Rebranding the gaze in contemporary Hollywood: orientalism, patriarchy, and genre recalibration

This article examines how Arab women in contemporary Hollywood cinema continue to be shaped by intersecting regimes of Orientalism, patriarchy, and neoliberal diversity. Through thematic, comparative, paratextual, and constructivist grounded-theory analyses of The Mummy (2017), Beirut (2018), and Aladdin (2019), the study argues that genre functions as an ideological mediator, recalibrating rather than disrupting colonial and patriarchal logics. The proposed model of Rebranding the Gaze explains how Hollywood absorbs feminist and postcolonial critique into marketable inclusion, transforming empowerment into a consumable aesthetic. Arab women are rendered hyper-visible as spectacle yet politically invisible as subjects, sustaining Western modernity through contrast. By tracing these processes across fantasy, thriller, and action genres, the study exposes the commodification of difference as a global media strategy. It calls for feminist media scholarship to move beyond cataloging stereotypes toward theorizing the industrial and epistemic mechanisms that reproduce inequality under the sign of diversity.