ABSTRACT
In March of 2008, Queen Rania of Jordan launched her YouTube video channel with the release of her first online video, titled “Youtube Exclusive: Send me your stereotypes (اينار ةكلملا).” 1 This short, less than two-minute video, with more than 1.75 million views, 6,766 comments, and 54 video responses, took Queen Rania’s persona to a new level of interactivity, reaching and targeting English-speaking audiences abroad. A fade-in from black exposes Queen Rania from the shoulders up in black and white—she begins the video by saying, “In a world where it is so easy to connect to one another we still remain very much disconnected. There’s still a whole world of wonder that we cannot appreciate with stereotypes. It is important for all of us to join forces, come together, and try to bring down those misconceptions.” With these words Queen Rania launched a new outlet for her persona and her cross-cultural dialogue project by announcing a polemical call to YouTubers to aide her in countering Arab stereotypes. Queen Rania’s first moments as an outwardly public social-media enthusiast show her justifying, in a sense, her reasoning behind starting her YouTube account by making claims about the video-sharing site’s ability to offer better opportunities for cross-cultural understanding than “old” media. Over 40 seconds into her the clip, she explicitly makes this comparison: “If what most people know about the Arab world and Arab people they’ve known through programs like 24 and Jack Bauer, I think they are in for a very big surprise.” 2 After a short interlude showing Queen Rania being interrupted by a cell phone ringing and her smiling response to this impromptu distraction, conveniently conveying her personality as laid-back and humorous, she picks up where she lefit off: “YouTube is a great platform for dialogue, because change begins within each one of us and our willingness to reach out to each other.” This interlude showcasing her innate warmth book-ended by her comparison of “old” and “new” media’s abilities to portray Arabs illustrates how Queen Rania’s rhetoric of maternal feminism—a strain of feminist thought that has had multiple iterations over the years, yet consistently places the role of motherhood in a woman’s life at the center of its politics—hinges on the familiar utopian discourses surrounding the potentiality of social media.
