Digital Platforms and Elite Representations in the Middle East: Examination of Cultural Hegemony, Counter Hegemony, and Media Discourses

The article analyzes elite representations in Netflix’s Dubai Bling, AlRawabi School for Girls, and The Spy through scene-level critical discourse and visual-semiotic analysis. It shows how luxury iconography and security aesthetics convert economic/political capital into symbolic authority, while counter-hegemonic narratives remain weak. Dubai Bling aestheticizes consumption; AlRawabi stages gendered hierarchy through school space and discipline; The Spy visualizes an order/chaos binary via grading and framing. Subaltern actors are largely invisible. We conceptualize this as aesthetic legitimation under platform capitalism: performances are ritualized, visibility is governed, and legitimacy travels from narrative to paratexts. Digital platforms thus function as ideological apparatuses that reproduce elite imagery in a local–global symbiosis. The findings underscore digital platforms as ideological apparatuses that reproduce elite imagery through a local–global symbiosis, and they also map indicators of elite legitimacy by operationalizing critical theory at the scene level.