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 MESA 2006 Panel Summaries
Arab Women Living on the Borders and Making Spaces
Submitted by Fatima Badry
Panel Participants:
Panel Organizer, Fatima Badry, American University of Sharjah
Chair: Mary Ann Fay, American University
Discussant: Frances S. Hasso, Oberlin College
Presenters: Rima Sabban, Dubai University College; Lena Jayussi, Zayed University, Fatima Badry, American University of Sharjah; John Willoughby, American University; Afaf Al-Bataineh, American University of Kuwait
The panel aimed at discussing how Arab women are forging new spaces by trespassing across social, cultural and neo-colonial borders as well as those defined by gender and the self. The panelists explored the forging of new identities and the redefining of the self by challenging gender borders and prescribed perceptions, by entering new spaces of action in society and by providing their own definition of themselves and their roles as citizens of a greater nation. In “Modernity’s Contested Boundaries: Describing, Inscribing and Transcribing Arab women,” Jayussi examined how both the Orientalist perspective and traditional approaches attempt to impose their views of modernity and Arab-Moslem womanhood. The fate of Arab women has been used as fertile ground for the struggle over the contemporay antinomies of authenticity vs. westernization, public vs. private space and individualism vs. collectivism. Two types of discourses are held for, and not by, Arab women. Western discourse proposes a gender agenda modeled on the western, while the traditionalist discourse adopts rigid prescriptivist borders of the space designed for women. Meanwhile, Arab women live their own lives, negotiate new spaces across multiple boundaries and “produce their own understandings of the relationship between individual and collective, personal and political, public and private sphere.”
In her paper, “Producers or Products of Writing: The Voices of Arab Women,” Al-Bataineh examined discourses in the writings of prominent Arab and non-Arab men and women writers to reveal what type of spaces are ascribed to women. The paper discussed the impact of these writings on perceptions of Arab women by analysing how they generate stereotypes that in turn orient the direction of Arab women’s studies. The author adopted a comparative approach to elucidate how gender, ethnicity and genre are used by writers from different backgrounds to determine the borders which Arab women can or cannot cross.
In the third paper, “Learning on the Periphery: Acquiring Social and Cultural Identities through Migration,” Badry focused on how education has allowed a certain class of Arab women to forge new identities and new spaces by being on the move. It examined migration as creating a new space for women, freeing them from gender based family and community constraints and allowing them to learn to adapt to new social roles. It looked at migration as a sort of empowerment. The paper contributed to the debate on migration, issues of identity, narrations of the self and marginalization in a global context. Sabban in her paper, “Negotiating Gender Borders in Arab Oil Universities: The Case of The United Arab Emirates” examined how women working in the new universities in the UAE manage to create space for themselves to take an active part in the educational system despite these institutions patriarchal, tribal, and gendered undercurrents. The author argued that Arab women academics continuously attempt to “deconstruct, and reconstruct realities” to serve their goals although they may end up paying a high price and at times lose their space and become marginalized. Willoughby in his paper, “Crossing Employment Boundaries: Arab Women and the Drive to Nationalize the Gulf Workforce,” considered the drive by Gulf leaders to “nationalize” the workforce in view of the scale of foreign worker employment in the Gulf. The paper surveyed the gendered policies being designed to encourage the employment of national men and women in the private sector. These interventions include measures that reserve employment spaces for nationals, enhance education and provide better benefits for nationals who take on private sector jobs. The impacts of these policies are often confused and contradictory. Thus, while the rapid expansion of educational facilities have made national women significantly larger consumers of higher education than national men, the employment and benefit policies being proposed mainly assume that men will be the main financial support of future Arab families. Slowly but surely as well, the efforts to replace expatriate labor in telecommunications, banking and computer services, for example, have led to a quiet questioning of the desirability of sex-segregated educational institutions. The paper also analyzed how the new rhetorical emphasis on the promotion of national women’s employment challenges gender relations and transforms relations between expatriate women and Gulf women.
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