Log in Register. Searchable Program. Full Program. Search Sessions. Search Abstracts. Search Participants. Bad Girls of the Arab World. Panel Description. In Bad Girls of Japan, scholars explore how the behavior and demeanor of girls and women in Japan have served as lightning rods for heightened anxiety during times of change. They push girlishness and the dangers inherent in the liminality of girlhood to extremes.
Bad girls are not merely strong women, exceptions who prove the rule, or breakers of glass ceilings. While bad girls have been particularly visible in the Arab world within the context of recent political upheavals, our papers demonstrate that it has accompanied other historical moments and manifests itself in cultural texts and aspirations as well as behaviors.
While the bad girl phenomenon can offer forms of agency, our panel also notes the dark side of Arab bad girl-hood. Women do not always choose to be bad girls, and may suffer when such a role is thrust upon them. Even when they do choose to transgress, negative repercussions can be grave.
Rather than romanticize the bad girl of the Arab world, we seek to understand all aspects of her experiences. It then reaches back into history with research that links politically powerful women of the mid-thirteenth century with contemporary literary production. The intersection of literature and gendered subjectivities is also treated in a paper on the reception of popular literature on Princess Di among women in Cairo.
An analysis of artist Ghada Amer as an Egyptian bad girl incorporates the visual arts into our theoretical frame. Elizabeth Bishop. Based on fieldwork, I argue that Egyptian workingwomen hid trashy paperback books with pictures of Diana Spencer under their beds in order to read them over and over again. They coupled her thin lips and narrow nose, her dewy display of cleavage, her pitiless blonde coifβwith disordered habits of living, with sensual investment, with licentious sexuality, with unlawful reproductionβin short, with how they understood badness.
