Hend Alawadhi

This paper analyzes cinematic representations of HIV/AIDS in the Arab world, focusing specifically on Egyptian director Amr Salama’s feature film Asma’a (2011). Based on true events, Asma’a explores the traumatic ordeals that Asma’a, an HIV-positive woman, has to contend with in contemporary Egypt. When she develops a gallbladder infection, she finds that no doctor is willing to operate on her due to misinformed fears of contamination and cultural contempt. By focusing on an HIV-positive, working-class woman who willingly becomes infected, the film attempts to dispel the connection between serostatus and moral judgment—or, to phrase it differently, between innocent HIV/AIDS and that which is divine punishment. Asma’a also demonstrates how the state renders bodies marked with stigma—in this case HIV/AIDS—as disabled and relegates them to the outskirts of society.
The first section of the paper provides a diegetic analysis of the film, focusing on the main events in the narrative vis-à-vis select accounts from contemporary media for contextualization. Additionally, I attempt to locate similarities between the implications of contemporary sociopolitical attitudes towards PLWHA in the Arab world and the West, especially the United States, drawing on both queer studies and feminist disability studies.
The second section is dedicated to the cinematic techniques and genre conventions that Asma’a utilizes to clearly establish its departure from previous representations of HIV/AIDS in Egyptian cinema. Additionally, this section offers analyses of four films from the late 1980s and 1990s that also represented HIV/AIDS in their narratives, relying on biased and stigmatizing “outbreak narratives.” Apart from Asma’a, there have been next to no unbiased representations of PLWHA in Arab mainstream media, particularly in feature films. Thus, I argue that Asma’a is uniquely positioned to change public awareness by subverting common misconceptions about HIV/AIDS.