Global Fandom Jamboree: Kirsten Pike (Qatar)

"Disney Live! Mickey's Music Festival" in Doha, Qatar in 2014

Hello! My name is Kirsten Pike, and I’m an assistant professor in the Communication Program at Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q), where I teach and conduct research in the areas of girls’ and children’s media culture, film and television studies, and feminist media history. Some of my research explores representations of feminism and femininity in U.S. girls’ media (especially teen media of the late 1960s and 1970s) as well as girls’ responses to those depictions. Another area of my research examines Arab girls’ engagements with both Western and non-Western media, including Disney TV shows and independent films made by youth in Qatar.

My initial interest in Arab girls’ interactions with Disney and other princess-themed media stemmed from my experience teaching a Girls’ Media Culture class at NU-Q in 2012. This is where I first learned of my students’ passion for all things Disney, and conversations I was having in the classroom inspired me to learn more. So, in 2013 I gained IRB-approval to conduct in-depth interviews with 14 Arab female college students who grew up in the Middle East on their experiences with and opinions about princess-themed media, including Disney films and TV shows. One of the findings of this initial study was that while the girls enjoyed and avidly consumed Disney princess media and products during their youth, they also used this content as a springboard to create new cultural productions more in line with their gendered interests and concerns. Through creative stories, plays, games, videos, and photography, the girls actively challenged dominant themes in Disney princess media, especially the emphasis on heterosexual romance and marriage as well as unrealistic ideals of female beauty.[1]

My research has expanded over the years to include various methodological approaches and lines of inquiry. One of my recent studies, for instance, explores how Jeem TV (formerly Al Jazeera Children’s Channel)—a network that targets 7 to 12-year-olds across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—is adapting Disney content to make it more culturally appropriate for Arab youth. Specifically, it explores how Jeem TV is dubbing content into classical Arabic and rewriting and re-editing it to eliminate themes and images perceived to be unsuitable for Arab children, such as sorcery, violence, and romance. Because the network’s “cultural surgeries” are dramatically changing the gendered meanings and messages of Disney’s original content, another prong of this research explores Arab girls’ responses to Jeem’s adaptations. Ultimately, while many participants in the study disagreed with attempts to strictly censor romantic themes in Disney media (such as by cutting romance completely from a film), most supported minor edits to visual images and dialogue. This was especially true if such changes appeared to improve representations of women and girls, such as when a comment about a character’s physical beauty was replaced with a comment about her intelligence. Still, a couple of girls were adamantly against Jeem’s alterations, perceiving them as corruptions of the original texts.[2]

As this snapshot of some of my research with Arab girls likely suggests, fan studies and fandom in Qatar are both shaped by globalization and transnational media flows. Although organizations such as the Doha Film Institute (DFI) and Short Film Lab are doing vital work to cultivate local filmmaking talent, there is still not a lot of original film and television content being made in Qatar. As a result, local TV channels, such as Jeem TV (for preteens) and Baraem TV (for preschoolers), rely heavily on foreign films and TV shows to fill their schedules. This, combined with the rapid rise of satellite technologies and internet access/use in Arab Gulf countries over the past two decades, means that most young people who grow up here engage with transnational media as a matter of course. Some of the most popular media among Arab female college students in Qatar today include Turkish television shows, Korean serials, K-pop, Japanese anime, and Disney films and TV shows. Interestingly, the reliance on foreign media content by local and regional TV networks has sometimes resulted in Qatari youth being surprised to learn that some series they watched as kids, such as Arabic-dubbed Japanese anime programs that aired on Dubai’s Spacetoon TV channel in the early 2000s, originated in Japan—not the United Arab Emirates. Of course, the global and transnational nature of fandom and fan studies in Qatar is also shaped by the makeup of the population. Although Qatar is now home to some 2.9 million people, Qatari nationals account for less than 15% of the total population with expatriate workers, students, and residents from countries all over the world comprising the rest of the populace. While my own research has focused largely on Arab female fans of Disney media in Doha, other recent scholarship about fandom in Qatar has explored female fans of K-pop, male and female fans of Turkish television shows, and male and female sports fans.[3]

Although fandom in Qatar is shaped by transnational and global forces, it is also informed by local customs and practices. For instance, when I asked Arab girls which Disney princess films appealed to them the most and why, many made connections between a heroine’s virtues and values advocated in their Arab upbringing, such as working hard (Cinderella) or pursuing an education (Belle). Another interesting finding of my first study was that 12 of the 14 participants (86%) identified a white princess as their favorite, with Belle and Cinderella receiving the most votes and none choosing Jasmine, even though she’s supposedly from the Middle East. Although this finding raises concerns about Disney’s role in promoting whiteness as an ideal, it’s useful to consider it within a broader cultural context. That is, many girls in the study—all but one of whom were Muslim—reported being turned off by Disney’s tendency to sexualize and exoticize princesses of color, including Jasmine. Given how Muslim female youth from Qatar and other Arab Gulf countries typically practice modesty by wearing an abaya (i.e., robe) over their clothes and shayla (i.e., scarf) over their hair, we can better understand the girls’ apparent preference for more chaste Disney princesses, who are white.

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that financial security also shapes fandom among young people in Qatar. As one of the ten wealthiest countries in the world, many Arab girls who grew up here—especially Qatari nationals—come from privileged economic backgrounds; as a result, some enjoy affirming their fandom through a range of consumer practices. While a couple of the girls I interviewed spoke of recording onto VHS tapes Egyptian-dubbed Disney films that aired on TV as a way to watch their favorite films over and over again when they were young, many others described their vast collections of commercially released Disney films and TV shows, some of which they bought on vacations to Europe and/or the U.S. Many girls also discussed visiting Disney theme parks (some, multiple times), with one reporting that she spent an entire summer at a villa in Disneyland Paris. Traveling outside of Qatar to engage in Disney fan practices is also a part of male youth culture; for instance, one former male student shared with me the details of a trip he made to California to attend events and tours that were offered to members of D23—Disney’s official fan club. While it would be interesting for a future study to compare Disney fandom among male and female youth in Qatar, it would also be worth considering more fully how economic forces are shaping fan practices.

If we look at fandom simultaneously through local and global lenses, we find interesting patterns, such as the importance of economic status and custom in shaping expressions of fandom, which might combine acceptance (e.g., of U.S. consumer culture) and negotiation and/or disavowal (e.g., of U.S. social mores and prejudices) into a single act of fan participation. In addition, Qatar’s place as a site of transnational media flows without its own native production pipeline means that the average local fan has a broad range of tastes for global media products. Such a profile begs for further investigation into how fans’ interactions with different media artifacts may affect their individual and/or collective expressions of fan allegiance. Ultimately, as we see from this Global Fandom Jamboree, examining fandom as a complex intersection of the global and local gives fan culture a rich and dense texture and raises many new lines of inquiry.

Notes

[1] For additional details, see: Pike, Kirsten. “Princess Culture in Qatar: Exploring Princess Media Narratives in the Lives of Arab Female Youth.” In Princess Cultures: Mediating Girls’ Imaginations and Identities, eds. Miriam Forman-Brunell and Rebecca C. Hains, 139-160. New York: Peter Lang, 2015.

[2] For additional details, see: Pike, Kirsten. “Disney in Doha: Arab Girls Negotiate Global and Local Versions of Disney Media.”Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018): 72-90.

[3] See, for example: Malik, Saadia Izzeldin. “The Korean Wave (Hallyu) and Its Cultural Translation by Fans in Qatar.” International Journal of Communication 13 (2019): 5734-5751; Berg, Miriam. “The Importance of Cultural Proximity in the Success of Turkish Dramas in Qatar.” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 3415-3430; and Theodorakis, Nicholas D. and Daniel Wann, Ahmed Al-Emadi, Yannis Lianopoulos, and Alexandra Foudouki. “An Examination of Levels of Fandom, Team Identification, Socialization Processes, and Fan Behaviors in Qatar.” Journal of Sport Behavior 40.1 (2017): 87-107.

Kirsten Pike is an assistant professor in residence in the Communication Program at Northwestern University in Qatar. Her teaching and research interests include girls’ and children’s media culture, feminist media studies, and critical history/theory of television and film. Her research has appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Girlhood Studies, Mediated Girlhoods, and Reality Gendervision, among other venues. She is currently working on a manuscript called Girls’ Media in the Women’s Liberation Era: Girls Act and Talk Back (Routledge).