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“The Woman is Half of the Society”: English, Social Media, and the New Emirati Woman
Abstract
This paper is part of a greater project that conceptualizes English in the United Arab Emirates as a soft infrastructure (Larkin 2008), which creates professional and social networks that facilitate Emirati women's social, professional, and economic mobility. As an aspiring global entrepot, the UAE’s citizens (Emiratis) constitute only 15% of the country's near 10 million inhabitants, whereas the other 85% are foreign workers who hail from 196 countries to participate in the country's oil economy. Arabic is the official language of the UAE and its Islamic practices as well as the native vernacular of 30% of its inhabitants (FCSA 2018). Meanwhile, English, besides its role as a lingua franca or transactional language among speakers of different languages, has been imbricated in the UAE’s discourses of global capitalism (Pennycook 2012) and, hence, plays a prominent role in the country’s development of its education, commerce, and media sectors. As such, the majority of Emiratis under fifty years old undergo different types of English-language training, including mandatory English-medium higher education, to compete for positions alongside white collar expatriates in the UAE's multinational workforce and its bourgeoning knowledge economy. Focusing on social media as one specific infrastructure of English usage, this paper examines how a group of predominately female Emirati social media influencers in their mid-twenties to early-forties use English social media platforms to project state-feminist ideals of modern Emirati women while promoting self-development discourses and tackling social concerns that reflect women's struggles in the UAE's fast-changing modern terrain. The paper focuses in particular on how this group of influencers’ strategic choice of English, rather than Arabic, creates affordances for them to attract a wider international audience, pursue controversial topics, and provide a space of autonomous and anonymous engagement among female followers. The paper additionally examines how language ideologies (Silverstein 1976) related to English and Arabic usage in the UAE inform perceptions among the influencers and their predominately female follower base of social media as a semi-formal space of governance where self-expression and projections of self are negotiated. To that end, concepts of scale (Carr and Lempert 2016) are used to examine how self-development discourses are circulated and remediated (Peters 1999) through these English-medium social media channels to negotiate Emirati women's new professional subjectivities with the Islamic and patriarchal discourses which frame their roles as Arab, Emirati, and Muslim women, wives, and mothers.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Gulf
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies