Women and the Media in Jordan

This book provides a feminist, critical study of how gender power relations are played out through and across multiple mediated arenas in contemporary Jordan. It departs from an understanding of women’s status in Jordan as a highly charged subject, and a view of the media as not just a locale where tensions play out, but also an important arena for contestation and resistance. The book examines the dynamic relationship between women and the media in Jordan as it manifests at three key levels: labour, representation, and activism. To do so, it engages with wider issues: the political economy of the media, regulatory and legal frameworks, Jordanian women’s economic participation, the history of Jordanian feminist activism, gender-based violence, and the political context of the Arab Spring in Jordan. Through choice case studies, the book unpacks the complex role of legal, political, and social factors in shaping women’s relationship to the media. It centres women’s experiences and highlights their agency, disobedience, and efforts to negotiate and resist the limitations imposed by Jordanian patriarchy and, in doing so, it illustrates how gender, power, and resistance interplay through and within Jordanian media.

"This is a timely and major contribution to the literature on gender and media in Jordan. Ebtihal Mahadeen deftly negotiates an introspective positionality with an academic one to examine the various subject positions women occupy within the media landscape, affectively, discursively and as part of the labour force. The exploration of the complex dynamics of women, media, and the state demonstrates the importance of situating gender within the wider social order where political and socio-economic forces often play a role as important as “patriarchy” in constructing female subjectivities. This book reveals that a symbiotic relationship exists between all these forces. Hugely important and relevant work that will be extensively debated and quoted for years to come."

—Salam Al-Mahadin, Professor, Middle East University, Jordan

"Women’s voices remain shockingly absent from media around the world, despite decades of brave and perseveringglobal activism and monitoring. In this highly readable investigation into day-to-day constraints and successes experienced by women in and through the media in Jordan, Ebtihal Mahadeen shines a light on intricate and overlapping challenges that apply more widely. She joins an august line of female social scientists who have articulated particularities of researching their own societies in the Arab region and, in sharing remarkably frank narratives recounted by individual practitioners, exposes intersecting shortcomings on the part of media and other institutions."

—Naomi Sakr, Professor of Media Policy, University of Westminster, UK

"Mahadeen’s insightful study offers an in-depth account of the gendered experience in the media sector and the representation of gender in Jordan. Based on rich empirical data, this study broadens our understanding of the dynamics of media and gender in a conservative society like Jordan, as an example of women’s struggle in other Arab societies.  Mahadeen demonstrates how Jordanian media can be a site of contesting the ideology of honour and women’s rights. Her study reflects the voice of many women journalists and activists in Jordan, and this heightens the book’s relevance and contribution to existing, albeit scarce, literature that tends to overlook the nuances of the struggle against patriarchy in Arab societies. Mahadeen’s study offers a fresh and well-rounded analysis of the dynamics between media and gender and the utilisation of media to consolidate patriarchal norms. This book has established Mahadeen’s position as one of the major analysts of Arab media and gender, and it is essential reading and reference work for students and academics who seek to combine Media Studies and Gender Studies."

—Noha Mellor, Professor at the University of Bedfordshire, UK and Adjunct Professor at Stockholm University, Sweden. Co-editor of Routledge Handbook on Arab Media, 2021.

Ebtihal Mahadeen is Lecturer in Gender and Media Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research addresses the interaction between gender, sexuality, and the media within the Jordanian context/MENA region. She has published extensively on the gendered politics of culture, mediated femininities and masculinities, and the media as sites of hegemony and resistance.