In recent years Saudi Arabia’s online community has grown exponentially, fueled by smart phones, DSLR cameras, social media, and Saudi-produced online content. When explaining this phenomenon, most analysts have focused on young Saudi men, portraying the kingdom’s new online word as a largely male space. In reality, both men and women contribute to the online community. Not only have women gone online to promote political and social causes, but they have used online platforms to create art, find spouses, and make money. Women dominate Instagram, an online photo-sharing social network. Abdulaziz al-Shalan, an executive at a top Saudi media and YouTube broadcasting company, Telfaz11, said in 2014: “Women are killing us on Instagram.” Drawing on field research and interviews carried out from 2013 until 2015 in Saudi Arabia, this paper argues that Saudi women’s dominance of Instagram reflects a nexus of technological change and social norms that segregate men and women—norms widely seen as disadvantaging women. The most important of these norms is privacy and kin-based ties. Many Saudi women feel they must maintain the same level of privacy online as they would offline, and they seek to control who can see their online content. At the same time, they link their online networks to their close family and friends, especially those who attend their majalis: the regular meetings in homes and other intimate settings that are a pillar of Saudi society. Often majalis are divided by gender and are limited to members of extended clans, families, and tribes. Some women add a further layer of privacy online: Telfaz11 estimates that 30% of its online male subscribers are women. For female entrepreneurs, these institutions and desire for privacy provide a powerful advantage. As women, they can access networks (and spaces) closed to al-Shahlan and his male colleagues, networks that include thousands of female consumers. Ahlam al-Najdi, who boasts three million Instagram followers, is one of the many female entrepreneurs to succeed by marketing directly to Saudi women through female networks and spaces. Notably, Telfaz11’s chief Saudi rivals—Lumink and Uturn—have women employees. They have starred in online videos and written episodes, including those for Uturn’s most popular YouTube show, “3al6ayer” (on the side). Ultimately, the behavior of Saudi women online provides insight into questions of gender and space in the kingdom. It also illustrates how a patriarchal system can, ironically, benefit some women at the expense of men.

Women around the world have used civil society as a tool to hone their organizational skills, mobilize likeminded people, and deliver social change. Yet authoritarian regimes often repress civil society through legal and extralegal tactics. This repression can be even more pronounced in the oil-rich Arab monarchies in the Gulf, which use their wealth to block the creation of independent civil society groups and develop state-run programs and organizations that crowd out nongovernmental institutions and herd people into groups with politically sanctioned end goals and messages. However, there is one area of society that is relatively protected from government interference in the Gulf states—the semi-private, semi-public sphere of the majlis (plural=majalis). This paper focuses on the more private majlis gatherings that are hosted within the home or within a circle of known family, friends, and acquaintances. These “protected spaces” are “physical domains and the social organizations within them that institutionally, legally, and normatively are off-limits to state intervention” (Tetreault 1993, 277). Although men’s majalis have been extensively researched, women’s majalis (majalis al-hareem) have been largely overlooked in the literature, with existing research tending to focus on elite women’s gatherings instead of the daily gatherings of ordinary women. This paper’s argument links together the theoretical framework of civil society with the specific gathering place of the majlis al-hareem to explore how female participation in these gatherings affects social, economic, and political opinions and behaviors. From March 2014 to the present, a research team of six faculty and fifteen female student researchers (twelve of whom are Qatari) has investigated this topic through both qualitative and quantitative methods: two professionally-administered surveys of the Qatari citizenry; ethnographic subject-participant observation of approximately 30 majalis al-hareem; individual interviews; and photography, audio recordings, and videography. Our results indicate that majalis al-hareem do indeed function as important sites of civic engagement for Qatari women, in which participation provides opportunities for skill building, networking, and information gathering akin to civil society organizations in the Western world. Further, Qatari women who participate in these majalis are significantly more likely to be socially and politically engaged in their broader communities. These results raise intriguing possibilities for the study of female engagement and empowerment in authoritarian and oil-rich regimes.

Since 2011, Arab Gulf states have portrayed any instances of domestic unrest as male-dominated, externally driven, and violent, yet female citizens have been vocal participants in both opposition protests and loyalist rallies: Tawakkol Karman is a prominent example. This research questions why women have chosen to publicly oppose or support the state through a comparative study of Bahrain and Oman. It explores the individual decisions of women who joined demonstrations and their experiences in the public sphere, drawing from a series of over 90 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2013 and 2014 with Bahraini and Omani citizens, including human rights activists, protesters, civil society, and members of government. With some exceptions, women have been largely absent from regional opposition demonstrations in Oman. Only in Muscat, where demands included better maternity leave and citizenship for children of Omani women, did women widely participate. Women who participated publicly in opposition faced both societal and state repression, including slander against their virtue, and the paper discusses how this has impacted the women involved. Most Omani women, however, eschewed opposition, instead opting to march in loyalist counter-demonstrations. Their support, the paper argues, is driven by the Omani regime’s state-sponsored feminism, even as the state marginalises female dissenters. In Bahrain, women are a prominent feature of both opposition and loyalist rallies, and have long been active members of civil society. The regime, however, has capitalised on fears that the Bahraini opposition is Islamist and conservative, portraying it as determined to enforce a strict Shia interpretation of women’s rights. Simultaneously, private images of prominent activists have been circulated online, including women activists with their heads uncovered, and explicit footage of a human rights lawyer and his activist wife. Based on in-depth interviews with these individuals and with government officials, the paper argues the repressive state response to women’s participation in reform movements is driven by an intention to alienate Sunni and secular Bahraini women from opposition, yet has also hardened the resolve of existing activists. Ultimately, the research finds that Omani and Bahraini women have participated actively in the public sphere during the Arab Spring, both through protest and demonstrations of loyalty to the state, challenging the states’ depiction of these incidents as predominantly male, violent, and externally driven.

A knowledge-based economy rests on the premise that all citizens must possess the necessary skills to operate in a modern economy. In the case of the UAE, such terminology has been extensively used in official documents and speeches in order to highlight the type of society and economy to which the government aspires. A good example is the UAE National Vision 2021, which charts the ambitions for the UAE as a whole for the next decade. Yet within this important document, the promotion of professional opportunities for women is mentioned solely in passing and within a section that deals with family cohesiveness. It may be that such a location is indicative of the framework within which the expansion and betterment of female professional opportunities is still discussed; nevertheless, this limited reference is still surprising given the efforts of the UAE in making the expansion of women’s rights an important part of its domestic and international image during the last decade. In this paper, I focus on a relatively neglected field of enquiry: Emirati female intellectuals. Usually referred to as ‘women achievers’ or ‘women leaders’, there have been some works focused on their experiences. However, most of these have tended to assume a biographical tone, indicative of the public use of these women as role models whose professional achievements support the further integration of women into the workforce. Further, the prestige and royal approval that comes with such public highlighting has led societal detractors to dismiss their positions and achievements as mere window dressing. To understand these women and their emerging place in Emirati society, I pursue two lines of inquiry. First, I look at how educated Emirati women approach the position of women in their society and what their discourse tells us about them and their views. Second, I investigate the critical challenges that highly educated women endure in their professional paths. My research draws on semi-structured and unstructured interviews conducted in 2007/08 with Emirati women with PhDs, as well as secondary literature. Findings reveal that very high education does offer some shielding from criticism and accusations of lack of knowledge, but female intellectuals often face the same kind of social restrictions that affect other less educated women in society. Ultimately, this paper seeks to ascertain the extent to which being an intellectual is still a profoundly gendered experience in the UAE.