Postfeminist ‘Islamophobia’: The Middle East is so 1980s in Sex and the City: The Movie 2

This article analyses how Sex and the City: The Movie 2 (King, 2010) represents a binary between style that is coded as ‘vintage’ and, therefore, desirable, and style that is depicted as ‘dated’ and identified as bad taste. Although this has been a dominant motif in both the Sex and the City series and first film (King, 2008), Sex and the City: The Movie 2 maps this distinction onto a West/Middle East binary. While everything Western (or, more precisely, everything NYC) is represented as stylish, the Middle East (and here it is Abu Dhabi that stands in for the Middle East) is depicted as dated and, the film suggests, trapped in the decade of the 1980s. Sex and the City: The Movie 2 develops many of the prejudices found in contemporary Western representations of the Middle East but articulates these through the motifs of fashion, consumerism and female sexuality. The article proposes that what is most offensive about Sex and the City: The Movie 2 is that it conflates all the social, cultural, political and, most importantly, religious differences that exist between secular New York and Muslim Abu Dhabi and reduces all of these issues to a simple question of style and knowing consumerism.