Saddeka Arebi

Bio: Saddeka Arebi is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Ideology & Patriarchy. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 51 citations.

Women and Words in Saudi Arabia: The Politics of Literary Discourse

Abstract: This study explores how contemporary Saudi women writers use their writings as a way to gain control over the rules of cultural discourse in their society. The author examines the work of nine influential women writers and presents excerpts of their writings which appear here for the first time in English. On the basis of interviews with the writers and textual analyses of their works, Arebi establishes that despite religious, cultural and political constraints, they continue to contribute to the definition and interpretation of religion, tradition, and history. Arebi shows how in doing so, they pose a strong challenge to the powerful ideological forces in their society. Yet she argues that despite this challenge to their local discourses of power, they do not necessarily conform to Western feminists' conceptions of resistance or to the nature of patriarchy. Saudi women writers, through a unique and culturally specific interplay of poetics and politics in their writings, have chosen to carve out a discourse of their own, adopting a form of resistance that is based more on a dialectic of protest and affirmation than on clear-cut opposition. Arebi's ethnographic and literary evidence demonstrates how this chosen form of resistance has enabled them to create a place for women in the intellectual life of their society and, more importantly, to effect a fundamental transformation in the rules of cultural discourse.

Women and Education in Saudi Arabia: Challenges and Achievements.

Abstract: The historical socio-economic and political conditions of Saudi Arabia are an essential aspect of understanding a woman’s position in Saudi society. The persistence of women’s exclusion from public life in contemporary Saudi Arabia is one of the most heated debates not only among Muslims but also worldwide, as Saudi society comes under more and more scrutiny internationally. In 1980, there were more female graduates in the humanities than male. University women could study most of the same subjects as their male counterparts except those, which might lead to their mixing with men. This paper explores some of the restraints and achievements of women in the field of education in Saudi Arabia today.

What the numbers tell: The impact of human, family and financial capital on women and men's entry into entrepreneurship in Turkey

Abstract: Entrepreneurship contributes to economic development in countries worldwide. Entrepreneurial activity is beneficial for both men and women, including those in developing countries. However, men and women may not engage in entrepreneurship to the same extent because of differential access to (various forms of) capital. This study examines the relative importance of three types of capital – human, family and financial – in pursuing entrepreneurship. Using data collected in Turkey, we find that regardless of sex, all three forms of capital influence the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur in varying degrees. Contrary to expectations, the impact of human capital on the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur is higher for women than men. Data also revealed that family capital facilitates women's entry into entrepreneurship only when family size is very large (i.e. seven or more). No gender differences are observed in the impact of financial capital on the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur. Findings sug...

A most masculine state: gender, politics and religion in Saudi Arabia

Abstract: Women in Saudi Arabia are often described as either victims of patriarchal religion and society or successful survivors of discrimination imposed on them by others. Madawi Al-Rasheed's new book goes beyond these conventional tropes to probe the historical, political, and religious forces that have, across the years, delayed and thwarted their emancipation. The book demonstrates how, under the patronage of the state and its religious nationalism, women have become hostage to contradictory political projects that on the one hand demand female piety, and on the other hand encourage modernity. Drawing on state documents, media sources, and interviews with women from across Saudi society, the book examines the intersection between gender, religion, and politics to explain these contradictions and to show that, despite these restraints, vibrant debates on the question of women are opening up as the struggle for recognition and equality finally gets under way.

Where Have the Bedouin Gone

Abstract: The Bedouin have been exoticized as nomads and essentialized as representatives of segmentary lineage organization and tribalism. This essay shows more complex and multifaceted existences and argues that "Bedouin" has changed from denoting a way of life in the past to marking an identity today. A multi-sited perspective presents socioeconomic and sociopolitical change among Bedouin from Algeria to Saudi Arabia and includes colonial impacts, commercialization of pastoral production, occupational change, and sedentarization. Bedouin involvement in tourism and the manufacture of Bedouin heritage for sale as a commodity and as a component of (some) Arab national heritages are also discussed. The coexistence of segmentation, markets, states, and Islam is stressed, with class divisions now becoming predominant. A concern with Middle Eastern ethnography in general, largely implicit, runs throughout the text [Bedouin, Arab World, segmentation, complex society]. The overall outlines of Arab Bedouin society are well known to anthropology, despite the lack of detailed studies. -Robert F. Murphy and Leonard Kasdan 1959:18 To answer the question "Where have the Bedouin gone?" requires identification of who are the Bedouin, consideration of where they have been, and understanding of their contemporary presences in wider Arab state societies and national cultures. The question is simple and straightforward; but an answer is neither easy nor clear-cut. "Bedouin" is not an occupation recorded on national identity cards or passports. The category of Bedouin (or nomad) existed and was counted in the censuses of colonial governments; but Bedouin are not enumerated as such in today's national censuses.1 Indeed, the Arab Human Development Report 2002 does not even mention the Bedouin in its analysis aimed at "creating opportunities for future generations" (United Nations Development Program 2002). Have the Bedouin ceased to exist? Are the Bedouin a part of the past with no present or future roles? Educated urbanites I met during the course of fieldwork in Saudi Arabia in 1968-70 usually told me that the Bedouin were all but gone. They had become taxi drivers, traders, worked for the Arabian American oil Company (ARAMCO), served in the National Guard, were low-level government employees, and so on. Many families were settling, boys were going to school, young and middle-aged men were putting aside old-fashioned styles of Bedouin clothing in favor of a new, more homogeneously national style. The Bedouin never came to town anymore on camelback but in red Ford pick-up trucks. Perhaps a few Bedouin-women, children, and old men-remained in the steppe with the herds, but this was a holdover from the past. Fieldwork (Cole 1971, 1975) showed that observation to not be true: a vigorous nomadic pastoral production system still existed. Yet, most urban Saudi Arabians, and some Bedouin, thought the present back then would be but a short period of transition to a future in which the urban and the national, or modernity, would replace nomad camp and tribe, or tradition. Despite their statistical non-existence and the predominance of the urban, the national, and now the global, Bedouin persist in multiple and changing ways in all seventeen Arab states in Southwest Asia and North Africa and in Palestine/Israel. In searching for the Bedouin in this vast and differentiated terrain, three interrelated issues are addressed.2 The first issue is the socioeconomic transformation the Bedouin have experienced-both at home on the range and in new occupations in villages, towns, and cities. The second issue is change in sociopolitical relations between and among the kin-based identities and groupings strongly associated with the Bedouin and the wider state systems within which they exist. The third issue explores a relatively newfound role of the Bedouin in the manufacture of cultural heritage consumed as a component of national identity, or authenticity, in some settings and/or by local and global tourism in others. …

Honor Thy Sister: Selfhood, Gender, and Agency in Palestinian Culture

Abstract: In this article, I examine the ideology of honor among West Bank Palestinians most particularly as it relates to sexuality and gender relations within families. I contend that the iconic Arab and Palestinian subject of the ideal, gendered, connected self-a central concept that undergirds most representations of honor-elides the significance of the individual and obscures the rights and strengths of women and the obligations, vulnerabilities, and anxieties of men. Beyond a critique of representations of honor, subjectivities, and patriarchy, I suggest that ideological-culturally-based explanatory models of behavior favor coherency over ambivalence and untidiness. In terms of honor and the subjectivities that inform it, such explanations have led to an over-reliance on resistance as a method of analyzing "anomalies." I argue that for Palestinian women and men, subjectivity and agency are achieved within and are a reflection of structural, ideological, and experiential configurations, rather than as resistances to them. In this article, I wish to examine honor in contemporary West Bank Palestinian society, first in broad terms and then particularly as it relates to sexuality and gender relationships within families.1 I suggest that, rather than a "code," which implies a system of rules and regulations, honor is a wide-ranging, dynamic, multi-stranded ideology about "right living." I intend to draw attention to obscured/overlooked discourses and embodied practices of honor ideology - those that reveal women's privileges, power, and claims on men who, in turn, have broad responsibilities towards women. I contend that the iconic Arab subjectivity of the ideal gendered, sociocentric, or connected self mistakenly elides the significance of the individual and obscures the rights and strengths of women and the obligations and anxieties of men.2 In doing so, I am not claiming gender equality. As I show, on many indicators, women have not achieved parity with men.3 1 also acknowledge that many, perhaps most, males do attempt to monitor their women's sexual comportment. What I do claim, however, is that the context for such monitoring, including structures of hierarchy and authority, the shared understandings that surround and enable it, the rights/claims/privileges women receive within it, and the notion of self and agency that inform and support it have been largely post-scripted/ignored/erased or simplified/distorted, producing the "honor-as-problem-for-women-and-progress" paradigm4 as well as a continuation of the linkage of men with legitimate authority and women with informal power (Sa'ar 2006).5 My intervention, however, is more than a critique of representations of honor, patriarchy, Arab subjectivities, or region, but rather speaks to a general trend towards ideological-culturally-based explanations for behavior in which coherency is privileged over ambivalence and untidiness. We are, I believe, hampered by our own definitions and conceptual frames, which tend to ignore dissonance and contradictions in quest of cognitive consistency, a tendency which generates the need to probe the "atypical" and the "curious," made so by, I would argue, our narrow models of normativity. As Michael (1997) points out, women who do not comply with the constraints assumed to be located in patriarchal societies are considered anomalous and require explanation. Even the analytical terms used to describe this "anomalous behavior" - "circumventing male authority;" "manipulating their position;" "negotiating for power" - semantically reinforce our notion of an imbalance of autonomy, power, and authority between genders in patrilineal, gender-segregated societies. All are neatly subsumed in the term, patriarchal. ..(1997: 170, emphasis in original). How can we think about selfhood and agency, ideology and structure when our conventions presume that women with power in honor-based "patriarchal" societies circumvent, manipulate; that they attain various resources - economic, political, personal, symbolic - in antagonism to or as a negotiation with cultural norms; that they are "deviants, subversives, or crafty manipulators? …