Identities in flux: a cartography of feminist artistic practice in the Middle East

Abstract

This thesis explores the fluid and relational forms of body and subjectivity in the feminist contemporary art practice of selected Middle Eastern women artists – Sama Alshaibi, Nezaket Ekici, Mona Hatoum, Amal Kenawy, Shirin Neshat, and Lamia Joreige. As interdisciplinary practitioners whose works traverse between different media such as film, video, performance, and installation, these women’s artistic praxes render a mobile, changeable, and interconnected account of identity via a complex and dynamic interplay between the dualisms of self/other, mind/body, nature/culture, East/West, and human/nonhuman. Since these artists engage in non-fixed and non-dualistic forms of female existence, this thesis employs Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of becoming and the Deleuzian-inflected new materialist feminisms of Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, and Stacy Alaimo as its theoretical scope. Interweaving the process-oriented, durational, and relational vocabulary of the notion of becoming with Braidotti’s nomadism, Grosz’s corporeality, and Alaimo’s transcorporeality, this study discusses the ways in which these Middle Eastern women artists envisage female subjectivity as an open-ended, plural, and transitory composition that is always on the move, through its relational bonds and linkages with divergent bodies, entities, and geographies. Influenced by the cartographic potential of the theories in question, this thesis concludes by presenting a cartographic imagination of the selected artistic canon as a supplementary method for understanding the malleability and rhizomatic interconnectivity of feminist contemporary art in the Middle East.