eastern countries becoming antagonistic and resulting in negative media propaganda in the United States.

            I particularly liked the part in the Stabile and Kumar article when they compared the amount of news stories written about women in Afghanistan for years before 9/11 and the three months after. They say that in the three months after 9/11 there were 6 times as many articles about women in Afghanistan than in the 18 months prior to it. This just perfectly illustrates the way that the media manipulates the information that we receive to conform to government policy. It shows that the United States obviously had no interest in the plight of women under the Taliban… unless it suited our purposes. It makes me wonder about all the things that go on in the world that I never hear about because it is better for the government to have me kept in the dark.

            Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is not only the volume in which we hear about them, but the quality of the representations. Jarmakani discussed the ways that Arab women are portrayed as either veiled or completely exposed and sexualized in a Harem setting. Both of these portrayals are purposeful constructions by our media to convey how we should feel about Arab women. In both scenarios these women are meant to be seen as horribly oppressed by a hyper-masculine patriarchy, from which the civilized white men are duty-bound to free them. This trope is seen again and again, always coinciding with some event that affected relations between the U.S. and Middle-Eastern countries.  The controversy around Truth Hurts’ song “Addictive” is the perfect example of this happening now. The images of belly dancers and harems are becoming popular because of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Exoticizing Indian culture and exploiting it is just another justification for the wars, and the fact that the artists who used the Indian songs didn’t even bother to get the rights to those songs, is just another example of the ways in which Americans believe they can exploit anyone and everyone for their own economic gain.

            Reading these articles in the context of our “Global War on Terror” is particularly interesting. After 9/11 the same tropes from the 70’s and 80’s were brought back to life, and used as even further justifications for intervention in the Middle East. I loved the way that Stabile and Kumar really detail the ways in which the United States almost single-handedly created these situations in the Middle East, but when it comes time for war, that context is removed and blame is placed on the Arab and Muslim world for being so backwards. While reading these articles it occurred to me that that idea of “terrorist” or “terrorism” can now be used almost synonymously with Arab or Muslim, despite the fact that we have white terrorists within our own borders. Obviously we do not bother to differentiate between the small fundamentalist sect of Islam that promotes violence and the rest of Islam. This is just another tool to justify our economic exploitation of less civilized and violent people.