Media images of Arab women shifted from harem girls to terrorists to veiled victims

Evidence

From the late 1940s into the 1970s and 1980s, images of Arab men shifted from lazy sheikhs reclining on thrones to new images of rich, flashy oil sheikhs who threaten the U.S. economy and dangerous terrorists who threaten national security. As for representations of Arab women, before World War II they were represented as alluring harem girls and belly dancers. In the first decades after World War II images of Arab women became largely absent from the representational field, but in the 1970s they reemerged as sexy but deadly terrorists and in the 1980s as veiled and oppressed. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 78

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s interest in media representation and the victim/agent binary; echoes critiques of the ‘veiled and oppressed’ framing found in Edward Said and postcolonial media studies.
• SEED: The disappearance of Arab women from the representational field entirely in the 1940s-60s, then their re-emergence in two sharply opposed tropes, is a striking observation worth an article on how ‘invisible’ subject groups reappear only as projections of national anxiety.