282 Mediated Publics
What’s its merit? Nothing. Women like it because there is fash-
ion news and Egyptian movies. There are about two movies a
day and the rest is Syrian music. It is just like our [national]
television except that the newscasts are better. (Tarek, 20-year-
old student)o doubt, for Algerian womenN^35 MBC’s appeal stems in part in
from the romantic ideology displayed in the endless Middle Eastern soap
operas it broadcasts; but it also reflects what Bourdieu calls the “paradox
of the doxa,” which consists of neither defying nor questioning the status
quo.^36 This “paradoxical submission” is not always expressed in forms that
are easily objectified or open to objectification (and hence critique). It is
incorporated in such a fashion that it becomes natural for both men and
women. It comes to belong to the order of nature. I have cited Bourdieu
not because I totally agree with the framework of his analysis of mascu-
line domination, which seems to me to be entirely situated in the realm
of substantial and formal domination and leaves no room for opposition,
subterfuge and novel practices; rather, his framework allows us to under-
stand how micropractices stemming from everyday life can be read in the
greater context of social structure and how actors justify what is imposed
on them (in the case of Algerian women)^37 and what they impose on oth-
ers (in the case of Algerian men).
et us begin by stressing that women not only watch MBC, but L
that it is expected that they do so. Female viewers report a preference for
this network in the context of the real and possible “danger” presented
by images broadcast by Western networks. After all, and despite every-
thing, my female respondents say “we are [at heart] Arab” or “we are
Muslim” and cannot be exposed to situations that will “corrupt our soul.”
Alongside these controls exists another kind of generalized appropriation
by the men of the television sets linked to satellite dishes. As discussed
above, as soon as the men come home, people either watch national tele-
vision as a mixed group or women are asked to leave. “I have a nephew.
He’s twenty years old. At nine o’clock he settles in and asks us to leave”
(Djohra, 44 years old). This selective appropriation of the object is not
solely focused on preventing women from viewing the prohibited (which,
in a kind of understatement, is referred to as “scenes”) but also by pre-
venting them from being exposed to the conductors of knowledge—in the