Suchergebnisse

Review of: New and Old Routes of Portuguese Emigration: Uncertain Futures at the Periphery of Europe, Cláudia Pereira and Joana Azevedo (eds) (2019)
Cham: Springer, 281 pp.,
ISBN 978-3-03015-134-8, e-book, Open Access

The Israeli film Strangers (Erez Tadmor/ Guy Nattiv, 2007) loosely integrates elements from Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet and uses the archetype of the star-crossed lovers to approach the Middle East conflict. This paper questions how the original structure, which relies on a rivalry between two identical parties, is transposed to a setting where the power relations are marked by inequality. By examining the political meanings and the Orientalist overtones that are embedded in the process of gendering Israel and Palestine through the protagonists, this paper argues that Strangers affirms Israel's cultural and moral superiority and silences the structural violence of both the occupation and the dispossession of the Palestinians. Granted that a key element in Shakespeare is the final reconciliation between the families, this paper finally questions the pertinence of Shakespeare's play as a hypotext to address the realities of the Middle East. ; O filme israelita Strangers (Erez Tadmor/ Guy Nattiv, 2007) integra vagamente elementos da peça shakespeareana Romeu e Julieta, usando o arquétipo dos amantes desafortunados para abordar o conflito do Médio Oriente. O presente artigo questiona como a estrutura original, baseada na rivalidade entre duas fações idênticas, é transposta para um contexto onde as relações de poder são marcadas pela desigualdade. A partir da análise dos significados políticos e das conotações orientalistas presentes no processo de masculinização/feminilização de Israel/Palestina através dos protagonistas, este artigo defende que Strangers afirma uma suposta superioridade cultural e moral israelita e silencia a expropriação dos palestinianos. Uma vez que a reconciliação final entre as famílias é um elemento central em Shakespeare, este texto, questiona, por fim, a pertinência da peça shakespeareana como hipotexto para abordar as realidades do Médio Oriente.

The aim of the present article is to tackle the way in which CNN and BBC – as leading examples of hegemonic Western media – represented the cases of sexual violence that were being denounced during the war in Libya. Looking into the coverage of this war may be useful to analyze the very concept of wartime rape and enquire to which extent rape narratives are framed by social constructs of sexuality, gender, and race, as well as by political agendas. I argue that the Western media tended to pay more attention to rape stories that were politically beneficial to NATO's war effort in support of the opposition, and showed less interest in accusations that did not involve Gaddafi's henchmen. I finally discuss the culturalization of sexual violence, by addressing the strategies of othering implied in the media explanations and contextualization of the rapes.

This book offers a systematic and comparative analysis of the intersections of religion and gender in times of populism across the EU-Mediterranean. The chapters explore tensions and issues related to religion and gender in nations including Portugal, Italy, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Greece, Turkey, and Israel/Palestine. Shifting attention from the European Union to the Mediterranean area allows the inclusion of countries whose history is significantly interwoven, taking into account the legacies of colonialism, the effects of post-colonialism, and the role of the EU in relation to gender-related issues in particular. The volume investigates not only country-specific cases but highlights similarities and differences in the region and aims to understand how the interconnections influence the issues at stake. It draws together countries with non-Christian majoritarian religions, with different political regimes, and where feminism and women's movements have different shapes, histories, and relationships with religion. The book will appeal to scholars interested in the entanglements of gender, religion, and populism from a range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, political science, religious studies, and gender studies.

The period 2015/2016 was marked by several hotspots of turmoil in the European Union. Events such as the euro crisis, the massive arrival of refugees, the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels, the New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Cologne – to name just a few – were perceived as signs of a political crisis challenging the very ideal of Europe as a welcoming and inclusive "imagined community" (Anderson 1982). Several individual member states, often pushed by major advances in their anti-immigration parties, have been key actors in leading the reintroduction of European national border control, the monitoring of non-Europeans, the Othering of bodies according to gender, race, sexuality and religion, the construction of walls and fences, the development of systems of detention and securitization and the promotion of anti-immigration policies. Digital media has played a major role in creating subjectivities around the crisis and promoting processes of Othering. Within this new media ecosystem, online social media perform a key role. By opening the floor to new gatekeepers and blurring the traditional lines dividing audiences and media production, social media allow the generation and dissemination of narratives and frames in a ubiquitous, echo-chamber – that is, an environment or a sphere where people only listen and speak to like-minded peers, so that their own views reverberate and are, thus, reinforced (Sunstein 2007) – and "Facebook disclosure" logic (Wills and Reeves 2009), which stages social media participants as the "true voice of the people", particularly in a time of increasing distrust in traditional media. As such, the moral panic around refugees and Muslims, the gendering and racialization of threat and fear, intertwined with phobias framed by the dichotomy of "us versus them", cannot be understood without critically examining digital media. This essay is part of an on-going transdisciplinary project at the Center of Social Studies, University of Coimbra: (De)Othering: Deconstructing Risk and Otherness: hegemonic scripts and counter-narratives on migrants/refugees and "internal Others" in Portuguese and European mediascapes. This project sets out to critically examine media representations of migrants, refugees and "internal Others" in Portugal and across Europe, while mapping out their interconnections with particular narratives in the field of security and within the War on Terror. This essay examines the role of digital media in amplifying the "sexual moral panic" around migration. We argue that digital media strongly contributes to the dissemination and escalation of phobias of invasion and dangerous sexuality framed by constructions of race and gender, proceeding from widely shared orientalist and colonial archives of racializing rape. This archive sustains the representation of male Muslim and Black migrants and refugees as subverting the sexual order of the European "imagined community". Two European nations, Italy and Germany, will be at the core of our analysis. We will examine digital media circulation of images and videos regarding sexual crimes committed by migrants (namely the rape and murder of young woman in Macerata by a Nigerian migrant in January 2018, the the rape and murder of young woman in Rome by a Nigerian migrant in October the same year, the 2015 New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Cologne and the rape-murder of a student in Freiburg in 2016 by an asylum seeker). The article argues that gender, sexuality, race and other categories of difference were crucial in the social media construction of these events as political crisis and threats to European identity.