Lady Kul El-Arab: Ibtisam Mara'ana and the Politics of Beauty (Rachel S. Harris)

The modern beauty pageant lies at the intersection of gender and nationalism. Its cinematic representation idealizes the image of the beauty queen, focusing on the most superficial elements: beauty and competition. Lady Kul el-Arab (2008), a documentary by Ibtisam Mara’ana Salh, disrupts these cinematic expectations. The film follows Duah Fares, a Druze woman living in Israel, as she trains to compete in the Lady of the Arabs (Lady Kul el-Arab) pageant in Jerusalem, and then later enters the "Miss Israel competition" in Tel Aviv. This talk explores the role of gender in front and behind the camera, and the resonance between the global and the local in the transnational phenomenon of the beauty pageant.

Rachel S. Harris is the Herbert and Elaine Gimelstob Eminent Scholar in Judaic Studies, and a Professor of Film and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, where she also directs the Program in Jewish Studies. She has written widely on Israeli cinema and literature. She is the author of Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (2017) and An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature (2014). Her recent edited collection with Dan Chyutin, Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema (2021), won the "Janovics Center Best Book in Transnational Film and Theatre" award. She is currently in Israel for Spring 2023, on a Fulbright-Hayes Senior Scholar Fellowship at Tel Aviv University, both in The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television and the Department of History, researching early Israeli cinema between 1949-1969.