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The Muhannad Effect: Media Panic, Melodrama, and the Arab Female Gaze

Author

  • Christa Salamandra

Summary, in English

In the summer of 2008, the Saudi-owned, pan-Arab satellite television network Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) aired a failed Turkish soap opera, Gümüş, as the Arabized Noor, creating an overnight sensation and a media panic. Arab news media attributed a wave of domestic violence and divorce to the series’ handsome lead actor, and his character’s romantic deportment. This article combines content analysis of Noor, examination of online discourses surrounding the series, and interviews with its producers. It explores women’s use of new media forms—satellite television and the Internet—to articulate desire and discontent, and the media panic these expressions induced among social and religious conservatives. Opposition to Noor—and to the idolization of its male lead—invokes older notions of women’s potent sexual desire as a threat to the social order, and justifies

their containment and control. The series’ ambiguity, like that of Turkey itself, invokes binaries of East and West, Islam and secularism, tradition and modernity enabling a range of commentary on the state of Arab society in general, and sexual relations in particular. The Noor phenomenon created a forum where conflicting notions of Middle Eastern identity, sexual agency and gender relations vie for dominance.

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Pages

45-78

Publication/Series

Anthropological Quarterly

Volume

85

Issue

1

Document type

Journal article

Topic

  • Other Social Sciences

Keywords

  • pan-Arab satellite television
  • female gaze
  • Media panic
  • media convergence
  • Internet
  • Social media

Status

Published