Cinematic and Aesthetic Cartographies of Subjective Mutation

This article examines the use of cinema as a mapping of subjective mutation in the work of Deleuze, Gauttari and Berardi. Drawing on Deleuze's distinction between the reduction of the art-work to the symptom and the idea of art as symptomatology, the article focuses on Berardi's use of cinematic examples, posing the question in each case of to what extent they function as symptomatologies or mere symptoms of cultural and subjective mutations in examples ranging from Bergman's Persona to Van Sant's Elephant to finish on speculations about Fincher's The Social Network as a critical engagement with subjective mutation in the 21st Century.

Power, Arab media Moguldum & gender rights as entertainment in the Middle East

Discourse is a giant field of research and gender related rights are still a disputed area of thinking. Thus, when Arab transnational satellite televisions produce dialogues, images, stories and narratives about the disputed “universal” gender rights in the Middle East, the big questions remain how and why. According to De Beauvoir (1949), one becomes woman and to Butler (1990) one is not born a gender at all but is “done” and “undone” to become one via discourse. Islamic feminism speaks of a cultural/religious specificity in defending women rights and even gender diversity based on new Quranic interpretations. The gender, “Al-Naw’u”, remains synonym to sex “Al Jins” as gender and queer theories never developed in Arabic in tandem with the European institutions or the theories of the19th century– especially those ideas emerging from studies of the mental asylum. This research tries to understand gender related “rights” and “wrongs” as manifest in the discursive institutions owned by media mogul Prince Al Waleed Ben Talal Al Saud. The trouble of such a study is lexical, ideological and institutional at the same time. Since we lack a critique of the discourses and narratives addressed in the pan-Arab satellite channels, in general it is difficult to understand their significance and influence in everyday life practices. What language is used to speak of gender rights or wrongs? Which ideology is favoured in this practice of legitimisation and/or policing? Using case studies, CDA of social and religious talk shows, narrative analysis of Arabic cinemas, this research adapted triangulation to show the complexity of conversing and narrating gender related content at the micro and macro levels within an institution of power. Using semi-structured interviews from fieldwork in Egypt (2009) and Lebanon (2011), archive research and online ethnography, the research exposes the power structure under which gender discourses evolve. It emerges that gender content is abundant on the Pan Arab satellite space, “manufactured” on talk shows and plotted tactfully in the cinematic “creative-act”. The result is a complex discourse of gender content that scratches the surface calling for interpretation. So how and why do gender rights and wrongs find place on Prince Al Waleed’s Media Empire?