CASAR CONFERENCE TRAVEL APPLICATION
Marwan M. Kraidy
Papers to be presented at International Communication Association convention,
Phoenix, Arizona, May 24-28, 2012
Paper 1
Broken Promise: Music Video, Contention and Circulation in Iraq-Us Relations
Marwan M. Kraidy
This paper explores the politics and poetics of Arab music videos in the digital age via the heated online polemics fueled by Wa‘d ‘Arqoub , a video featuring a romantic relationship against the backdrop of the plight of Iraq under US occupation. After reviewing the music video literature, I use music video to underpin an understanding of the public sphere grounded in notions of contention and circulation. Music video, I argue, is a heuristic site in two ways: as a text it brings to the forefront the human body as medium and sexuality as central trope; as a medium it highlights new patterns of circulation introduced by hypermedia space. Based on a close study of the music video itself and of more than 50 Arabic-languages sources, this paper argues that a combination of polysemy and visibility makes music video a distinctive catalyst of public discourse in the digital era.
Paper 2
Bold Red Line
Patriarchy and Capitalism in the Saudi-Lebanese Media Connection
Marwan M. Kraidy and Sara Mourad
This paper explores the important role that gender and sexuality play in the political economy of transnational, pan-Arab, media, especially satellite television.
Through a detailed analysis of a massive corpus of the media coverage of a controversy that ensued from one episode of the social talk-show Bold Red Line , broadcast on the
Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (which is now mostly Saudi owned) we analyze competing forces shaping Arab media, mostly ownership of most major outlets by the
Saudi clerico-political elite and the cultural influence of Lebanese media workers, against a backdrop where of increased commercialization of Arab media, and widespread discussions of gender and sexuality in Arab public discourse. The political economy of transnational Arab television, we argue, is best understood via a nexus between on the one hand capital from Saudi Arabia, the most socially conservative Arab country with a social system premised on the invisibility of women in public space, and on the other hand content from Lebanon, especially the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation whose main marketing strategy is the hypervisibility of the female body in media space. We conclude with a discussion of how this Saudi-Lebanese connection shakes a social status quo that is akin to a hysterical context, appropriating the feminist critic’s Tanya
Modleski’s notion of the hysterica text, which works so hard at suppressing sexual themes that it paradoxically makes them hypervisible

Paper 3
NEO-OTTOMAN COOL
The Rise of Turkey in Arab Media Space
Marwan M. Kraidy and Omar Alghazzi
This paper explores the spectacular rise of Turkey in Arab media space as one of the most important recent developments in transnational political communication in the
Middle East. Based on an extensive analysis of Arab public discourse about Turkey, we identify and analyze different themes in Arab public discourse about Turkey’s rise as a regional great power. First we discuss a long Turkish-Arab history of mutual stereotyping in books, film and television. Second we explain the emergence of Turkey as a key geopolitical and diplomatic player in the Middle East. Third, we analyze the pan-Arab popularity of Turkish television drama and cinema. In the past five years, Turkish television drama series have achieved record audience ratings in the Arab world, and gained sympathetic media coverage. This, our research concludes, may be due to Turkish drama’s delivery of an “accessible modernity,” one that features individual freedoms and a carefree consumer lifestyle, but without being wholly Western. Finally, we discuss the launch of TRT7-al-Turkiyya, a Turkish Arabic-language satellite television channel based in Istanbul and Beirut, signaling the official entrance of Turkey into the global battle for Arab public opinion alongside several foreign rivals.