Talent has no race, has no face - but it has a skin colour: The ‘appropriate femininity’ with the case of Kurdish-Swedish Actress Evin Ahmad

Abstract

Sexist and misogynist attitudes towards actresses in the mainstream film industry and other media have been the target of feminists for decades. Stigmatized and stereotyped images of immigrants on the screen have also been scrutinized. However, very little attention has been given to the ways in which actresses with foreign background, not necessarily from Black communities, are portrayed and narrated. Addressing this issue would reveal how non-Western body images on screen are racialized according to certain Western beauty standards. Sweden is often described as the most gender-equal film industry in the world; however, this does not mean that marginalization and subordination of non-white actresses with foreign backgrounds, does not occur. Accordingly, using the framework of feminist film critique and drawing on the works of Homi Bhabba, Sara Ahmed and Patricia Hill-Collins, this article offers a reading of Swedish-Kurdish actress Evin Ahmad’s experiences to demonstrate how ‘beauty’ and ‘body’ culture involve a complicated terrain around race, skin colour and body image. This article argues that a generalized ideology of beauty and stereotypical images of a Middle Eastern woman imposed on Ahmad demonstrate that values and attributes such as beauty, appearance and sexual attractiveness should be understood in the context of social and cultural relations, rather than as universally valued or devalued individual characteristics.