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Feminist Media Studies
ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20
Double Marginalization: The Invisibility of Syrian
Refugee Women's Perspectives in Mainstream
Online Activism and Global Media
Katty Alhayek
To cite this article: Katty Alhayek (2014) Double Marginalization: The Invisibility of Syrian
Refugee Women's Perspectives in Mainstream Online Activism and Global Media, Feminist
Media Studies, 14:4, 696-700, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2014.935205
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.935205
Published online: 04 Jul 2014.
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DOUBLE MARGINALIZATION: THE
INVISIBILITY OF SYRIAN REFUGEE
WOMEN’S PERSPECTIVES IN MAINSTREAM
ONLINE ACTIVISM AND GLOBAL MEDIA
Katty Alhayek, Ohio University
After the “Arab Spring” uprisings, an optimistic strand in the field of media and social
change emerged which presents the role of social networking websites as key tools for
Muslim and Arab women to change the dominant representations about themselves in the
media and literature as oppressed and sexually objectified by their men (Nahed Eltantawy
2013). While I acknowledge the role of online social media spaces as resources for social
change, this paper incorporates feminist scholarship on gender, postcolonialism, and
representation (Abu-Lughod 2002; Chandra Mohanty 2003; Aihwa Ong 1999) to critically
evaluate social networking websites as spaces that actually promote stereotypical and/or
hegemonic understandings of Syrian refugee women’s issues. As an example of what Ong
(1999) calls “self-orientalization,” I analyze the discourses of the Facebook campaign
“Refugees Not Captives” (RNC) and argue that this campaign’s messages transfer to and
interact with mainstream global media coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis. My main goal
is to show how what may appear to be a local authentic online campaign aiming to
encourage feminist actions to end the suffering of Syrian refugee women is, in fact,
disconnected from the offline realities of these women and the activist groups who work
with them on the ground. My concern is to critique a form of feminist online campaign that
claims to represent the voices of women who generally do not have the economic and
educational privileges to access the online spaces to speak for themselves.
Methodologically, this article is part of a broader study based on my fieldwork during
the summer of 2013 in Jordan, where I conducted ethnographic research as well as thirtythree
in-depth interviews with Syrian refugee women and activists, including the
representative of the RNC campaign. My paper discusses how the discourses of both this
online campaign and the Western media reinforce hegemonic orientalist representations of
Syrian women, as well as marginalizing both refugee women’s voices and the voices of
activists that do not fit dominant representations of Muslim women.
Orientalist and Self-Orientalizing Representations
Thewell-known work of Edward Said (1978) introduces theterm “orientalism”to define
the cultural and ideological representations of the Orient in the Western/colonial literature,
in which the relationship between the West and the East is constructed according to a binary
relationship that places the West in a superior position to the East. As a result, the first is
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depicted in terms such as “masculine,” “rational,” and “modern.” In contrast, the second is
described in language such as “feminine,” “irrational,” and “backward.” One of the main
critiques of Said’s work is his lack of recognition of the agency of people in the East.
Addressing this theoretical gap, Ong (1999) uses the term “self-orientalization” to describe
the process of global Western hegemony interacting with and infiltrating Asian local cultural
discourses and also to recognize the agency of the Asian subjects who themselves use selforientalizing
representations to manipulate meanings for different purposes and gains.
While orientalist representations of Middle Eastern women in mainstream media are
well studied, I suggest that self-orientalization can be used in feminist media studies to
tackle the problematic of not only self-orientalizing representations but also questions of
online privilege and invisibility. In order to examine this problematic, I employ selforientalization
to describe the process of interaction between RNC as an Arabic Facebook
campaign and the global media coverage of Syrian refugee women’s issues. In particular, I
analyze the gendered aspects of the Facebook campaign’s self-orientalizing representations
and the orientalist representations of mainstream global media. I choose this
campaign based on both personal communication with Syrian feminists inside Syria and
later my interviews with fifteen Syrian activists in Jordan, with most of these experts noting
that RNC is the most famous campaign regarding Syrian refugee women’s issues. They also
reported that this campaign influences Syrian refugee women’s representations in the
Arabic media and beyond. Such influence can be attributed to when the campaign
emerged, which coincided with the first visible phases of the refugee crisis.
The Local Social and Global Media Representations
In September 2012, using Facebook, YouTube, and other communication
technologies, a group of young Syrian activists launched a campaign called Refugees Not
Captives (RNC), which introduces itself as a “campaign to protect Syrian women” (Lajiaat
Lasabaya 2012, para. 1). According to the RNC official Facebook page, their three main goals
are: first, to raise awareness among the girls’ families about the risks of forced marriage in
exchange for money; second, to communicate with those Arab youth who may have good
intentions and can be mobilized to legally criminalize and socially shame such marriages;
third, to communicate with women’s and human rights organizations in Arab countries,
with international intellectual elites, and also with corporate professionals and leaders to
encourage them to carry out humanitarian and ethical roles by establishing funds to
support marriages only between Syrian men and women (Lajiaat Lasabaya 2012, para. 7–9).
The activists who launched the RNC campaign emphasize their secular depoliticized
identity and that their cause is to speak up against forced marriages in exchange for money
between Syrian women in Jordan’s refugee camps and Arab men from Jordan and Arabian
Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia. Yet, in pursuing this cause, the campaign explicitly
others the people of the Arabian Gulf by describing them as “sexist sick teenagers who are
obsessed with sex” (Lajiaat Lasabaya 2012, para. 5). Furthermore, the campaign accuses
Arab men in general of racism because they use cultural and religious discourses to
encourage marriage of Syrian women (who are Caucasian by race) as a solution to help
refugee Syrian families affected by war.
The language in the RNC campaign mirrors elements of Western hegemonic
discourses that essentialize Eastern culture to represent Syrian women and Arab men, thus
ending up relying on processes of self-orientalization. Similar to the RNC, the global media
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representations focus on the individual level of actions and on blaming the Muslim culture
for forced marriages. In a Google search of the words “Syrian refugee women,” most results
are about forced marriages and how Syrian people sell their daughters off for money (May
10, 2013, BBC; May 15, 2013, CBS; May 22, 2013, ABC). The results of the Google search
include articles ranging from Western to local Arabic media. In these articles Syrian refugees
are portrayed as a homogeneous group of powerless, victimized women and oppressive
men who sell their daughters as commodities for rich Arabian men. In this sense, the
suffering of Syrian refugee women is minimized to involuntary marriage in exchange for
money, and the causes of this suffering are blamed on both the backward greedy men in
the women’s families and on the Arabian men who are sexually obsessed with buying
young girls.
Disconnection between Online Representations and Offline Realities
According to results from my interviews with refugee women and activists, the
disconnection between online representations and offline realities in relation to Syrian
refugee women’s issues in Jordan is significant. The dominant social and global media
representations generalize and differentiate Syrians and Arabs from other societies, and
ignore the broader context of the power relations that rule refugee women and activists’
lives in both their home and host countries. Most of my interviewees report that, for
example, forced marriage in exchange for money between Syrian women in Jordan and
Arabian men is limited to a few cases. In contrast, most refugee families are becoming more
protective of their daughters after arriving in Jordan.
Criticizing the dominant online representations about forced marriage, Sarah (thirtytwo,
a Syrian female activist resident in Amman) comments:
Our problems and concerns as people who were forced to be displaced in and out of their
country have been reduced to forced marriage for money in the Za’atari refugee camp!
We had in some communities in Syria few cases of forced and early marriages before the
Syrian Uprising. We were working with these communities to end these marriages and
support girls’ education as an alternative choice.
Similar to Sarah’s critique, Rula (thirty-three, a Syrian female activist resident in
Amman) clarifies:
When Refugees not Captives was launched, it was unfair to the respect for Syrian women,
men, and families. The problem is with generalizations. If a family marries their daughter
off for money, that does not mean that all refugee families do that. I worked with activist
groups to follow and document similar cases. We documented around ten cases in Za’atari
camp and we started to communicate with the families to help them solve their economic
hardship. Now there are almost no forced marriage cases in exchange for money. The
Jordanian government also helped us and put many legal restrictions on Syrian women’s
marriage in order to legalize the process as much as possible.
Parallel in importance to Sarah and Rula’s comments about the inaccuracy of dominant
online representations are the invisible refugee women’s offline experiences.
An example of the invisibility of Syrian women’s perspectives is Rim (twenty-six) who
is herself a young female refugee and activist who escaped Syria to Al-Bashabsha Camp
(before Za’atari Camp was established) and reflects on her lived experience:
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There were no campaigns that adequately tackled Syrian refugee women’s issues. I do not
like to talk about the Refugees not Captives campaign because it’s meaningless, and it had
received a lot of attention by people criticizing it. There were no other campaigns! The
Syrian women did not receive the actual media attention that they deserve; there is no
coverage or attention on what women want and how they should deal with their children
who are traumatized by war! As a young Syrian woman who went through a lot of
things—my work in the revolution, my escape from the security forces after a
demonstration, my defending of my male friend while he was being arrested—when I
arrived in Jordan’s camp, I was psychologically devastated and I did not find the support
that I was in need of. And now this is what other Syrian women go through!
While Rim’s comment emphasizes the disconnection between online representations
and offline realities of Syrian refugee women in Jordan, the following story highlights further
the invisible suffering and resistance of refugee women from underprivileged economic and
educational backgrounds. Karima (forty) is a Syrian woman from Homs City, married at age
fifteen according to the traditions in her poor neighborhood. Two years ago, Karima and her
children, a girl Lama (fifteen) and two boys Raheem (eleven) and Kamal (five), became
refugees in Jordan’s Za’atari Camp after months of internal displacement inside Syria. Karima
lost her eldest son and husband when a Syrian Army mission invaded their home in March
2012 and killed them in addition to most men in their neighborhood. Karima bore the
hardship of her life, and she did not think even once about marrying her fifteen-year-old
daughter off for money. Instead she fought to survive, and with the help of a Syrian activist
group in Jordan, she left Za’atri Camp and began a new life in Amman. Her daughter Lama,
who is now in school, aims to enter medical school after she finishes her high school
education. Many similar stories are invisible. Instead the dominant media representations
regarding refugee families focus on how Syrian families force their daughters to marry Arab
men in exchange for money. The offline realities of Sarah, Rula, Rim, and Karima highlight the
double marginalization in online spaces regarding Syrian refugee women. Such marginalization
is caused by the hierarchical power relations that rule Syrian mainstream online
feminist activism making some voices heard and others marginalized. In the case of Syrian
refugee women’s issues, the voices that are heard belong to those who have economic and
educational privileges and who reflect the language of Western hegemony in understanding
the Arab and Muslim world through self-orientalizing discourse.
Conclusion
This article examines a case study of social media online privilege, representation, and
exclusion regarding Syrian refugee women’s issues. The online depiction of Syrian refugee
women in the media is constructed through a complex process of orientalist and selforientalizing
representations. The RNC campaign members are active participants in
producing a self-orientalizing discourse that mirrors the same elements of the Western
hegemony essentializing discourse about Arab culture. The dominant representations
marginalize voices of underprivileged refugee women such as Karima and activists such as
Rim who emphasize the complexity and diversity of refugee women’s experiences. Further
research should more broadly examine the role of social networking websites in promoting
Western hegemonic discourse regarding women in developing countries and ways that
these representations can be challenged.
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REFERENCES
ABU-LUGHOD, LILA. 2002. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on
Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 783–790.
ELTANTAWY, NAHED. 2013. “From Veiling to Blogging: Women and Media in the Middle East.”
Feminist Media Studies 13 (5): 765–769.
LAJIAAT LASABAYA. 2012. “In Facebook [Group Page].” Accessed December 1, 2013. https://www.
facebook.com/Lajiaat.Lasabayaa/info
MOHANTY, CHANDRA. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
ONG, AIHWA. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
SAID, EDWARD. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
FRAMING SLUTWALK LONDON: HOW
DOES THE PRIVILEGE OF FEMINIST
ACTIVISM IN SOCIAL MEDIA TRAVEL INTO
THE MASS MEDIA?
Keren Darmon, London School of Economics and Political
Science
In the penultimate week of January 2014, two news items caught my attention: the
sentencing to jail time of two people convicted of abusing and threatening feminists
online, and the findings of a report by Democratic Audit UK, the London School of
Economics’ independent research organisation, that “too few women [were] called to give
evidence to parliamentary select committees” (LSE Democratic Audit UK 2014).
Upon examination, the connection between these two pieces of information
becomes clear. Caroline Criado-Perez is one of the feminists subjected to the Twitter abuse
for which the two accused have been convicted and sentenced. She came to their attention
as a result of her campaign calling “for a female figure to appear on a Bank of England note”
(The Guardian, January 24, 2014). Criado-Perez is also behind The Women’s Room, an online
platform set up in 2012 to provide the mass media with a database of female experts, in a
bid to address the lack of women discussing current affairs on the airwaves (The Women’s
Room 2014). The report from Democratic Audit UK alerts us to the fact that it is not just in
the mediated space that the voices of expert women are “too few” (LSE Democratic Audit
UK 2014) but also within the British parliament. It is possible that parliamentary select
committees could attempt to rectify the lack of female evidence givers by utilising the
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