Files

After being kept on the sidelines of sporting activities for centuries, women made a massive entry into the world of sport. Still now, however, this world continues to heavily discriminate against them: from the hyper-sexualization of their athletic bodies to the negation of these bodies as experiencing menstrual cycles, types of discrimination against female athletes abound.

In Italy, racist incidents against female champions of African origin representing the country in national and international competitions are increasingly frequent. With the Paris Olympics coming up, it is as good a time as any to reassert that racism is a serious threat to women’s right to sport, a right which was hard-earned over the course of a good hundred years.

Over the month of Ramadan, from Lebanon to Tunisia, Syria to Palestine, passing through Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco, viewers across Arab-Muslim countries share an almost sacred ritual: watching soap operas produced mainly for consumption during this month of fasting.

A study carried out in 2015 by the Tunisian Independent High Authority for Audiovisual Communication (Haute Autorité indépendante de la communication audiovisuelle- HAICA) in collaboration with the Belgian Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) recorded 225 utterances of insults over nearly 69 hours of Ramadan fiction shows. Insults and threats all addressed to the female characters of these series.

The show Bab Rezek (Doors of Livelihood), broadcast on Tunisia’s El Watania 1 television channel, is one of this year’s soap operas that addresses the suffering of Tunisian women working in agriculture and fields.

“Hello to the newlyweds, we’ve brought you sweets on a tray. Tell us, how did that first night go? Show us the proof of honor.” It is with this sentence that a mother congratulates her daughter on her marriage in front of the family and the whole village, demanding proof of the bride’s “honor”..

Egyptian soap operas offered us a hefty meal of major and recurring women’s issues this year, ranging from surrogacy to the same old marital infidelities. The shows treat these issues that revolve around women’s lives and rights in sometimes clever, sometimes unjust ways.

The series Fallujah, Part Two of which was broadcast on Tunisian channel Elhiwar Ettounsi, answers outstanding questions from Part One such as the outcome of the case of the rape of the minor student Rahma.

The series Wlad Badia (Badia’s Sons) is the talk of the town this month of Ramadan. The song Fahat Rihat al-Baroud (The Smell of Gunpowder), which plays during multiple scenes, has gone viral, and two of Sukkar’s iconic lines - “it’s not my business,” “I don’t care” - can now be heard randomly on the street and in restaurants.

The image of the Algerian woman in Ramadan productions has this year been reduced to the “legendary slap” an actress received, a narrative reinforced by the harassment several women on the street endured from the hidden camera crew.