As Qatari women attend and graduate from institutions of higher education and some enter the work force, their mobility and visibility increasingly juxtaposes their roles in the family and tribe with their new roles as equal partners in the creation of a new nation. This produces a “power paradox,” a term Hegland (1998) uses to describe the work of Peshawar shi’a women in Pakistan who are needed to recruit and mobilize other women to the religious movement, but whose movement challenges the gender segregation in the community. The power paradox is useful for thinking about Qatari women’s majlis discussions on changing norms related to marriage, gender and sexuality for Qatari women. The women know they have increasing forms of cultural capital in one arena, education, but lack power and status granted through marriage and kinship, where gender segregation, veiling and family name protect women’s social status. I argue that Qatari women combine the different forms of capital available to them, such as family names, veiling and education, in order to adapt to these “power paradoxes” and to find ways out of them. My research is based on eleven months of field work in Doha, the capital city of Qatar, where I attended several women’s majlis gatherings. During these gatherings, upper class Qatari women discussed social and personal issues that ranged from work to family to politics. These discussions reflect a critical moment in the burgeoning Qatari nation, where women are seen as potential allies and supporters in what Najmabadi calls the “heteronormative” state, but they also speak to the women’s creativity and power within the paradoxical contexts they find themselves in. These women are constricted by narrow definitions of gender, but also open to new possibilities of gender performance in the new Qatari nation.