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Abstract
This article examines Queen Rania’s 2008 YouTube campaign, aimed at Arab and Muslim stereotypes post 9/11, as a political performance that articulates a branding exercise of modernity. Using feminist performance analysis, the article explores how Queen Rania’s activist performance brands monarchical self and country (Jordan) as modern and considers its implications. A focus on three selected YouTube videos by Rania from this campaign provides a careful reading of her body and embodied narratives to consider choreographies of self-authentication and nation branding. I argue that a politics of branding is practised in corporeal and cultural terms by means of a monarchical media spectacle that inadvertently enacts imperialist and orientalist supremacy. Paradoxically, in attempts to break Arab and Muslim stereotypes, Queen Rania’s performance instead reproduces them. This nation-branding practice forwards a modern Jordan and futures monarchical legitimacy on the expense of marking other Arab and Muslim bodies as backward and dangerous.
Notes
1. In this regard, using the terms ‘western’ or ‘American’ does not intend to fix, essentialise, or homogenise the diversity of identities, cultures, and peoples within these geographic boundaries. I am only using those labels in this context because Queen Rania’s YouTube campaign was directed to the West and addressed the global spread of increased anti-Arab and Muslim sentiments, especially in America post 9/11.
2. See Nadia Kaneva (Citation2011) for a comprehensive overview and categorisation of emerging scholarship on nation branding from across disciplines.
3. Performance studies theorists De Frantz and Gonzalez (Citation2014) neatly distinguish the performative from performativity and performance; terms that I find overused and sometimes conflated in academic usage outside the disciple of performance studies. They write: ‘performance constitutes forms of cultural staging – conscious, heightened, reflexive, framed, contained – within a limited time span of action … performativity marks identity through the habitus of repetitive enactments, reiterations of stylized norms, and inheritance gestural conventions … the performative is the culmination of both in that it does something to make the material, physical, and situational difference’ (2014, p. viii).
4. I am not concerned here with deploying a Marxist reading of Queen Rania’s body on YouTube in terms of commodity fetishism and exchange. Nor do I take a cynical view about her performance to insinuate that her activism is a fake front or a deceitful accumulation strategy.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Maral Tatios Yessayan
Maral Tatios Yessayan is visiting assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Dartmouth College. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth (2012–2014) and is a fellow at the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth (2013–2015). Her research interests centre on performance, corporeality, and embodiment and feminist ethnographic methods applied to cultural, social, and nation-branding practices. She has written ‘Lingering in Girlhood: Dancing with Patriarchy in Jordan’ (2015) and is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Performing Jordan: Bodies, Labor, and Gender on the Transnational Stage.
