Gender and Crime Representations and Constructions of Deviant Femininity in Arab Cinema

Within the practice of film criticism in the Arab world, the task of providing a comprehensive view of the industrial, socio-cultural, and aesthetic factors which contribute to particular cinematographic representations of class, gender, and sexuality has never been adequately tackled. This article, however, cannot and does not pretend to fill this gap. Instead, it seeks to benefit from the opportunity present in the topic of “female criminality in the Arab world” to start examining the forces and institutions of bias, the cinematic history of various cultural groups and the relationship between film and Arab1 culture's definitions of femininity and masculinity.