‘Please Tell Me Who I Am’: Resisting Media Representation of Arab Masculinity and Violence in Wajdi Mouawad's Incendies

In Wajdi Mouawad's play Incendies (2003), a photojournalist stands offstage, photographing a sniper who, it can later be deduced, is half-Lebanese and half-Palestinian by birth. The sniper sings along to Supertramp's ‘The logical song’ Supertramp. 1979. “The Logical Song.” Breakfast in America, CD. A&M. [Google Scholar], using his rifle as a guitar. But he refuses to allow the photojournalist to capture his silent image. The sniper shoots him, drags him onstage and verbally tortures him before he kills him. The sniper then uses the photojournalist's arm as a microphone and interviews himself in a rock star fantasy to reveal his biography. This scene is examined in detail to tease out the themes of listening and tracing origins and identities in war, exile and diaspora, and leads to questions about the role the media plays in the construction of Arab masculinity as both menacing and marginal. The article argues in conclusions that, as one of the leading voices in Francophone theatre today, Mouawad offers a new variation on engaged theatre, one that frames origins as a process rather than a matter of fact.     

Mobility matters: women's livelihood strategies in Porto Novo,Benin

This article examines the importance of mobility in the creation of profitable livelihood strategies for women in Porto Novo, Benin. Drawing on surveys and interviews conducted in the late 1990s with over 500 women who use a wide array of strategies, I demonstrate that the importance of mobility to women's livelihood strategies is variable depending on the types of activities in which women are engaged. Specifically, where trade is a central part of a livelihood strategy the type of goods sold mediates the relative importance of mobility. The article also considers the ways in which socio‐economic settings differentially shape women's ability to be mobile. The research further contributes to feminist scholarship by examining the spatialities of social and economic processes in the creation of women's livelihood strategies.     

Blood from the Moon: Gender Ideology and the Rise of Ancient Maya Social Complexity

Archaeological data suggests that there is a direct link between the rise of social complexity and the erosion of women's status. Through a look at the ways in which gendered practices and symbols may shift as men and women (and males and females) negotiate their relationships and interactions within shifting social contexts, this article sets out to explore this linkage between social complexity and gender equality in the ancient Maya region. Building from the notion that ‘gender’ is produced and reproduced through practice and symbol as a culture constitutes and bounds gender roles and expectations by symbolically associating certain activities and materials with each gender as iconic representations and ritual enactments of those normative gender roles then serve to naturalise a gender ideology, this article argues that the rising ancient Maya elite attempted to legitimise increasing social inequalities through the manipulation, ritualisation and abstraction of female symbols of power associated with pregnancy, menstruation and childbirth. This appropriation and contestation of symbols and performances of gender identity can be observed in wide variety of powerful representations and practices within the Maya cosmology such as genital piercing, the 260‐day calendar and the neutering of female sexuality in monumental art.     

Disciplining Subjectivity and Space: Representation, Film and its Material Effects

Although the distinction between representation and reality is increasingly blurred, I argue that representational discourses have material effects in everyday life. By moving “outside the text” I trace the messy terrain between visual discourse and everyday life in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver by examining two questions: (1) how do discursive productions of visual culture articulate, inscribe, and discipline space and subjectivity and (2) how do aboriginal women negotiate the material consequences of those representations? Using discourse and feminist analysis, I analyse how a documentary film, produced by the Vancouver Police Department, constructs spaces and subjectivities of deviance through techniques of realism and the moral gaze of the police officers. I argue that aboriginal women negotiate these deviant representations through their experiences of racism and sexism by police officers. Consequently, aboriginal women are rendered either hyper‐visible or invisible by police officers, marked by their gender, race, and class. Combining an analysis of the documentary film and in‐depth interviews with aboriginal women, I argue that critical geographers must consider the analytical spaces “outside of the text” to explore the material effects of visual representations.     

Legitimacy and Public Policy: Seeing Beyond Effectiveness,Efficiency, and Performance

Studies of failure typically assess public policies through the lenses of effectiveness, efficiency, and performance. Here I wish to propose a further dimension to the evaluation and assessment of policy failure—legitimacy. The substantive elements of public policies and the procedural steps taken by authoritative decision makers during the policy cycle affect the perception of policy legitimacy held by both stakeholders and the public. In substantive terms, policy content should align with the dominant attitudes of the affected policy community and, ideally, the broader public. Procedurally, factors such as policy incubation, the emotive appeals deployed to gain support for an initiative, and the processes of stakeholder engagement shape the legitimacy of public policies and the governments who promote them. This argument is based on a comparison of education reform in two Canadian provinces during the 1990s. Governments in Alberta and Ontario pursued common agendas of education reform, but while Alberta achieved success, the Ontario government experienced a series of setbacks and lost the support of education stakeholders and the public. The root of Ontario's failures lies in the realm of legitimacy. These findings highlight the fact that the strategies used for enacting policy change may fail to bring about the necessary consensus among societal actors to sustain a new policy direction and calls attention to our need to better understand how governments can achieve meaningful public participation while still achieving legislative success in an efficient fashion.     

Cats of the Pharaohs: Genetic Comparison of Egyptian Cat Mummies to their Feline Contemporaries

The ancient Egyptians mummified an abundance of cats during the Late Period (664 - 332 BC). The overlapping morphology and sizes of developing wildcats and domestic cats confounds the identity of mummified cat species. Genetic analyses should support mummy identification and was conducted on two long bones and a mandible of three cats that were mummified by the ancient Egyptians. The mummy DNA was extracted in a dedicated ancient DNA laboratory at the University of California - Davis, then directly sequencing between 246 and 402 bp of the mtDNA control region from each bone. When compared to a dataset of wildcats (Felis silvestris silvestris, F. s. tristrami, and F. chaus) as well as a previously published worldwide dataset of modern domestic cat samples, including Egypt, the DNA evidence suggests the three mummies represent common contemporary domestic cat mitotypes prevalent in modern Egypt and the Middle East. Divergence estimates date the origin of the mummies' mitotypes to between two and 7.5 thousand years prior to their mummification, likely prior to or during Egyptian Predyanstic and Early Dynastic Periods. These data are the first genetic evidence supporting that the ancient Egyptians used domesticated cats, F. s. catus, for votive mummies, and likely implies cats were domesticated prior to extensive mummification of cats.