Middle Eastern North African Women Playwrights: Articles

This essay introduces the reader to Egyptian female playwrights, dramaturges, and theatre-makers. Starting with the first-ever piece called a "play" and written by a woman, May Ziyada, in 1922. It is a comprehensive overview of the role of women in theatre.

This content analysis of 15 Arabic and 3 Turkish drama serials on transnational Arab television examined the gender portrayals of characters. The analysis of 743 characters found that women were underrepresented, less likely to have recognizable jobs, and more likely than men to be portrayed in sex-typed occupations, activities, and settings.

The present paper will explore some of the re-enactments of the so called 'Arab Spring' in selected performances from Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, with their seamless connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among the concepts examined are Habermas's 'public sphere', Deleuze's 'revolutionary-becoming' and Rebecca Schneider's 're-enactment'. The remediation of revolution in performance reveals the material conditions and geographic locations of social unrest. Significantly enough, artistic re-enactments of the revolution have already been inflicted by 'techno-imagination', whereby most of us have become either spectators or citizen journalists of public dissidence, and yet we have been connected to the unprecedented upheaval by watching mediated images or implementing and re-editing them for distanced audiences. Includes work by Jalila Baccar and Fadhel Ja¨ıbi, Dalia Basiouny, and Naima Zitan. doi:10.1017/S0307883313000011