Heather Jaber

This paper turns to the Egyptian television series, Awalem Khafeya (“Hidden Worlds”), for the way that it retraces, reperforms, and recodes moments of state anxiety. It focuses on the show’s adaptation of a real concert by Lebanese band, Mashrou Leila, in Egypt in September of 2018, where a crackdown ensued after several people were arrested after images of concertgoers raising the rainbow flag in solidarity with the band’s openly queer lead singer spread online. It examines the way that the show portrays an anxiety and suspicion, but also fascination with new media. It compares this musalsal, or Arabic-language television drama, with the performances of the Hell House, or the evangelical church's alternative to the secular Haunted House, which similarly acts out scenes of “sin” to lead audiences to salvation. Each may be thought of as melodramas of invisible coercion, depicting a desire to render coercion visible. This paper considers the way that suspicion operates in secular state-building, naturalizing state practices but also betraying a pleasure in mimetic performances. It considers the implications for this kind of programming in the Egyptian and Saudi Arabian contexts, where the musalsal aired.

Heather Jaber is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania where she is also a doctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Research for Global Communications (CARGC). She also holds an M.A. in media studies from the American University of Beirut (AUB). As a doctoral candidate, she analyzes moral panics in the Arab world, focusing on the role of particular emotions and affects in the study of geopolitics and popular culture. She draws on religious studies and theories of affect to understand the economies of pleasure and shame which power practices of exposure. She is interested in practices of exposure and the way that spectators are pulled into national spectacles which channel, amplify, and transform publicly felt emotions and affects. She has published work in Critical Studies in Media Communication, The International Journal of Communication (IJoC), and Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research.