Abstract
Micro-celebrity practices on social media have become a phenomenon of global significance in today’s techno-savvy societies, drawing increasing scholarly attention (Benson, 2017; Cunningham, 2017; Stollfuß, 2020; Abidin, 2016; Banet-Weiser; Lewis, 2019). There is still, however, a dearth of research on how micro-celebrity practices have been appropriated by diasporic and minority communities in Western societies, especially Arab-Muslim women. To fill this gap, the present study investigates how Arab-European women harness social media to negotiate their subjectivities as subaltern cultural content creators. Focusing mainly on YouTube vloggers in the diaspora, the paper raises three questions: How do Arab diasporic women vloggers negotiate their gendered “border” identities? How do they deploy the multimodal resources in YouTube for this purpose? And, finally, to what extent does vlogging empower these women to challenge and transform dominant discourses about them both at the transnational and local levels? To address these questions, we draw on an intersectional understanding of postfeminism (Gill, 2016), and use multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to analyze the vlogs of four YouTube influencers from North-African origins located in four European countries. We argue that these vlogs are multimodel texts through which the vloggers negotiate hyphenated and intersectional identities that frustrate easy categorization and contest homogenizing representations. Ultimately, however, the very nature of micro-celebrity culture speaking to a transnational audience and the intersectional, diasporic location of these vloggers conspire to circumscribe the subversive potential of their discursive practices.
Presenters
Sanaa BenmessaoudAssistant Professor, Foreign Languages, University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Communications and Linguistic Studies
KEYWORDS
Arab Women, Diaspora, Micro-Celebrity Practices, Postfeminism, YouTube
