Open AccessJournal Article
A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia
TLDR
Al-Rasheed as discussed by the authors explores the "deep-rooted exclusion" of women in Saudi Arabia and explores the intercon- nection between gender, politics, and religion in an attempt to explain the continued exclusion of Saudi women from the public sphere.Abstract:
A MOST MASCULINE STATE: GENDER, POLITICS, AND RELIGION IN SAUDI ARABIA Madawi Al-Rasheed Cambridge: Ca mbridge University Press, 2013 (xii + 333 pages, works cited, index) $78.79 (cloth), $26.99 (paper)A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia will become an essential reference for discussions of what the author Madawi Al-Rasheed calls "the globalized question of Saudi women" (26). Saudi women are subject to economic marginalization and strict rules that regulate their everyday lives. While Western media focus on the ban on driving, this book explores the "deep-rooted exclusion" of women in the Saudi kingdom (1). Male guardians determine and control women's mobility, education, employment, and health just as the state makes their subordination possible at the legal, social, political, and economic levels.Al-Rasheed identifies her book as a project exploring "the intercon- nection between gender, politics, and religion" in an attempt to explain the continued exclusion of Saudi women from the public sphere (3). The ban on independent associations and organizations has also played a major role in denying Saudi women a chance to press collectively for social transforma- tion (2). The status quo is, however, changing with the expansion of com- munication technology that allows Saudi women to be present and active in the public sphere. Their voices are no longer unheard as they challenge ociety "through daring voices, critical texts, and real mobilization" (2).Acknowledging pioneering texts in the study of gender in Saudi Arabia, including work by Soraya Altorki, Saddeka Arebi, Eleanor Doumato, and Amelie Le Renard, and drawing upon the work of feminist scholars Deniz Kandiyoti, Suad Joseph, Mounira Charrad, and Sylvia Walby, Al-Rasheed looks to fill a gap in the growing literature by placing gender in Saudi Arabia in relation to the state and religious nationalism. She formulates the concept of "religious nationalism" in conversation with and against Joseph Massad's and Partha Chatterjee's theories of nationalism, which, she argues, "fail to account for the imaging of Saudi Arabia" (9). Unlike Jordan, for example, which was "invented" by forging a nationalism based on Bedouin culture, "the Saudi nation articulated an identity by claiming to apply the Sharia in all aspects of life and submitting to a universal Islamic ethos" (14). Citing the work of Beth Baron and Mervat Hatem, she also contrasts the case of the Saudi kingdom with that of Egypt, where anticolonial nationalism allowed women to benefit in certain legal aspects while "projecting gender relations as a function of greater political projects" (17). In the Saudi kingdom, religious nationalism involved breaking the military and political autonomy of the tribes, even as it drew upon the tribal ethos to keep "women in a patriar- chal relationship under the authority of male relatives" (5). By looking at both secular and religious nationalisms in the region and their relation to modernity, mostly through the prism of their discourses of women's rights, Al-Rasheed shows how "in both cases, women are turned into symbols, representing anything but themselves" (17).In the Saudi kingdom, a limited women's presence indicates the nation's obedience to Islamic law. Al-Rasheed surveys a number of Saudi fatwas on women in the 1980s whose restrictive interpretations of Islam, she shows, were used by the state to further limit women's visibility in the public space. The religious 'ulama' have also emphasized women's "emotionality" to deem them incapable of serving in state positions and public offices. This narra- tive was further used to make the subordination of Saudi women possible in legal, social, and religious terms. In order to control their appearance and mobility, women's bodies were referred to as sources of fitna (which the author translates as "chaos" rather than "temptation").According to Al-Rasheed, Saudi women face a "double exclusion"- "one in the general economy and one in the domestic sphere" (23). …read more
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Dissertation
Gender and metadiscourse in British and Saudi newspaper column writing: male/female and native/non-native differences in language use
Abstract: The topic of gender differences has proved to be a popular line of inquiry for language and gender researchers for decades, and the recent growing interest in the pervasive phenomenon of metadiscourse makes it a major domain in the research of discourse analysis and corpus-based analyses. This study extends the investigation of gender and metadiscourse to newspaper opinion columns. The study seeks to explore both gender and metadiscourse in written media texts by analyzing a corpus of British and Saudi newspaper opinion columns. Using corpus-linguistics techniques, the study aims to investigate gender differences in the opinion writings of men and women columnists regarding their use of metadiscourse and selected linguistic and stylistic features. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, the study further aims to compare the use of metadiscourse markers among British and Saudi columnists in order to identify which metadiscourse categories predominate in this type of newspaper discourse and how they are distributed according to cross-cultural preferences. The corpus consists of 320 opinion columns totaling 273,773 words, 160 columns written by British writers and 160 columns by Saudi writers selected from four elite newspapers, the British The Times and The Guardian, and the Saudi ones The Saudi Gazette and The Arab News. The 320 columns were searched electronically using concordancing software programs and then all the metadiscourse devices were examined qualitatively in context to determine their actual functions. All frequencies reported have been normalized per 1,000 words to allow for accurate comparisons and tested statistically. Results confirmed that there were 33,854 metadiscourse tokens in the corpus, an average of 105.49 occurrences per opinion column or 3 elements of metadiscourse in every 25 words in each of the two corpora: British and Saudi. Findings revealed both male and female columnists in both groups showed more similarities than differences in their overall use of metadiscourse especially in the interactive dimension. In spite of that, some statistical significant gender-based variations among columnists in the use of interactional dimension of metadiscourse were also found. Female columnists used more self-mentions, more engagement markers, more adjectives, more pronouns, and more adverbs than their male counterparts, and tended to adopt a personalized engaging subjective style that relies on personal experiences in their writing about domesticity, family, and ‘feminine’ concerns. In contrast, male columnists used more hedges, verbs, numerical terms, swear words, articles, and prepositions, and tended to adopt a more factual informative style and provide more verifiable information to support their arguments in their texts about politics, economies, education, sports, and other masculine topics. In addition, results revealed that British and Saudi columnists made use of both interactive and interactional metadiscourse, and some statistically significant variations in the amount and type of metadiscourse were reported. The study reported that metadiscourse is a useful concept in the journalistic discourse of opinion columns because, through its devices, it helps to expose the presence of a writer, organize the text, facilitate communication, aid comprehension, and allow the writer to build a relationship with readers. The study concludes that gender is a significant source of variation that influences the linguistic and the stylistic choices of opinion columnists along with the genre’s conventions.
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References
More filters
Dissertation
Gender and metadiscourse in British and Saudi newspaper column writing: male/female and native/non-native differences in language use
Abstract: The topic of gender differences has proved to be a popular line of inquiry for language and gender researchers for decades, and the recent growing interest in the pervasive phenomenon of metadiscourse makes it a major domain in the research of discourse analysis and corpus-based analyses. This study extends the investigation of gender and metadiscourse to newspaper opinion columns. The study seeks to explore both gender and metadiscourse in written media texts by analyzing a corpus of British and Saudi newspaper opinion columns. Using corpus-linguistics techniques, the study aims to investigate gender differences in the opinion writings of men and women columnists regarding their use of metadiscourse and selected linguistic and stylistic features. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, the study further aims to compare the use of metadiscourse markers among British and Saudi columnists in order to identify which metadiscourse categories predominate in this type of newspaper discourse and how they are distributed according to cross-cultural preferences. The corpus consists of 320 opinion columns totaling 273,773 words, 160 columns written by British writers and 160 columns by Saudi writers selected from four elite newspapers, the British The Times and The Guardian, and the Saudi ones The Saudi Gazette and The Arab News. The 320 columns were searched electronically using concordancing software programs and then all the metadiscourse devices were examined qualitatively in context to determine their actual functions. All frequencies reported have been normalized per 1,000 words to allow for accurate comparisons and tested statistically. Results confirmed that there were 33,854 metadiscourse tokens in the corpus, an average of 105.49 occurrences per opinion column or 3 elements of metadiscourse in every 25 words in each of the two corpora: British and Saudi. Findings revealed both male and female columnists in both groups showed more similarities than differences in their overall use of metadiscourse especially in the interactive dimension. In spite of that, some statistical significant gender-based variations among columnists in the use of interactional dimension of metadiscourse were also found. Female columnists used more self-mentions, more engagement markers, more adjectives, more pronouns, and more adverbs than their male counterparts, and tended to adopt a personalized engaging subjective style that relies on personal experiences in their writing about domesticity, family, and ‘feminine’ concerns. In contrast, male columnists used more hedges, verbs, numerical terms, swear words, articles, and prepositions, and tended to adopt a more factual informative style and provide more verifiable information to support their arguments in their texts about politics, economies, education, sports, and other masculine topics. In addition, results revealed that British and Saudi columnists made use of both interactive and interactional metadiscourse, and some statistically significant variations in the amount and type of metadiscourse were reported. The study reported that metadiscourse is a useful concept in the journalistic discourse of opinion columns because, through its devices, it helps to expose the presence of a writer, organize the text, facilitate communication, aid comprehension, and allow the writer to build a relationship with readers. The study concludes that gender is a significant source of variation that influences the linguistic and the stylistic choices of opinion columnists along with the genre’s conventions.
Journal ArticleDOI
An Overview of the Current State of Women’s Leadership in Higher Education in Saudi Arabia and a Proposal for Future Research Directions
Azzah Alsubaie,Karen Jones +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors highlight the current state of women's higher education leadership in Saudi Arabia and propose new directions for future research to address the current dearth of empirical work on women's leadership in higher education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Gendered Complexities of Promoting Female Entrepreneurship in the Gulf
TL;DR: This article explored women's entrepreneurial activities in the Oman and Qatar in light of the state attention given to promoting entrepreneurship in the region over the past decade, and found that the same forces that are meant to empower women often reproduce or reinforce certain gender norms while introducing new forms of dependency.
DissertationDOI
The Comparative Sociology Of Disabled Masculinities: A Bourdieusian Analysis Of Autobiographies By Men With Spinal Cord Injuries and Autism Spectrum Conditions
TL;DR: This document summarizes current capabilities, research and operational priorities, and plans for further studies that were established at the 2015 USGS workshop on quantitative hazard assessments of earthquake-triggered landsliding and liquefaction in the Central American region.
A survey of intention to leave, job stress, burnout and job satisfaction among nurses employed in the Ha'il region's hospitals in Saudi Arabia
TL;DR: Nurses in Saudi Arabia, as in other Arabian Gulf countries, may be nationals or non-nationals, and as they are contracted, there is a high turnover among them.