Fansubbing and the Perpetuation of Western Popular Culture's Gender and Racial Stereotypes in Arabic

Television, cinema, pop music, and comic books are great entertainment and educational apparatuses. However, these seemingly harmless mediums are often noxious conduits of destructive ideologies and reality distortion, as they perpetuate negative perceptions of the 'other' and are major sites for power contestation. This paper contributes to the existing works on popular culture by probing the importance of misrepresentation of racial and gender stereotypes in western popular culture and how they are perpetuated in Arabic fan subtitling. Drawing on multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), compositional film analysis, as well as Roland Barthes' notion of myth, this research lays bare certain dichotomies such as Hollywood's soft power and how it moulds the opinions of its global audience. The focus is on the portrayal of Arab/Muslim men and women and how they are gendered in film and television, and more importantly, how the Arabic subtitled versions perpetuate this misrepresentation on screen.