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Mom-preneurs and Tech-preneurs: The Construction of Modern Motherhood and Work in the Gulf
Abstract
In this paper, I compare the experiences of “mompreneurs” to female entrepreneurs who have established technology companies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In particular, I investigate the experiences of married expatriate women in the UAE who decide to leave full-time professional employment and establish an entrepreneurial business after becoming mothers. “Mompreneurs” specialize in mother or child related services or products while female entrepreneurs specialize in technology companies. Through a 3-year ethnographic investigation and 60 indepth interviews, I explore how women attempt to re-imagine their mothering in market terms and how they describe the emotions involved in mothering and working. I also explore the variation in managerial practices of “work” in these entrepreneurial ventures: some business owners reproduce organizational cultures similar to their previous jobs but others cultivate cultures of resistance that reinforce the primacy of care as a “work” value for their employees. Finally, I investigate how representations of entrepreneurs feature in both domestic and international cultural and policy landscapes. Based on preliminary analyses, I find that entrepreneurship is a class-based strategy that some expatriate women pursue, enabling them to exercise a form of neoliberal citizenship. This qualitative work complicates our understanding of how state feminism and western-centric narratives of development shape gendered cosmopolitan subjectivities in the Arab world that go beyond the citizen-state dichotomy. The research findings also sheds light on the ways in which the UAE is experienced as “Arab” and as a contested space of permanent temporariness: providing both constraint as well as immense potentiality for emerging subjectivities and career mobility.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None