Framing the Other: Rethinking Media Representations of Mursi Women’s Display of Gendered Lip-Plated Bodies

Abstract

With illustrations drawn from Ilja Kok and Willem Timmers’s documentary Framing the Other (2012), this article rethinks media representation of the contact between Mursi lip-plated women of Ethiopia and Western tourists who come to sightsee and photograph their traditionally modified bodies. The film Framing the Other represents this contact as a destructive force that has not only enabled Mursi women’s victimhood as objects of the tourist gaze, but one that has contributed negative cultural change and loss of tradition. In this article, I provide an alternative, if not oppositional, interpretation that only attends to the nuanced ways Mursi women negotiate cultural loss and change, and recognizes modalities of agential tactics they deploy to negotiate cultural exchange and perform identity work within a cross-cultural contact zone marred with significant inequalities that work to their (dis)advantage. I do not imply that my reading will provide a definitive reading; rather, I reexamine the vanishing tradition and victimhood narratives portrayed in Framing the Other, showing that its multiple layers of meaning in fact motivate an oppositional and alternative reading.