Introduction: Transnational feminist approaches to film and media from the Middle East and North Africa

ABSTRACT

This introduction outlines the special issue’s call for a transnational feminist approach to film and media from the Middle East and North Africa. The authors provide an overview of approaches to gender in Middle Eastern and North African film, as well as surveying new methodological directions in the field. They argue that a transnational feminist approach brings together divergent fields and has numerous generative possibilities for the contemporary political context. Finally, the authors briefly outline each contribution to the special issue.

Keywords:

• Transnational cinema
• transnational feminism
• Middle East
• North Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Please note that in writing ‘women’, we use the word in the most expansive and inclusive terms possible.

2. Our emphasis on approach calls for a distinctly feminist orientation in understanding how the flows of capital, bodies, and cultures affect material lives and culture.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zahra Khosroshahi

Zahra Khosroshahi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Glasgow, researching women’s filmmaking and Iranian cinema. She is currently working on her forthcoming monograph Iranian Women Filmmakers: A Cinema of Resistance (Edinburgh University Press). Zahra’s scholarship explores how film challenges systems of power, and how filmmaking specifically functions as a form of resistance in Iran. Her publications appear in a number of leading journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Frames Cinema Journal and Feminist Media Histories.

Sara Saljoughi

Sara Saljoughi is Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her essays have been published in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Iranian Studies, Film Criticism, Film International, and Iran Namag. She is the co-editor of 1968 and Global Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2018). She recently completed a monograph on cinema in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s.