Beauty and the (B) East: A Postcolonial Reading of Disney’s Arab Woman

Hajar EDDARIF

This paper draws on gender as a fundamental cultural mechanism of Disney animated film, Aladdin (1993). Adopting a cultural(ist) and postcolonial theory, the aim of this study is to investigate Disney’s representation(s) of the Arab woman. It shall argue that the production of such representations streams from colonial principles and serve imperialist intentions.. Part of the concerns of this work is to briefly tackle the portraying of man and space in Disney’s Aladdin. In this vein, the present article provides a scrutiny of how Disney as a culture machine represents the Arab world in general but focuses mainly on the image of Arab women in one of the most popular Disney animated films which are generally labeled as innocent, fun and entertaining.