The Media's Biased Gaze with Professor Evelyn Alsultany {Re-Release}
Keep challenging your biases and examine how they were formed
AND WE’RE BACK!
With a re-release, yes. But the hiatus is mostly over and 2025 is going to rock your socks off!
Wanna know a secret? Given *gestures broadly* everything, I’m deeply in zero fucks mode so next year I’m going to employ the “act as if” strategy.
What does that mean? Unlike “fake it till you make it,” this technique doesn’t tax your central nervous system by making you fear being found out as a fraud. It’s yet another method for tackling imposter syndrome head-on. So you too can give zero fucks about opinions that don’t belong to you.
Stay tuned, because it’s the theme of all of my work in 2025. We’re done hiding our lights, babes.
Episode Description
Speaking of light, this episode isn’t that. It’s heavy. Why? Because how the events of the last week have been reported need to be examined.
I’ll put the trigger warning right up top:
⚠️ Content note: This episode discusses terrorism, rape, school shootings, and genocide. Also the death toll in Palestine as of Dec 9, 2024 is now 42,000 people.
In a media landscape that continues to demonstrate its selective empathy, the recent disparate coverage of two tragic and avoidable deaths starkly illustrates Professor Evelyn Alsultany's core argument about media representation. While extensive airtime has been devoted to the death of a white CEO, the death of Black Girl Disney's Dominique Brown has received far less attention—a painful reminder of how media systematically determines whose stories matter and whose lives are deemed worthy of collective mourning.
Media representation isn't just about entertainment—it's a powerful force that shapes our perceptions of marginalized communities. In this compelling re-released interview, Professor Alsultany dismantles the harmful stereotypes and narrow narratives that reduce complex human experiences to simplistic caricatures.
In her groundbreaking book, Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion, Professor Alsultany dissects the harmful “logics” that justify exclusion and inequality. She boldly challenges the idea that marginalized people should need to be a "good" version of themselves to be accepted.
As a Cuban-Iraqi American, a childfree Latina, and a leading expert on Arab and Muslim representation, Evelyn's work exposes how Hollywood and media narratives that legitimize exclusion and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Through her research, we gain a better understanding of how our perceptions are shaped—and how we can push back against injustice.
This episode explores themes of identity, representation, and accountability in the wake of historical events currently unfolding in Arab and Muslim countries, and how our media is covering them. The professor invites us to step out of our comfort zones, confront the systems of oppression we live within, and listen to voices we too often ignore.
Evelyn’s bio:
Evelyn Alsultany is a professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC’s Dornsife College and a leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media and on forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism.
Alsultany is the author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion (2022) which was listed as one of the 10 best scholarly books of 2022 by The Chronicle of Higher Education; was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers’ Prose Award; and received Honorable Mention for the Arab American National Museum book award. She is also the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (2012).
Alsultany has served as an educator and consultant for Hollywood studios (Netflix, Amazon, NBC Universal) and co-authored criteria, the Obeidi-Alsultany Test, to help Hollywood improve representations of Muslims. She has published op-eds in The Hollywood Reporter, Time, and Newsweek.
To get the full show notes and an episode transcript, go to PauletteErato.com/shownotes. This is episode 77.
How to Listen to The Media's Biased Gaze with Professor Evelyn Alsultany {Re-Release}
Listen to The Media's Biased Gaze with Professor Evelyn Alsultany {Re-Release} on your favorite podcasting app or on Apple:
💻We’re not back on YouTube yet because reasons🤷♀️
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