Looking for the Arab Superheroine: Layla El-Faouly, Marvel’s Moon Knight, and the Imperial Gaze
Authors
Prtenjača, ZvonimirIdentifiers
Permanent link (URI): http://hdl.handle.net/10017/59775DOI: https://doi.org/10.37536/reden.2023.5.2236
ISSN: 2695-4168
Date
2023Bibliographic citation
REDEN: revista de estudios norteamericanos, v.5, n.1 (2023), pp. 4-23 . ISSN 2695-4168
Keywords
Arab women
Gender stereotypes
Imperial gaze
The Marvel Cinematic Universe
Moon Knight
Superheroine
Document type
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Version
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional
Access rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Abstract
Seen through Hollywood’s imperialist and masculinist lenses, the Arab woman is exoticized as a veiled,
taunting belly dancer, eroticized as a licentious slave concubine confined to a harem, and monstrified as
an alluring temptress or a conniving terrorist. Excluded from any possibility of a dialectical response, this
Othered damsel in distress is reduced to a commodity first gazed upon and then (ab)used by the Western
man. But what happens when the Arab woman returns the Westerner’s voyeuristic and fetishistic gaze and
evades the traps set by his gendered stereotypes? This paper pursues the answer to that question by scrutinizing
Layla El-Faouly’s depiction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s sixth television series, Moon Knight
(2022), wherein the Egyptian explorer, archaeologist adventurer, and superheroine engages in what E. Ann
Kaplan terms “the looking relation” (1997, xviii, original emphasis) with the overzealous American leader
of the Disciples of Ammit, Arthur Harrow. The paper traces Layla on her “complex intellectual/psychic
journey” through Harrow’s “objectifying imperialist gaze,” concluding that she effects the “renewing process
of inter-racial looking relations” (Kaplan 1997, 14) for the Arab woman by refusing to be rendered
voiceless, passive, and foreign in the Westerner’s eye.
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