Contemporary theories of social media publics use the network as a universal symbol of social connection across heterogeneous cultural contexts. Units of networking are defined by digital infrastructure, which prescribes categories such as private Facebook groups and public YouTube channels, giving users transnationally a set of network components with which to improvise. This paper draws on research in digital performances from the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, to consider how Arab women’s networks use social media affordances to build publics across contentious social divides. In contrast to ideological polarization in the birthplace of social media, these networks use the category of “woman” to cross over religious/secular divides, offering universalist alternative publics to national media publics where women symbolized cultural essentialisms. Corporations in the Arab world use the strategically essentialist category of “female” to market consumer goods and media to women and girls. The digital entrepreneurs in my study addressed these very markets as lifestyle influencers, playing roles ranging from hijab evangelist to makeup maven. However, they used the affordances of YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, to cut across some entrenched class and cultural divisions within the category of women. As these influencers focused on specific interests, they folded consumer networks and cultural ones into heterogeneous networks. I examine how these differed from both national definitions of women’s publics, and the networks of consumer capitalism critiqued by scholars of Western digital media for women. Using the lens of performance, I argue that these networks staged strategically universalist embodiments of Arab womanhood.