Through state-sponsored media campaigns, educational institutions, and sites of religious learning, the UAE’s citizens and foreign residents are instructed in the ideal of “empowerment” and taught to enact its practices in their everyday lives. Discourses of empowerment assert that individuals have the ability—and, indeed, responsibility—to assert control over their bodies, emotions, actions, lives, and destinies at large. A neoliberal precept at its core, the tenet of empowerment is premised upon a particular understanding of subjectivity, where the individual constitutes the primary unit of society and possesses the freedom, desire, and capacity for the self-control necessary for self-development. This paper examines how the UAE’s empowerment discourses and campaigns operate as part of a national project dedicated to producing self-governing, neoliberal subjects. It focuses in particular on how a nationwide push for “women’s empowerment,” as a personal aspiration and societal objective, has shaped the subjectivities of not only Emirati women, but also migrant women based in the UAE. Local media is suffused with laudatory narratives which underscore the successes of empowerment campaigns by highlighting women’s accomplishments and agency. This paper combines an analysis of these official accounts of empowerment with data collected from two years of ethnographic research conducted with migrant Muslim women resident in the UAE. Its approach is twofold: firstly, it identifies and examines the specific characteristics which define this locally rooted empowerment venture. Secondly, it considers how this state-led empowerment regime is embodied, negotiated, and challenged by women in their narratives and everyday practices. The paper combines these related threads of inquiry to ask: what kind of subject does the UAE’s discourse of empowerment produce among migrant Muslim women? It argues that, insofar as empowerment is interwoven with agency, and insofar as agency is the bedrock of subjectivity, ascertaining the types of empowerment endorsed by the state and evaluating how these models are engaged on the ground grants us insight into the modes of subjectivity animating women in the UAE. Building upon scholarship theorizing empowerment, agency and subjectivity, and neoliberal governmentality, this paper contributes to conversations dedicated to making sense of how individual agency and freedom are expressed in relation to the modern state’s techniques of governance. Significantly, in using a GCC state as its case study, it aims to demonstrate the pervasiveness of these (post)modern forms of power while also detailing their uniquely local iterations—and thus the specificities of the subjectivities they engender.