#reimagining Arab Women’s Social Media Empowerment and the Postdigital Condition

Abstract

Social media intersects across physical spaces, digital infrastructures, and social subjectivities in terms of what is being called the “postdigital,” in an increasingly merging offline/online world. But what precisely does it mean to be “postdigital” if you are an Arab woman or social actor in the Global South? How does access to social networking sites, while increasing visibilities, also provide potential for increased agency? This study is concerned with the extent to which Arab women’s self-presentation practices on Instagram could be considered as empowering, or otherwise, within the postdigital condition. First, the study takes Instagram as a case to develop a theoretical framework for considering social media as a tertiary artifact, involving material, routine-symbolic, and conceptual affordances. Second, it applies the artifact framework to explore a corpus of self-presentations by five Arab women influencers. Feminist postdigital theorizing offers unique contributions to problematizing normative, ethnocentric, and neoliberal conceptions of Arab women’s empowerment. The application of the novel framework leads to an interpretative discussion of Arab women’s influencing practices across merging offline/online and transnational boundaries. Overall, the critical perspective begins to reimagine Arab women’s empowerment, not simply as individualized or material processes, but as agencies that are interwoven within the commercialized and conceptual dynamics of visual social media.

Feminist Postdigital Inquiry in the Ruins of Pandemic Universities

“…For example, like the Western liberal feminism that has arguably misunderstood, misrepresented, and incorrectly framed Arab women through their analytical and political attempts to 'unveil' and secularise (Ahmed 2011;Eltantawy 2013). Non-secular approaches are considered additional colonialising practices that misappropriate Arab women as passive victim and Other (Ahmed 2011;Mohanty 1988), but forcing Arab women or any social actor to speak or show parts of their bodies which they wish to keep private is intrusive and denies their agency and autonomy (Hurley 2021b). Al-Ali (2021) also discusses how Western feminists have drawn attention to the invisibility of women in literature and academic disciplines; women's experiences are often distorted or misinterpreted.…”

“…To address these tensions, the study was informed first, by academic scholarship. Second, previous iterations of feminist postdigital analysis were carried out by both authors (Hurley 2021b;Al-Ali 2021). Third, inquiry was underpinned by recorded critical conversations with 12 Arab women professionals, academics, activists and influencers.…”

TAM Constructs Predicting the Use of Mainstream Social Networking Sites by College Students in Kuwait

“…According to the State of Social Media in the Middle East (Crowd Analyzer, 2020), all mainstream social media in Kuwait are male-dominated, except for Snapchat, which suggests that women in this patriarchal culture opt for more private and less traceable SNS, such as Snapchat. Moreover, Instagram was also found to increase the visibility of Arab women and provide a potential for increased agency (Hurley, 2021).…”

#Mixedcouples on TikTok: Performative Hybridization and Identity in the Face of Discrimination

“…Recent research has explored female Muslims and the hijab as a form of digitally mediated representation of empowered femininity, choice, and entrepreneurship on Instagram (Baulch & Pramiyanti, 2018); the analysis of the hijab as a clothing item that becomes central to their identity, modesty, and fashion style through Instagram posts (Boy et al, 2018); researchers have also used a post digital feminist approach to understand Arab women’s empowerment and agency through their uses of Instagram (Hurley, 2021); while other scholars have found the ways in which Islamic views of modesty and faith have adapted to digital spaces and attention economies (Kavakci & Kraeplin, 2017).…”