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This paper deals with the scopic enactment and negotiation of the scalar dynamics of gendered nationalism and their implication for women’s third prison in the Egyptian post-independent setting. Women’s Third prison is a critical category referencing Middle Eastern women’s intersectional positioning between kinship feudally-inflected patriarchy and political familism with the latter constituting the panacea and pinnacle for the imagination and gender imaging of women placed in the national body-politics. The paper tackles the questions of the gender politics of nationalism and their scopic drive underpinning the cinematic adaptation of the gender story of the nation from text to screen along two historical contexts—the period of developmental and global modernity. Adopting a multicultural feminist approach, the paper examines three cinematic adaptations of two novels and a play. These are Idris’ AlʿAyb (Disgrace 1962), al-Zayat’s Al-Bab al-Maftouh (Open Door 1960) and al-Asaal’s Segn al-Nisa (Women’s Prison 1882). The paper approaches the adaptations - Idris and Khalifa’s AlʿAyb (Disgrace 1967), Youssef Issa and Latifa al-Zayat’s al-Bab al-Maftouh (Open Door 1963), Abu Zikri and Naoum’s Segn al-Nisa (Women’s Prison 2014) - through both McClintock’s framework on the gender politics of nationalism (1997), Hucheon’s notion of “the context of creation … and reception” (Hutcheon 2006, 15) and Mulvey’s take on the visual pleasure of narrative cinema. The paper capitalizes on the medially induced turn in Translation Studies (Littau 2011) with its attention to context and media as parameters and venues for constructing the self-image of national cultural identity. The paper argues for the following: first, the significance of the context of creation and reception as a regulating and shaping parameter for the politics of adaption - conceived in repertoire with the narrative reservoir and scopic schemes shaping the horizon of expectation of the target audience; second, the technologies of violence of gendered nationalism and its scopic enactment of the scalar dynamics of social hierarchy through the visual narrativization of the gender story of Western styled nation-state. Third, the visual narrativization of national cinematic adaptation administers a transmedia story-telling within the scopic regime of modernity and global modernity. Fourth, Western styled nationalism negotiated the inherent paradox of modern nation-state through the social-contractual relation of women to national body politics - visually narrativized through the Egyptian styled pleasure of national cinema fetishistic scopophilia. Ultimately, the paper argues for the sustainable persistence of women's third prison, whose metamorphosing visual narrativization tolls the knell for the nation-state's hyphen putting the current social order in jeopardy with no redemption for a viable alternative.
